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

The National Parks Institute (NPI) Executive Leadership Program has made a comeback, and The Grove is once again centrally involved. Over the course of ten days, 22 leaders from 11 countries and eight U.S. Parks immersed themselves in a learning journey, taking them from the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in the S.F. Bay Area, to UC Merced, and then to Yosemite National Park. It was a powerful experience for those involved, and David Sibbet, The Grove’s founder, was the...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...