The Grove at TED2008: Fostering Insight by Communicating Ideas Visually

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 this year’s 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? What stirs us? How can we change the world?

Based on The Grove’s ground-breaking history of fostering insight and communicating ideas through big picture visualization and visual planning tools, founder and president David Sibbet was invited to capture the ideas presented by some of the planet’s leading thinkers at the event.

TED is a legendary gathering of leaders in technology, entertainment and design, the brainchild of well-known information architect Saul Wurman. Started in 1984, the conference became a kind of Davos for the digerati, and in 2001 was sold to the non-profit Sapling Foundation headed by Chris Anderson. The current mission, embedded in its tagline “Ideas Worth Spreading,” is to give millions of knowledge-seekers around the globe direct access to the world's greatest thinkers and teachers. More than a thousand people attend the growing number of TED conferences each year, paying pricey fees that provide access to a stellar event as well as fund the media and other communications that are subsequently made available to people worldwide.

Visualizing and graphically recording each of the 50 TED speakers using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro on a Wacom Cintiq tablet computer at the four-day Monterey event, David worked with a team from TED2008 sponsor (and client of The Grove) Autodesk, which included “rock star” designer Kevin Richards and John Schmeir, both of Autodesk, and Phil Davidson of Perceptive Pixel.

Kevin’s drawings of the speakers and David’s depiction of their ideas resulted in a tour-de-force of interactive visualization technique, producing some 700 illustrations over the four days, which are now available in a downloadable book created by Autodesk’s Tom Wujec.

Autodesk’s “BigViz” activities at TED  also provided a captivating demonstration of multi-touch technology, like that found on the i-Phone or Microsoft’s surface technology. All the images created by David and Kevin for each TED presenter were available by touch on a 3.5 x 14-foot Perceptive Pixel multi-touch screen display. Touching on one of the pictures would cause it to expand and show the grouped and attached pages. These could be touched and turned, expanded, shrunk, or grouped with other pictures.

After the event David created a movie to share his TED experience, which is available on The Grove’s web site. You can also enjoy the book and another video created by Autodesk’s Keith Chamberlain at the Autodesk web site.  There is more information and links to all this information on David’s blog.

The Grove's "Visual Fight Club" Facilitates

Dynamic Debate Among Gaming Executives

Every year the video game industry’s most influential leaders gather in Las Vegas for the 2008 D.I.C.E. (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) Summit. The conference includes three days of seminars with some of the most celebrated and creative minds in the video game industry. It also includes an awards ceremony where industry leaders and members pay tribute and recognize the individuals and products that contribute to the growth of the multi-billion dollar interactive entertainment software business.

Event hosts from Autodesk invited The Grove Consultants International to partner with them in planning parts of the conference because of The Grove’s pioneering history of fostering insight and communicating ideas through big picture visualization and visual planning tools. While comedian and game enthusiast Jay Mohr hosted the award festivities of the 11th annual D.I.C.E. Summit, The Grove facilitated and graphically recorded the event’s first ever “Visual Fight Club."

The Visual Fight Club was designed by The Grove in cooperation with Autodesk to facilitate dynamic discussion among high-profile industry leaders on developing trends and other topics relevant to the current state of the video game industry.

Each round of the “Visual Fight Club” consisted of two leading video game experts facing off to debate critical issues regarding today’s gaming industry. As Fight Club participants and the D.I.C.E. audience members duked it out over hot topics like “Will consolidation kill innovation and risk?” and “Traditional publishing versus free distribution”, a giant mural documenting the epic battles was created live by The Grove’s David Sibbet and Dana Wright on a custom-made four- by forty-foot wall.

In addition to lending riveting live-action interest to the verbal debate on stage, by graphically recording the discussions in large panoramic format The Grove helped paint a powerful and memorable visual picture of the most important issues facing the industry today and the ideas behind efforts to address them.

The conference was attended, among others, by senior executives including:
• Shane Kim - Microsoft Game Studios, Corporate Vice President
• Gore Verbinski - Pirates of the Caribbean, Director
• Russ Crupnick - The NPD Research Group
• Robin Kaminsky - Activision, Executive Vice President
• Mike Morhaime - Blizzard Entertainment, President
• Dr. Mark Ollila - Nokia, Director of Technology & Strategy for Games
• Yannis Mallat - Ubisoft Montreal , CEO
• Dr. Mike Capps - Epic Games, President

The Grove Fosters Community-Building
Through Graphic Facilitation Training

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 leadership program called IMPACT Greensboro was created to pair people of diverse backgrounds to develop friendships.  The premise is that friendships “expedite the building of trust between diverse people, foster an inclusive culture, create new understandings, and break down barriers.” IMPACT Greensboro participants—known as “change agents”—are recruited for the program to best represent Greensboro’s diverse community and to inspire hope for the community’s future.  They are charged with building authentic relationships while solving differences and finding shared values and solutions to day-to-day issues.

Graphic facilitation skill training is one of the tools being introduced into the program for these important ambassadors of change in Greensboro. The Grove’s Principles of Graphic Facilitation training workshop teaches participants the art of leading groups and group processes toward agreed-upon objectives in ways that are participatory, productive and memorable.  In creating a custom-designed training course for the IMPACT Greensboro change agents, The Grove’s intent was to build skills, provide tools and share processes to help them communicate effectively with the people they serve, work together with others toward agreed-on goals, and obtain higher levels of engagement and commitment through the use of big picture graphics and visual tools and practices.

Researchers report that people retain approximately 65% of what they see, 15% of what they hear, and 80% when the two are combined. By keeping this in mind and working with graphic displays and clear visual metaphors learned through The Grove’s Graphic Facilitation training workshops, IMPACT Greensboro program leaders and change agents of all kinds can become much more effective in any kind of group work, be it visioning, process alignment, action planning, or innovation.

Panoramic Visualization:
David Sibbet to lead session at VizThink

The Grove is presenting a workshop called "Panoramic Visualization: A Mind Gym for Group Intelligence," at the first ever VizThink Conference in San Francisco this week. We are also participating in a Viz Challenge general session where David Sibbet and two other people who work with visuals in very different ways will all handle a challenge assignment provided at the time of the event. The event has a good buzz, with more than 325 people already registered.

VizThink's goal is to bring together the best of the best in our industry with participation from trainers, marketers, presenters, executives, planners, strategists and managers. "Our industry," is classified as visual thinkers who use any form of the visual arts, such as graphic design, illustration, photos, video, animations, sketches, 3D, etc., for communication and learning.

The Grove received a call several months ago from people organizing the VizThink conference. Would we participate? What leading edge ideas would we like to bring forward?

We are bringing together experts in visualization from across the spectrum, Tom Crawford, the organizer, said. We're holding it in San Francisco hoping that you and other leaders in the field will participate. Visualization is growing exponentially, he said. It's time to get together and see what this means.

We at The Grove agreed to participate in the planning, as did another dozen or so leaders in interface design, product design, scientific visualization, media design, facilitation, product development, personal development, data visualization, financial modeling and gaming.

Why Panoramic Thinking, and what does this have to do with a gym? The Grove has discovered, over our 30 years of working with interactive graphic facilitation in groups that are planning, innovating, and implementing change, that different kinds of visualizing in a very real way represent different kinds of thinking, AND the act of visualizing and drawing is a way to train the brain to think in these different ways.

Think about the difference between a list of information on a flip chart, and a mind map that shows ideas branching out from a central hub. These are very different ways of thinking. Add in an explicit graphic metaphor, and thinking jumps to yet another level visual communication and understanding.

A good example of the effectiveness of working visually was The Grove's work with directors at the Hewlitt Packard (HP) Lab Center in Bristol, England. They were looking to find out what lab projects might result in breakthrough product ideas for the company. Joel Birnbaum, the lab director, was convinced that visual language would help them see the interfaces between the labs and technologies.

The Grove suggested creating a map of the HP Labs ecosystem, using trees as metaphors to identify key product concepts following the template shown here.With the soil representing core competencies, the trees began with a root technology and extended into a core product idea (the trunk), branching product ideas (the limbs), and potential markets (the canopies) that could bear fruit (the results). In a ninety-minute general session, the group identified 16 candidate trees and then spent the rest of the offsite and planning process refining the best ideas. These were eventually presented to top management and several were successfully turned into new businesses.

The ecosystem drawing was 40 feet long, but could be easily reproduced for widespread distribution and told a powerful story that could be recalled and retold from every desktop throughout the company.

This kind of large scale, panoramic visualization uniquely allows a group to operate a much more intelligent level, as a whole. It supports not only high engagement of each participant, but system-level thinking. It also facilitates memory retention, which is critical for follow-through and results.

This and other experiences are the basis of David Sibbet's seminar at VizThink this week. The session was taped and is available through links on the VizThink web site at: http://wiki.vizthink.com/DavidSibbet, or at http://wiki.vizthink.com/grove.

OD Network Members Choose The Grove:
“Most innovative and cutting edge OD Practices”

This year, the Organizational Development Network (OD Network) is honoring The Grove with its annual Members’ Choice Award for contributions to the field of organizational development. As this year’s recipient, The Grove will be 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 organizations, the OD Network’s members voted The Grove to be the organization that most influenced the OD field as a whole through new and innovative methods.
  
Last year’s award went to the Interaction Institute for Social Change. Previous winners include: Winifred deLoayza; Herman Resnick; Peter Block; Edgar H. Schein; Marvin R. Weisbord; Peter M. Senge, et al, (The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook); and Chris Argyris.
 
The OD Network provides resources, opportunities for networking and professional development to OD professionals in order to further the Network’s mission of “creating tomorrow’s organizations today.”

The Grove is an organizational development consulting and design firm and a publishing company. The Grove Collaborative Design Center is situated in the heart of one of the most exciting new-media communities in the world, overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge in the Presidio of San Francisco’s Thoreau Center for Sustainability. Located between George Lucas’ Letterman Digital Arts Center and the SF Film Centre, it’s from this base that The Grove’s seventeen-person team – along with its worldwide network of partners and collaborators – brings people together to look to the future, visualize change and foster innovation through collaboration. The organization’s work spans both the private and public sectors throughout North America, Europe, Africa and Asia.

David Sibbet, the founder and president of The Grove, is an organizational consultant, information designer and author with over 30 years experience working with both organizations and individuals to collaborate through visualization and big-picture thinking. His work in graphic facilitation, strategic visioning, and group processes has made him an acknowledged master facilitator and expert on visual language.

 

Visual Planning Systems Emerge…
Graphic Guides Are Now Even ‘Bigger’

Clients love working with The Grove’s large format Graphic Guides in situations where visualization and panoramic thinking will help clarify the vision and expedite the process. Recognizing the flexibility of these tools, we have reframed their use into application-specific toolsets called Visual Planning Systems™ (VPS) that include Strategic Visioning, Personal Development and Customer Research.

In the coming months we’re adding new elements to our Strategic Visioning VPS and introducing three new Visual Planning Systems—Team Startup, Organization Transition, and Business Planning. Each system contains integrated tools designed to help you get consistent, productive results from planning, including some combination of:

	Orientation & Customization Tools Process models, digital presentations, overview booklets, and a new line of best practice cards and sample meeting agenda cards will help users show colleagues how the system works and support flexible meeting design.
	Meeting Tools Our familiar Graphic Guides come in all kinds of sizes, from the wall-sized versions used for large groups to the smaller tabletop and personal sizes. Each of these has a companion Leader’s Guide to support its use.
	Communication and Follow-up Tools Because follow-up is a key to actually getting results, our Digital Graphic Guides mirror the paper-based templates in electronic format, providing a visually enhanced form to facilitate fast and effective meeting reporting in presentation media.

Tools, however, are only one part of the success equation for planning. Leaders and facilitators who know how to create real learning and decision-making environment are essential. For this reason, our Training Workshops, Coaching Services and Customer Support services are designed to provide essential support for each system.

The Grove’s public training workshops and custom in-house training workshops help support implementation of our Visual Planning Systems, as well as our Team Performance System products. Visit our website through the embedded links above, or contact Donna Lafayette for more information on custom training programs designed to suit your organization’s needs.

Our unique visual planning workbook, the Personal Compass, is our popular personal development VPS and has proven to achieve results for personal growth and life planning. A new career planning workbook is in the works, based on this model of delivery, for an expected release in early 2008.

The Grove is currently investing in an upgrade to our infrastructure that will allow for affiliate marketing worldwide, digital delivery of as many of these products as possible, and on-line support. Like the rest of The Grove’s offerings, these are being evolved alongside real client work and support and a growing Worldwide Network of firms that are standardizing on The Grove’s visual way of planning, to which we are deeply committed.

 

New Step-by-Step Handbook for Creating
Powerful Teams. Available now!

If you’ve used the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance™ Model, you know what a powerful framework it is for understanding the essential building blocks of high performance in teams. When combined with the Forreste/Drexler Team Performance™ Indicator, a short, straightforward assessment that points you to the stages of the Model that are unresolved within your team, you have a quick way to move from theory to powerful results with a team.

The new Forrester Drexler Team Performance Indicator Application Handbook provides you with a step-by-step facilitator’s guide for working with the Indicator. Whether you are a team facilitator or a team leader, working with or without a facilitator, you will find in this guide all the direction you need to work effectively with the Model and the Indicator, including detailed processes and instructions.

As part of the Handbook, you will receive a copy of the Model, the Indicator and the Team Performance Indicator Guide To Interpreting Results.

Learn more about the Forrester/Drexler Team Performance Indicator Application Handbook at the Grove web store. This product will be available for shipping November 1st, 2007