Best Practices and Insights for Facilitating Creativity, Alignment & Organizational Results

Recently Stanford scholar Bob Horn, longtime friend of The Grove and fellow pioneer in visual thinking, led a GLEN Exchange * introducing his “mess mapping” process for exploring social messes and their causes. Author of Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century, he is a specialist in mapping complex social problems. Currently, he is writing a book called The Little Book of Wicked Problems and Social Messes.

In mess mapping, a group of diverse stakeholders tackles a challenging...

At The Grove we help people come together to create something new. Clients work with us to begin new initiatives, create or refresh new teams, or set a new direction.

Whatever the facilitative challenge, there are patterns in the way we approach our work. Through metaphoric imagery, this year’s Grove calendar illustrates some of the basic practices that we use to facilitate a creative group process. Please follow along with our visual story, then download The Grove’s 2019 printable calenda...

Authors: Dick and Emily Axelrod 

Editor’s Note: Recently The Grove’s Tiffany Forner worked with Dick and Emily Axelrod to create a visual template and Leader’s Guide for their meeting planning process, The Meeting Canoe, which they describe in their book, Let’s Stop Meeting Like This: Tools to Save Time and Get More Done. We thought the following tips in the Leader’s Guide were so fundamental to good meetings that we asked if we could share them, and the Axelrods generously agreed.

From its inception to the present day, The Grove has helped design and lead large organizational- and community-change projects by successfully applying its visual facilitation, teaming, strategic-visioning, and process-leadership methods. Now Grove founder David Sibbet and Gisela Wendling, vice president for global learning, have written Visual Consulting: Designing and Leading Change, the fourth book in the Wiley & Sons Visual Facilitation Series. It includes several new frameworks and a ...

Recently the dean of The College of Business Administration at Cal Poly Pomona called The Grove for help. The college of six academic departments and more than 5,000 students needed to move beyond a culture of silos, update some of its administrative processes, and address what seemed to be a lack of opportunities for innovation. As the college was getting ready to celebrate its 50th anniversary and was shifting from a quarter-based to two-semester-based system, the timing was ripe for a ma...

For more than 40 years, The Grove Consultants International has pioneered and supported a worldwide wave of interest in visual learning and facilitation. Now The Grove has launched The Global Learning & Exchange Network (GLEN), a network of process consultants, facilitators, team leaders, change practitioners, organizational leaders and more. Its mission is to increase people’s ability to collaborate across organizations and cultures by providing a learning community dedicated to inquiry, i...

More than 50 authors joined in a three-day global book sprint to create The Visual Facilitation Field Guide, a project launched by Jeroen Blijsie in The Netherlands. The book’s co-editors are Jeroen, Tim Hamons in Singapore, and Rachel Smith in the United States. The authors represent a broad spectrum of the field of visual practice. Their goal: to write a book that raises the profile of these methods and makes them accessible for both practitioners and clients.

Contributors worked around ...

Author: Laurie Durnell 

What can you do to get your team in sync for 2018? When people get lost in the details of week-to-week implementation, it is easy for them to get disconnected from the big-picture strategy. Early in the new year is a natural time to reconnect, review, and renew. Here are three ways to focus your organization or team and develop strategic insight for the coming months.

Option One: A “Bridge to the New Year” Session

Time Involved: 2–3 hours

Bring the new year in...

Happy New Year from The Grove! Our 2018 illustrated calendar is now available. The Grove’s Malgosia Kostecka and Tiffany Forner have populated each month with a playful combination of text and image. We hope the calendar inspires creativity for you in 2018.

Download / print a 1-page 11″x17″ calendar PDF

Download / print a 14-page 8.5″x11″ calendar (1-page-per-month) PDF