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

The Grove is experiencing one of our busiest years in a decade, and we are serving more international clients than ever. This, alongside the recent EuViz conference in Berlin and our growing number of global partners, is prompting an increased focus on how we can best support this worldwide evolution of visual practice and interest in Grove methods.

Global Visual Practitioners Converge at EuViz

In August The Grove’s David Sibbet, Rachel Smith, and Gisela Wendling...

On October 7, 2013, David Sibbet was a featured speaker at the National Organization Development Network (ODN) Conference in San Jose, California, where he received ODN’s Lifetime Achievement Award. The following article is adapted from his conference presentation and his remarks at the awards ceremony.

I was invited by several ODN colleagues to share with you some of the shaping influences underlying my work and The Grove Consultants International’s methods. It’s an...

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...

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...

 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...

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...