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

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Storymapping Process Aids Merger, Informs Future Vision for Oakland Unified School District storymapping

The Grove has worked with Family, Schools and Community Partnerships (FSCP), part of the Oakland Unified School District, to envision the department’s journey over the next five years and think about possible concrete steps to strengthen its work.

FSCP, the Oakland public school system’s largest department, addresses all non-academic support for students and families, partnering with external community agencies as needed. The department’s goal is to create full-service...

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Grove Graphics Support Virtual Gathering About Higher Ed and Online Learning graphic facilitation

Recently The Grove’s Rachel Smith graphically supported an online event that addressed the complexities of higher education in a digital age. Using a tablet, illustration software and web-conferencing technologies, Rachel created visual notes during each of the gathering’s three featured online events.

The event was hosted by EDUCAUSE, a networking and resource hub for IT professionals working in higher education. The three-day online Sprint featured an interactive mix of...

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What Is Visual Listening? visual leadership

Greg Voisen poses a question to David Sibbet during a .

 

 

Question: You mentioned that visual listening is at the heart of every meeting. What do you mean by visual listening? I’ve heard of all kinds of listening – compassionate listening, listening from the heart – but what is visual listening?

David Sibbet: Visual listening is showing people how you are listening to them by drawing what you’re hearing as you listen.

If you think about the traditional...

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Agile Visual Planning: Supporting Innovation and Action strategic visioning

 

Agile visual planning empowers both individual leadership and group creativity—a formula for good results for organizations that employ it.

The concept of agile planning is inspired by agile software development, a method of providing versions that are “just good enough” to engage a user base—then iterating through ever more complete and polished releases that reflect real user experience.

To get going, propose a concept, a direction, or a generative idea; then...

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Take the Tour: A Webinar Walk-through of the Team Performance Online Survey team performance

 

Is your team working together effectively? Gain new insight into your co-located or distributed team, and identify areas for improvement, with the Team Performance Online Survey.

Watch the webinar >

We’ve just posted the recording of our recent webinar (5/14/13) about The Grove’s online survey tool for teams. Laurie Durnell, director of consulting, and Rachel Smith, director of digital facilitation services, walk through the tool from the perspectives of both a team...

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The Team Performance Survey: A Case Study team performance

Editor’s Note: A global biotechnology company began using The Grove’s Team Performance tools three years ago and the Team Performance Online Survey late last year. Their Learning and Development team draws from the Team Performance System to strengthen team cohesion and performance across wide-ranging functions and locations. Here is the company’s Team Performance story as shared by the project lead, a Learning & Development manager.

 


 

Accelerating and...

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DLR Group, Named #1 U.S. Design Firm, Says Big Goals Led the Way strategic visioning

The Grove has worked on strategic planning for many years with DLR Group, a national architectural firm. Recently one of our close collaborators at the firm got in touch to share wonderful news: Architect Magazine named DLR Group the #1 design firm in the United States. “Your process has helped us transform our firm,” he wrote.

 


 

We called Jon Pettit and Griff Davenport, DLR Group’s managing principals, to learn more about their firm’s journey to...

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Decision Rooms: Making Choices in a Big-Picture Context visual leadership

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.

Staging...

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HealthEast Care System: Storymapping the Quality Journey storymapping

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.”

 

 

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