The dynamics underlying coherent change practice are as systemic as the natural process of photosynthesis. Understanding these patterns is a key to good design and personal mastery.

Core idea sets and disciplines guide The Grove’s work. Since 1976 The Grove has applied systems thinking, experience-based learning, and Arthur M. Young's Theory of Process to the fields of organization, team, and leadership development. In recent years we have incorporated research findings on complex adaptive systems, information design, and diffusion of innovation. The fruits of this exploration are the many tools and learning materials we provide to clients designed, as with any robust "software," with accessible user interfaces. They reflect a well-mastered set of core competencies, and a shared “operating system” for working successfully as a network-style organization with associates all over the world. The following provides an orientation to The Grove’s methodology.

Theory of Process: Arthur Young’s lifelong work describes the patterns of order and chaos that underlie all phenomena. His insights into evolution and transformation have provided the deep archetypes from which many of The Grove’s tools have been drawn. He foreshadowed what is now the field of complex adaptive systems, studying how living systems work, and sought to show that science has discovered the role of purpose and consciousness in matter.

Process Models: The Grove’s application of process theory to organizations, teams, and individuals has resulted in a suite of frameworks for guiding the design and implementation of any level of group process. It also provides the organizing structures for The Grove’s sets of tools for facilitation, team performance, strategic visioning, and organization change.

Graphic Facilitation: Panoramic, big-picture visualization has been a core competency at The Grove since our founding. Using active recording as a way to both listen to people and provide rapid, meaningful feedback transforms group processes.

Ecology and Systems Thinking: Many on The Grove’s staff are involved in projects at the forefront of what is thought of as the sustainability movement—an inquiry into what humans need to be like to have a world that is flourishing and regenerative—instead of one that is degrading and possibly even collapsing. Systems thinking is a core discipline in this work, and persists as a Grove competency. In some ways, systems thinking is visual thinking, because people’s sense of how elements relate comes from displaying distinctions in some kind of mental space or framework.

Experience-Based Learning: The Grove’s founder, David Sibbet, began his organization work with the Coro Foundation, an organization that pioneered full-immersion-style training in public affairs. Many of The Grove’s consultants have worked with Coro over the years. A deep belief that people learn best when they are fully engaged with all their senses and intelligences guides The Grove’s work to this day.

New Media: For more than 15 years The Grove and the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California have explored how groupware could reshape organizations. This interest extended to multimedia, seeing interactive graphic work on the wall as a metaphor for the hyperlinked, visual/kinesthetic/audible worlds of cyber space and global networks. As the 21st Century begins, The Grove is immersed in understanding the “new literacy” that will be required, and weaving these understandings into our client services and tools.