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

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...

An uncertain economy requires resetting your vision, assumptions, and plans. And tight budgets mean you’ll probably need the tools to do it yourself.

The Grove has developed the Strategic Visioning Agenda Planning Kit to help you apply our Strategic Visioning Visual Planning System™ (VPS) to your most pressing organizational planning challenges. It’s flexible and even fun, and based on more than 30 years’ experience guiding organizations large and small through...

 Capturing “big ideas” visually is one of the things folks at The Grove do best, so the TED2008 conference offered a rich landscape of thought from which to work. The program for the 2008 gathering in Monterey, California was designed for participants to consider the really big stuff happening in our world today and contemplate the biggest questions facing us… Who are we? What is our place in the universe? How do we create?...

 With studies on "social capital"-social trust, diversity of interactions and leadership-showing  that Greensboro, North Carolina consistently ranked below national average in trust between citizens, The Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro partnered with several agencies to design the "IMPACT Greensboro" program and asked The Grove Consultants International for help.

In an effort to change this troubling dynamic in the community, a unique...

In 2008, the Organizational Development Network (OD Network) honored The Grove with its annual Members’ Choice Award for contributions to the field of organizational development. With this award, The Grove was recognized for its “innovative and cutting-edge OD practices.” The OD Network is an international association, consisting of more than 3,000 members from all 50 states and abroad. Looking at companies whose practices can be applied broadly to communities or...

 At a unique trade show billed by Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour as the first ever “Recovery Expo” in August 2006 at Biloxi’s Mississippi Coast Coliseum, booths showcased vendors selling everything from Kevlar siding to prefab homes, legal expertise and building and zoning advice. At the center of the hopeful gathering, a Grove Storymap™ helped attendees gain some perspective: a clear picture of the progress made in the state’s recovery efforts over...

It was while doing community development on farms in the Boland region of South Africa that Alinda Nortje, a former social worker with a statuesque frame, warm smile and wildly contagious energy, became deeply aware of the emotional baggage many people at the lower job levels in her country were carrying. Low self-esteem, lack of self-confidence, lack of a personal vision and a feeling of hopelessness due to generations of social oppression were common. 

Nortje searched...