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

Excerpted from Visual Leaders by David Sibbet (John Wiley & Sons, 2013)

Seeing the forest and the trees is vital to effective decision making. Much of this involves thinking through what needs to be compared with what.

You as a leader can ask for functional plans to be presented to you in ways that aid you in comparing and prioritizing activities using whole-system vision. These types of environments are called decision rooms, project rooms, or rapid decision support centers.

...

Betsy Stites and Pam Hull had a problem. They had completed a focused strategy process in their organization, the HealthEast Care System in St. Paul, MN. Now the big goal for HealthEast was “to be the benchmark of quality in the Twin Cities.” The problem was how!

“There had been a lot of uncertainty,” Betsy reflects. “Quality is so ethereal. We had to figure out a way to integrate things from an organizational and cultural standpoint.”

...

If you have been fortunate enough to be part of a high-performing and well-aligned team, you won’t soon forget the experience. Unfortunately for most of us, this is all too rare an occurrence.

If your team is flailing, divided, or lacking clarity, The Grove’s newly released Team Performance Online Survey (TPOS) can help.

A Platform for Team Learning and Improvement

The TPOS and resulting Report power a data-rich series of conversations to help your team move...

Author: David Sibbet

What do loosely coupled systems, a stand-up meeting, and tequila have to do with each other? They were all elements in our successful Visual Teams workshop a few weeks ago at Fort Mason, in San Francisco, and argue for why visuals are working with teams.

At the opening of the workshop we invited everyone to share his or her best team experience, and then identify the relevant qualities on a Mandala Vision Graphic Guide® (Groups invariable rediscover the...

1. Gain Alignment. Need to get everyone on the same page in your organization? The Grove‘s Storymap™ process is designed to reveal and resolve alignment issues, refine the message and get all stakeholders on the same page and moving toward the same goal.

2. Clarify the Complex. Fresh visuals provide a clarifying way for people to understand a complex situation. Different information may be flying all over an organization with few people knowing how pieces fit together....

Author: Susan Berry

Military members are coming home to the U.S. in growing numbers. Drawdowns in overseas operations, and new budget realities at the Department of Defense (DOD), have accelerated the move back to civilian life for many military members and families. For some, this situation has interrupted long-term career plans. For most, the transition comes at a time of economic uncertainty and job search challenges.

As they head home, military members and families can draw...

The Challenge

The Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire is an entity that focuses on support for people with disabilities and their families. Through person-centered planning, the Institute enables individuals to create a plan for their future through a process-oriented approach, and it became evident that a manual for creating these customized plans was an imperative. “Because the purposes for planning are so diverse there’s been a tendency to oversimplify....

When and Why to Use Certain Team Tools

We receive many questions from customers about the Drexler/Sibbet/Forrester Team PerformanceTM System of products. We thought it would be helpful to compile some frequently asked questions with our best answers.

Q. I want to introduce the Team Performance System to a group. What products would you recommend?

A. As a facilitator or manager you will need some background on the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance Model® and best practices that go...

Education Elements is a company that serves K-12 schools seeking to implement blended learning solutions in the classroom. Looking for a way to get across the central concepts about blended learning that would help potential clients understand the approach, Education Elements turned to The Grove for a memorable way to illustrate them. Together, we developed a series of three custom graphic recording movies, each about five minutes long.

Each movie answers a central question: What is blended...

What Is Graphic Facilitation?

To begin, let me share a story that illustrates how graphic facilitation works. Recently, a rapidly growing human resource development consulting firm operating in China and Japan asked my company, The Grove Consultants International, to come to China and teach its consultants graphic facilitation. In spite of a tradition of using wall posters for communication and having a language based on ideographic characters, the firm had not made the leap to using...

On September 27th, David Sibbet and Rachel Smith conducted the first workshop in a series based on Sibbet’s bestselling book, Visual Meetings. Held at Fort Mason in San Francisco, this six-hour immersive workshop covered a range of topics from graphic templates and visual models to virtual work and new media. More than one-hundred people were in attendance.

“Visual meetings are effective because they engage people more and involve people...

Author: Rachel Smith

I am frequently asked about the tools I use to graphically record virtual meetings. “Virtual meetings” in this case refers to web-conferencing sessions where people are connected from all over the place using computers and various software tools including WebEx, Connect, GoToMeeting, Live Meeting, Elluminate, and so forth. The web-conferencing software has to either support screen sharing or have a really, really good whiteboard feature. Here’s...