Welcome to The Grove’s Blog

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...

Author: David Sibbet

Becoming Aware of Metaphor

Using metaphor consciously is another skill involved in mastering facilitation. Humans make sense out of things by comparing what they know with what they don’t know. If the comparison says one thing “is” another thing, it qualifies as a metaphor. If I say it is “like” another thing, it qualities as an analogy. For instance, I could say that the Grove Facilitation Model™ is like a mental...

Author: David Sibbet

I want to reflect a little on why I think that personal development is essential to “mastery” in facilitation, and how we approach teaching about “mastery” at The Grove. We define facilitation as “the art of leading group process toward agreed-on outcomes with full participation, creativity, and ownership from all involved.” Facilitation is about serving the group and its collective purpose as distinguished...

Author: Rachel Smith

A few weeks ago, we put the following question to several facilitators’ groups on LinkedIn: What are the biggest roadblocks you’ve encountered during virtual or blended meetings? (We defined blended meetings as those where some participants are face-to-face and some are attending virtually.) In the lively discussions that followed the question, expert facilitators shared the issues they have encountered—as well as some tips for dealing with them. This...

Author: David Sibbet

We’ve all heard of the term “team building”—based on the industrial-age metaphor that people are like construction blocks. You might not even think of this as being a metaphor, but it implies you start with nothing and somehow, after a group process, teams are “built” and everything works. When Allan Drexler and I set out to create a comprehensive model for team development in the 1980s, we agreed that the building...

David Sibbet recently graphically facilitated a meeting between Vivek Kundra, the first CIO of the United States appointed by President Obama, and a collection of Silicon Valley venture capitalists and technology innovators, including Mint.com, Mozilla, and Facebook, at IDEO Labs to discuss how government can improve how it is delivering services to the American people.

Doug Solomen, an old colleague of David’s from Apple, now works at IDEO and invited David to...