DavidSibbet.com

Visual Meetings at The Clearing

2010-08-15T15:40:50-07:00

This last week I was at The Clearing in Washington DC , co-facilitating a workshop designing an interagency approach to logistics for crises like Haiti. At the conclusion The Clearing's founder, Chris McGoff, introduced Visual Meetings and invited everyone to join staff and associates of The Clearing in a post-meeting reception and book signing. Chris's new company is making graphic facilitation a central part of their offering, since their mission is to tackle the most complex problems government faces. They don't believe they can do this without visualization, partnering with The Grove. It was impressive to be sharing about this work right inside a conference room filled with the evidence. Many a person in the meeting said they were so relieved not to have to go to a meeting full of PowerPoints. A couple of the participants got extras for their kids -- a request that made my day.

Before The Clearing, Chris created Touchstone, a large 200 person DC consulting firm that he sold three years ago. We both share Michael Doyle as a mentor and friend and actually co-facilitated Michael's memorial service when he passed away several years ago. We originally met when Chris was heading up IBM's decision support rooms offering in the 1990s. IBM thought these computer aided meeting rooms might work as a shared resource for business but eventually went another direction. Chris built Touchstone after that experience.

At the event for Michael. Chris pledged to finish a book he and Michael were working on that visualized the primary concept of excellent consulting practice. They called them "The Primes" and that will be the name of the new book. Chris is currently refining the final version. It's another testimony to the power of simple visuals to explain complex topics. (I'll blog about it when it appears for sure).

While I was in Washington my wife Susan was visiting our daughter Valentine, and our grandson Eric in Philadelphia, on her way to a writing retreat i Ireland. They were excited to find Visual Meetings out on the new release table at Barnes & Noble in Philadelphia and sent me this picture. Richard Narramore, my Wiley editor, says B&N decides by itself what gets featured and that this is a really great break. You can connect to more about the book on line at About Visual Meetings.

Visual Meetings Arrives at The Grove

2010-08-04T00:17:42-07:00

Imagine holding the book you see here in your hands, and knowing that you wrote, illustrated and designed all 262 pages! I got that chance last Friday when Visual Meetings arrived from Wiley & Sons. The process began in December of last year when Richard Narramore called and wondered if I would like to write a book about visualization for groups, following the success of Dan Roam’s book Back of the Napkin. Little did I realize then how fun it would be to deliver this sweeping review of 35 years of leading visual meetings all over the world. I’m writing here to share some of the process I went through for those who might be interested in how books like this come to be. If you want to skip this post and go right to getting the book, then click on this link to a special page on our web site at The Grove—About Visual Meetings. It has all the details. If you want to hear my personal story of this journey read on.

ORIGINS OF THE BOOK

This book is really the fourth generation of a book I first wrote in 1980 called “I See What You Mean: A Workbook Guide to Group Graphics.” It was originally a ring binder with tabs, set in IBM selectric courier type, with press-type chapter titles and even press-type bordering. I holed up in my studio with a graphic artist named Pam McAdoo and produced the first version in about two weeks, and then added many pages in another two-week marathon. I was trained as a journalist and was editor of my college paper at Occidental so I know something about producing quickly.

But my own inner artistry was kicking in by taking on the self-imposed intention of demonstrating what someone could do with available office equipment. I knew by then that Group Graphics, which is what we called our method of conducting visual meetings at the time, was an amazing tool for groups. But there was no understanding that it was even possible and no demand. We needed to create attention by conducting workshops, and this book was the training manual. I wanted to show people that being visual was possible right then with no barriers. As a result of this choice I See What You Mean had the gritty authenticity of containing only material we knew worked. I say “we” because this work has been collaborative from the start. My colleagues Geoff Ball and Sandra Florstedt co-led the first workshop at Fort Mason the year this book appeared, and Geoff was my original inspiration for this work.

What some of you may not know was that this book was also the equivalent of a thesis in the Theory of Process, which I was studying with Arthur M. Young all through that time. The book’s architecture follows the predictable stages of process, and is an intentional translation of all the key aspects of that theory into very accessible tools for facilitators.

CREATING A FACILITATION GUIDE

The second generation of Visual Meetings was a facilitation training manual created for the Mars Corporation in the late 1980s and then revamped for National Semiconductor in 1991 as a support for training an internal team of change consultants. By this time the MacIntosh was available with PageMaker and laserprinters. I purchased what MacAdam Computers (the go-to place for Apple products at the time in San Francisco) said was the first two-page screen in the city. I could see a full spread in Adobe Illustrator.

Much to the consternation of my own design team, I dove in and actually wrote much of this Facilitation Guide right in Illustrator (this is quick for the first draft but creates problems in editing if you are slavishly consistent with style sheets). But I wanted to see the pictures and the words work together in tight integration, much like they do in magazines. In this iteration we evolved all the formats that are now the basis of many of The Grove’s training materials—concentrating on very visual “spreads” where graphics go across two pages, and on what we term “page-at-a-glance” best practice layouts.

My good friend Bob Horn, author of Visual Language and founder of a Boston-based company called Information Mapping, pioneered ways of “chunking” up information visually to greatly improve the usability of computer manuals and I was convinced this was what any good graphic designer should do. I was reinforced in that thinking by Joan Browning, who taught me professional graphic design when we merged firms in 1991. She led me to see that determining different functions for all the pieces in a communication and then carefully matching graphics and fonts could produce highly accessible material. Both were talking about what we now know is the field of information design or information architecture.

The facilitation guide for Mars was about three inches thick and spiral bound. The folks we certified internally to use it affectionately called it “the brick.” It was very successful in its intended purpose and still in use by some of them.

WRITING GRAPHIC FACILITATION

The third generation of Visual Meetings was the result of deciding that each chapter in “the brick” really needed to be a separate book. I began with the Principles of Facilitation, which outlines about a dozen principles for each of the four flows of activity a facilitator has to manage (We name these Attention, Energy, Information and Operations). Next was Best Practices for Facilitation. It has over 260 best practices keyed to the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance Model and is a key sourcebook for anyone serious about facilitation.

The next book I wrote was Graphic Facilitation: Transforming Group Process with Power Of Visual Listening. It was written as a comprehensive guide for anyone wanting to become a professional graphic facilitator and is as comprehensive a treatment as you will find (IMHO). In it I went back and brought forward all the things I’d learned since starting this work in 1972. (All these are available through the Grove store if you click on the links).

Graphic facilitation is the term used by those of us who both lead meetings and create the graphics at the same time, using the displays integrally with the group process. This is an approach that is stunning in strategic planning sessions with management teams and many other group settings. But this is a real performance challenge, not dissimilar to learning to play progressive jazz. It’s possible, and there are a growing number of us who do this successfully for a living, but not for everyone.

The approach includes being able to create presentations charts on flip charts and large, blank sheets, graphic recording when someone else facilitates, and facilitating, usually on the fly within well designed processes. Put these all together and you get graphic facilitation.

All these guides are what now support The Grove’s Principles of Graphic Facilitation training, an outgrowth of the Group Graphics trainings of long ago. This process is as well tested as any methodology can be. A testimony is the fact that nearly every one of my consulting staff over the years has gone on and created their own successful practices and firms. It began with Jennifer Hammond Landau and Howell Thomas—who are still practicing. Then in the 1990s Suzanne Otter, Diana Arsenian, Christina Merkely, Kayla Kirsch and Deirdre Crowley all worked at The Grove . They all have successful practices. And finally my assistant Sunni Brown, a bright public policy student from Texas, helped me with the Graphic Facilitation book, agreed to be the model as the curious learner, and has gone on to create her own Brightspot Consulting as a very creative graphic recorder. She is currently the co-author of Gamestorming with Dave Gray. Talk about a learner.

VISUAL MEETINGS IS BORN

Over the years I’ve learned that really good publications are team efforts, and each one of the books I’ve created has involved more and more people who help refine the approaches and designs. In this fourth case I experienced being guided by a professional East Coast editor, Richard Narramore. His experience at Pfieffer publishing reference books in organizational development led him to our website and our work.

I mention East Coast because there is a real cultural difference in the United States between the coasts. In general the Eastern seaboard has not been as quick to catch on the designerly ways of knowing that are ubiquitous in the West Coast. What we take for granted out here is news to some people in New York. But Richard has a passion for making ideas accessible and making books successful and was adroit at responding to my many tables of contents, and gently weaning me from some of the more flagrant west coastisms.

I’ve learned that business books don’t really have a market unless a couple of conditions are met.

You need to have a large network of people who will buy whatever you write.
You are a speaker that can sell bushels of books to give away at big meetings.
You are already a well-known author.
You have defied gravity by self publishing and proving that you have a market, and then the big publishers will talk with you.

I really only met the first criteria, and a bit of the fourth. That was because many of you are already owners of Grove products and know about their quality and integrity and would trust what I create. The Grove has a very robust mailing list and that, I must say, was critical to Wiley’s interest. Having something to say only gets you in the door.

Richard’s point of view is that the title and cover have to be right and the table of contents and first chapter have to be right, and the rest of the book will probably take care of itself if you know what you are writing about. So he really worked with me in December and January on those things and out of this came the title Visual Meetings, and the concept of organizing the book around the full cycle of learning (I wasn’t about to give up on Process Theory at this point).

My drafts of a first chapter took three or four rounds. In an initial one I wrote about one of my favorite meetings, a spring retreat I conduct every year in Baltimore for their Leadership program. But the example was really about something that requires a very experienced person to pull off. It wasn’t the right pitch and voice for the manager and HR person who isn’t big on drawing, but has to run meetings and wants them to work and maybe wants to be visual. I finally connected back with those meetings that were seminal in my own development, and the experience with Apple Computer was for sure. So that leads off the book.

I was actually amazed at how easily the rest flowed once we had the architecture and central voice and image established. I remember holing up in on a trip to Bangkok in a hotel (before the riots) and having both my MacBook Pro and my Wacom tablet there. I created about 10 chapters that long weekend with very long days. I came back and most of my free time in March was spent writing. But it turned out to be a joy. In connecting with the elements that anyone can use, and telling stories and creating illustrations that made the possibilities really clear, I felt like I was finally delivering this work up to the next generation, to which I dedicated the book. I also realized that the graphic facilitation work on large sheets was just a facet of a whole range of visualization strategies, in which the simple sticky note figured hugely. Writing these chapters about how to really do sticky note work was new ground, and wasn’t really covered in the earlier books. Neither was all the experimentation and success The Grove has had creating templates that provide light scaffolding for visual planning.

THE ONE THIRD RULE

I anticipated that this book would follow the one-third rule I’ve come to believe in, and it did. The one-third rule is my observation that it takes about a third of time to create the first draft of a book. It takes another third to rewrite everything so it all works together. And it takes another third to polish and correct the book. This latter process took several months. Because I took on the task of actually designing the book in InDesign as a way of authoring in visual format and getting a tight integration of word and image– I did introduce a lot of inconsistencies that had to be fixed in the picture department. Everything needed to be 300 dpi duotones in Photoshop it turned out. The 96 dpi illustrations just weren’t sharp enough. You probably don’t want to know about all this, but I did spend a good number of hours just fine tuning the drawings with the help of our Director of Design, Bobby Pardini. This is the kind of boring stuff that is in phase three. Thanks for Wiley they handled the indexing.

TEACHING THE BABY TO WALK

I should add a fourth third to my rule, since we are now entering the all important part of getting enough sales in the first run that the book is considered successful enough to warrant attention from the distributors. We are very happy that Barnes and Noble has chosen the book to be featured in its August .com site and will be featured all month on its new release tables through the country. This is a BIG deal according to Wiley. They don’t often do this. I should probably pay Dan Roam some royalties because I suspect it’s the success of his book that is generating this interest and not the merits of Visual Meetings alone.

It is interesting on Amazon to see that Gamestorming and Business Model Generation are both coming out coincident with Visual Meetings. Each is making a very complete case for visualization in business, all coming from different angles. When I set out on this path years ago, I thought of process leadership and group graphics as a performance art very much like music. I’ve even called it “conceptual jazz.” In this spirit I has always felt that a new field needs lots of voices and styles to be a true field, and that the existence of these books all of a sudden is an indication that we have finally reached critical mass.

I make a good argument for why in Visual Meetings. These practices are actually very old, and have been the friends of designers and architects since those professions began—but the intersection with new technologies has begun to launch a revolution for anyone who runs meetings and leads group processes.

I’m about to head into the 15th annual meeting of the International Forum of Visual Practitioners. These are the people who are on this wave and making a living at it. I’m going to share in a historical retrospective, and at the end, thanks to Wiley, comp everyone a copy of Visual Meetings. It couldn’t be a better birthday present for this new creation. It will begin its own life now, and I will begin to turn my creativity to the new ideas that are hatching (and believe me they are!!!)

Danone's Virtual Victory—Six Cities Without a Hitch!

2010-07-23T01:36:04-07:00

Imagine a three channel, six city tele-computer-graphics meeting with over 40 people involved and lasting four hours. I can and actually helped facilitate one recently when Danone—the water, yogurt, and baby food company from France— decided to review its plans for talent management in Asia with its teams in Tokyo, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Singapore and San Francisco in a virtual rather than face to face setting. Here’s a picture of our video link (I was represented only by my graphics).

The Grove teamed up with our partners in electronic meetings, CoVision, to support Meryem Le Saget, our Parisian associate. Danone is her client. By chance I had been able to attend an initial visioning session in Singapore last February, and we created a visualization of the BoLe project, named after a Chinese god who was very famous or being able to pick top horses. Danone’s intent is to grow its Asian talent to support its rapidly expanding business there.

Individual country teams had developed action oriented roadmaps since the visioning session, and our virtual meeting was to review these plans with Danone general managers and align with the BoLe vision. The business details are confidential, of course, but Cecile Diversy, the visionary HR manager who is supporting this effort (the prominent person in the video picture) was glad to have The Grove share about the process. We all learned a great deal.

OUR INFRASTRUCTURE
One of the first things we learned is that creating a reliable infrastructure is not only an imperative but also a lot of work. In F2F meetings rooms, chairs, table, and people talking are all understood elements. The challenge is setting purpose, building trust, understanding objectives, etc. The same concerns attend virtual meetings, but there aren’t the rooms and chairs. You have to create them with technology.

What we “built” was a platform with three channels. The primary channel was a video/audio connect behind the Danone firewall that we all tuned into with a special VPN access program we had to download. The Danone IS folks really showed off connecting all the cities and sustaining a video network that really worked. The screens in each location would show all the sites, and magnify the ones who were talking. Cecile is giving her opening talk in the initial picture I included.

A second channel was the CoVision Council software, available to small groups of three in each meeting room via PCs connected to the Internet. On this platform Josh Kaufman and Lenny Lind, the CoVision staff on the project, could push questions to the participants, who would then have small group discussions and post answers. All the answers were readable by anyone with a computer, and were focused on by a “theme team” of general managers and Meryem and Cecile. The key leaders in the company were then asked to respond to key themes raised by the participants.

A third channel carried my visualization work in San Francisco on a WebEx conference in which I had the rights to show whatever was on my screen. This is what people in Singapore saw—a summary slide projected from the WebEx meeting of my Wacom Cintiq tablet drawing, done in Autodesk’s Sketchbook Pro software (my preferred recording medium). You can also see the CoVision computers in the foreground.

Each meeting room had one screen showing the video, and another showing either my recording, or whatever slides presenters needed to use—toggling back and forth. They also had a Grove Storymap of the BoLe Vision hanging up as a mural.

Our technical team had three teleconferences and a long, 4-hour test run making sure everything was working. During that I drew this little sketch of my setup in San Francisco, and a portrait of Josh Kaufman, who directed the meeting from Singapore, and Jeffrey Zhang, head of the technical crew in Singapore. He and his IS folks in each city were amazing, and very proud of what they accomplished—for everything worked beautifully. Here is all the gear we needed just for our San Francisco end of things.

FACILITATION LEARNING

Once an infrastructure is “built,” then the actual process needs to be directed and facilitated. Josh Kaufman of CoVision was that lead, with Meryem close by. CoVision has supported an incredibly wide range of very important meetings with its Council tools. The Grove has worked with them at Nike, RE-AMP, and the California ISO. CoVision works regularly with America Speaks’ thousand persons meetings, including one with 6,000 people considering designs for the World Trade Center. They have worked at Davos and with the Clinton Global Initiative. Meryem is working with them regularly in France.

Some of my take-aways about this meeting are the following:

You need experienced facilitation: I got to see the fruits of CoVision’s experience in Josh’s cool handling of all the variables in this Danone meeting. To keep the meeting focused, we had a facilitator in each of the cities who were all part of the test meeting. Their job was to brief the general managers who attended, make sure people were having the small breakouts and knowing how to post answers to questions, and providing chat feedback and questions to Josh about anything that needed attention from the central hub. I personally wouldn’t have suggesting that the kind of recording I do be part of the mix if I also hadn’t had a lot of experience. We don’t flap in the pinch.

A detailed agenda and timing discipline makes it possible: We worked on dozens of version of the agenda and key questions that would be asked in Council, using e-mail and teleconferences to tune things. During the meeting Cecile reinforced over and over—"Keep it short and snappy." A big part of the success of the meeting was keeping to the timing and keeping the comments and presents to their agreed upon limits. Each of the presenters were well rehearsed in addition. This allowed the improvised responses to have enough time and bring the meeting to life.

A back channel is essential: We had a fourth channel open on Skype for the facilitators, Josh, Lenny, Meryem and I to communicate. It turned out to essential in making adjustments for the back and forth between slides and my recording, and to calibrate how the tablet images showed up on the different screens in the different cities.

Each channel needs a dedicated viewing computer: As someone who was reflecting the entire process with graphic recording, I needed to track the entire event and know where we were and what was happening on each channel. The different programs don’t allow multiple screens to be open in a convenient way (a factor in “application sharing” on a web conference program like WebEx), so I had one computer showing the videos and providing me with audio on a headset. Another computer showed what people were seeing on the screen that projected my work and the slides. I used my computer for the tablet and the back channel, but if doing it again would have a fourth computer with just the Skpe.

IT is essential: Eddie Palmer, The Grove’s IT coordinator, was on hand for both the test and the meeting. Tiny little things can throw a virtual meeting off track, like having the audio settings incorrect, or experiencing disconnects. Because I was on a Mac and the video needed to be on a PC we were working cross platform. I know a fair bit about computers, but can’t navigate a PC and do graphic recording. I think all the sites were very grateful for their IT people.

Audio is king: The Grove discovered during our work on the Groupware Users Project with The Institute for the Future in 1990s that audio is the bottom line for virtual work. If people can’t hear clearly, nothing else works very well. Fortunately our connection was and stayed strong.

You need to set up files in advance: None of the programs for recording on tablet computers has been designed by graphic recorders, and as a result the way they handle access and filing is far from intuitive, and doesn’t work in real time unless you set up the files in advance. I create headings in advance, number all the pages and have them ready in a file to use with Sketchbook Pro. If I want to take notes in regard to any slides, I need to pull those into a TIFF format in the right sequence with my blank recording pages in advance.

A good tablet and software makes all the difference: It is possible to take graphic notes on the whiteboards that most computer conference software provide, but it is very crude, doesn’t word wrap or allow for much tool control and isn’t really very satisfactory. The same is true recording on PowerPoint. These tools are primarily good for checking, circling, or making very rudimentary notes. If you do this work much invest in a good tablet. The Wacoms are the industry standard.

Breaks are important: We took a good break about halfway through, and a half dozen small group breakout sessions that were in essence breaks. This made the four-hour meeting possible.

Multi-tasking is the virus in virtual work: We were quite strict about multi-tasking in this meeting, but in my experience it is very hard to control and so tempting when things lag. Having split attention really affects any meeting, and is something that people who do serious virtual work fight continuously. Craig Neal, who teaches the Art of Convening on teleconferences, has found that with strict adherence to being present, very deep work can happen virtually. Audio is actually quite intimate when people are on headphones and mikes. But getting all this established and people committed is a process in and of itself.

The facilitation team needs to be a real team: Josh, Lenny, Meryem and I all know each other and have worked together many times. When you combine three consulting firms like this having them all work well together is a must. We were able to focus completely on the task and knew where each of the others would be focused during the process.

Pioneering can be exciting: One of my biggest take-aways from the Danone meeting was how excited all the teams were by simply having the courage to meet in this fashion and break entirely new ground for the company (and in facilitation in my experience). In Danone most of the general managers are French, as one might expect, and changing that in Asia is what the BoLe project is all about. By conducting this BoLe meeting in this fashion, the entire Asian staff had a chance to shine as facilitators and IS specialists supporting the meeting. It ended up being an important development experience all the way around. So too, the French managers learned a lot. They had to move out into new territory and explain their divisional strategies and plans in a new medium, and it sharpened their focus.

Cecile received a lot of great feedback after the meeting. While the cost savings of avoiding an expensive face-to-face meeting were real, the team building benefits in each country were probably more valuable.

Dan Briklen has Developed a Workable iPad Notetaker

2010-07-06T23:34:13-07:00

My coaching colleague Ward Ashman shared a link to TechWeb's interview with Dan Briklen, inventor of Visicalc and now developer of a real note taker app for the iPad. Click here to see what it can do. I was up and running in ten minutes and was delighted to find that I could write with my finger in the zoom screen and have it appear on the page as decent handwriting. This is just the tip of the iceberg, I believe -- and so does Dan. "The iPad isn't a viewer it is a controller," he says. "People want to have direct control."

I read in the news recently that productivity apps are outselling the other kinds as users begin to give Apple the feedback about what this tool is really for. Did those of us who are in visual practice have to figure this out. I don't think so!

Reflecting on Independence Day

2010-07-04T11:16:34-07:00

I woke up this morning thinking about freedom and independence, not just because it is the celebration of the United States freeing itself from England, but also because it is the anniversary of my freeing myself to create my own business. That was back in 1977 when I set up a personal consultancy focused on organization development, communications, and graphic & design. My logo was a bright yellow spot, looking a bit like a light bulb. Here’s the image. (Note: I don’t live on 6th Avenue any more.)

Looking back the feeling of excitement about declaring “independence” didn’t last very long. I wasn’t very “free” in those early days, in the ways that mattered most. Deciding to be “independent” I was also deciding to take on a new set of responsibilities. I now had to do my own marketing, selling, writing, fulfillment, invoicing, and all the other things that make a company a company. My little startup was really nothing more than idea, and the next three years were a slide into challenge after challenge as I struggled to figure out how to run a business.

I’d been working at Coro, a high minded non-profit whose purpose was to improve the quality of public process by training leaders in public affairs. I could make a great case for the ability of a small percentage of dedicated people being able to shift a system, and get grant and donation money to support our work. But business was a different thing. My new freedom required new responsibilities and new understandings.

As an independent consultant I had to figure out how to talk about what I could offer that people would pay me for, right away! The connection was direct and specific. “I can facilitate your meeting with graphics,” I could say confidently. But in 1977 who wanted that? It wasn’t the way anyone conducted business, except designers and architects and engineers. Other people talked, or showed overhead slides, or looked at numbers (not even spread sheets in those days). Who needed visual meetings anyway? I worked my network, and got odd jobs, but I wasn’t really taking off.

I remember the year I actually gained some independence and freedom, and it was when I figured out who really needed what I had to offer and began to book some serious business. It happened at a Group Graphic’s workshop at Fort Mason in the early 1980s. A Canadian strategy consultant named David Cawood attended. He had been as a big eight firm but preferred “independence” and was on retainer to several large Canadian firms as an assist to their management teams. He had the idea that I could come up and facilitate one of his more complicated meetings with graphic recording. He’d set it up as an experiment, and if it didn’t work, he wouldn’t lose anything. I just wouldn’t come back. But if it did work he would have discovered a way to differentiate his value from other competitors!

It was as if my little light bulb logo suddenly powered up! I get it. My clients could be independent management consultants, who already have work, and not the organizations themselves! Within six months I was working at the top of the house at Apple, General Electric, General Mills, and David’s client, Federal Industries, a conglomerate with businesses across Canada.

Later Arthur M. Young, the brilliant evolutionary theorist who articulated the Theory of Process that has been so inspiring to The Grove, provided an explanation of this phenomena – of why freedom without constraint really isn’t freedom. He saw all process in the universe as a marriage between phenomena that is very unpredictable and dynamic, like light and fundamental forces, and phenomena that is governed by rules of cause and effect, like molecules. The free stuff needs the constraint of mechanisms to express themselves, he’d say. It’s only when we learn the rules at the bottom line that we can turn toward the freedom we imagine in our top line aspirations. This kind of freedom comes from mastery—quite different than freedom that is simply absence of constraint.

Year’s later my work with Process Theory and with Alan Drexler became the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance Model.

It is the same idea. A team has no real freedom to get results as a team until they have oriented to their purpose, build trust, clarified goals and come to firm commitment about roles, resources, and direction. Then it can take off , turn a corner, and begin to implement.

This puzzle of things getting harder before they get better shows up in many other places. As someone raised in the East side of the Sierra Nevada mountains, I know that when you are on a peak and see another one off in the distance, the process of getting there means going down first, and often fighting through deer brush and losing sight of where you are going, before you can climb up again to that new peak.

Claiming independence is just the beginning of something. Our Founding fathers had to create a government. They struggled. They wanted to avoid the ills of monarchy, and the perils of popular democracy. They needed a balance against greed and poor quality, and out of their experiments came our courts, the two houses of Congress, and a President with much less power than a monarch. The system worked for a long time.

But we are on a fitness peak now that is under siege. Living high on the hog at the expense of the rest of the world is not true sustainability. Depending on extraordinary military expenditures to sustain this system seems difficult. So where will we find a new set of freedoms—freedom from terror, freedom from poverty in old age, freedom from being whipped by an economy run by micro-traders on super computers?

We are going to have to learn the new rules to have those kinds of freedoms not just declare them. This is the challenge President Obama faces. He declared freedom but he hadn’t earned it, in that his team hadn’t yet mastered the new rules of these times.

As I sit in my studio this July 4th thinking back on 33 years of business, I do have considerable freedom. But I face a new mountain peak—that of being an elder to my generation and the next and the next. What do I really know about this role? How much of what I have learned applies to these times? How receptive are the younger people? How, in a time of multi-tasking and instant gratification, do we learn that you can’t rush learning the disciplines of agriculture, the time it takes to have and raise a baby, or the amount of time it takes to grow truly new understandings between our ears?

Independence and freedom, the kind that Michael Jordan had on the court, and Thelonius Monk had on the piano, comes with practice with and acceptance of constraints. It’s that dance that I celebrate today! It’s that dance I intend to engage the rest of my life.

Learning from Leaders of National Parks

2010-06-30T23:09:27-07:00

For eleven days early this May I accompanied twenty nine national park superintendents, deputy regional superintendents, and head rangers on a brand new immersive leadership training called the National Parks Institute. There were park execs from all over the United States and eleven others countries—including Chile, Paraguay, Lebanon, the Bahamas, the Dutch Antilles, Kenya, Australia, China, and New Zealand. I was the “facilitator.” I put this in quotes because it was a unique role – part master of ceremony, part process designer, part graphic facilitator, part participant observer, and part California Native speaker. It was a transformational experience for me and for the others. I want to share some of its impact here.

Here we all are at the end of the tunnel leading into Yosemite Valley.
The program was tagged “Managing Strategic Change” and was designed to provide a class A developmental experience using California as a base case. It was also a test of a collaboration between the National Park Service (represented by Yosemite and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area), UC Merced, and the Great Valley Center that hopefully will result in an ongoing program. It is the fulfillment of a vision by NPS leader, Steve Shakelton, recent Head Ranger at Yosemite and now in the Visitor & Recreation arm of NPS in Washington DC. He and his colleagues at the new campus at UC Merced saw an unparalleled educational opportunity in teaming up in the interests of strengthening park management worldwide in these challenging time. The Yosemite Fund, Toyota, and the Center for Park Management made it possible by funding this initial program.

GREAT VALLEY WATERSHED
As an integrating idea, the design team chose to frame the experience with the Great Valley Watershed, an extraordinary water eco-system that flows from the Sierra Nevada mountains through no less than sixteen rivers into the San Francisco Bay and two miles out to sea to the Farralones through the Golden Gate. Our journey would begin there, and trace back through the Delta, up the Merced to Yosemite, and exploring the Toulome River as it pours out of the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, artifact of the 1906 Earthquake and fires that left San Francisco desperate for water and politically able to pull off the damming of one of the last big rivers in the Sierra. It’s still controversial all these years later.
I am a native Californian –born north of San Francisco in Petaluma, raised on the East side of the Sierras in the small town of Bishop, schooled in Los Angeles, then, but for a 3 year interlude in Chicago, have been living in San Francisco since 1969. My brothers live on the coast near Forth Bragg and up in the foothills in Placerville. My father, until he passed away, lived north in Weaverville in the Trinity Alps. California and its land is not an abstraction for me but a lived experience. It is that relationship which gave this program such special meaning to me.

We began at Cavallo Point Lodge in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. We then traveled through the Delta and down Highway 5 and across to U. C. Merced, a new campus in sight of the foothills of the Sierra. Our final leg was up the mountains to the South end of Yosemite National Park, where sessions at Hetch Hetchy, the Yosemite Valley, and then Tenaya Lodge concluded the experience. I made a Storymap of the entire process in small form folded and also on a large mural. I'm including it here for those of you interested in the total design (and how you can visualize an agenda).

INSIGHTS
I don’t want to attempt to write a narrative about the entire experience, for it would be book length, but about some of the things that have been “working me” since, and represent the seeds of some key insights about this kind of leadership development.

ο    Leaders learn from leaders: Everyone in the experience thought that having the 11 park folks from overseas was an exceptional highlight, and I would agree. Their stories and experiences were often riveting, like the problem of controlling wild ungulates in Bhutan, or dealing with migrating animals exposed to poachers in the park in Kenya, or getting the Dutch to take the sustainability in the Antilles seriously. We’ll bake in a LOT more dialogue time next session I’m guessing.

ο    Partnering is possible with practice: In these budget stretched times, the example of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (Or Golden Gate National Parks as they would preferred to be calledwas inspiring to everyone—in large part because of the way they have worked with partner organizations in the evolution of the parks. Our one-day overview talking with folks at the Marine Mammal Center, Headlands Institute, and Crissy Field Center left everyone impressed with what is possible. I was a founding director of one of the park partners, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and know how time and energy partnerships take—but the reward is a robust organizational ecosystem, much stronger I think that any mono-culture could ever be.

ο    Thinking about systems is a challenge: The idea of looking at the whole California watershed was a fascinating idea—but not so clear to the participants in retrospect. We probably needed a trip to the SF Bay Model, and some talks with hydrologists. The UC Merced folks who shared with us the challenges of measuring snowfall in wilderness areas and Dangerman’s introduction to ESRI's geodata mapping technologies for looking at park areas began to get the group up to system level of thinking. But we needed to get the groups working themselves with some maps and models if we expected group-level systems thinking.

ο    Even leaders need time to reflect: My experience with leadership programs is that staffs feel compelled to pack them full with extra special presentations and experts. This is a flawed practice, since human brains, especially the brains of leaders, are full to the brim. For anything really new to get in the material has to be worked. We finally had two days at the very end that were completed facilitated, and the group loved the chance to start making sense of things. This practice will be threaded throughout next time I’m sure. In a time when leaders are “always on” with Blackberries, e-mail, constant meetings and the like, this problem of getting focused thinking time is serious. Quality simply does not come through with constant multi-tasking.

ο    Parks are the canaries in the ecological gold mine: So many of the stories and experiences we shared were about the ways in which different parks are already showing the stresses of global warming, the economic meltdown, and shifting geo-politics. I came away believing that these precious ecosystem are like the Alexandria Library of our times, and are under threat. Because they are dynamic, living places, they reflect what is happening, and they have staffs that pay attention, unlike many other regions. I was fascinated with the living case study we did on fire management practices, and the current appreciation that many forest ecosystem have fire as a key part of the total process, and need it to thrive. By the same token, global warming is increasing the catastrophic nature of fires in systems that have not been allowed to burn. I’m not sure we are yet at a place where public policy can deal well with this kind of dynamic understanding of systems.

ο    The engineering arrogance of the early 1900s may be challenged in our times: The earthquake and fire in San Francisco in 1906 galvanized public opinion and provided the context that allowed the city to develop Hetch Hetchy as a water source. It’s now providing water for San Francisco and some 25 other community and farms. But I was surprised to learn that only 4% of that water is actually consumed for drinking water, and also startled to see that it all passed through some big pipes down at the bottom of the bay that cross tho huge earthquake faults. Almost certainly this system would be compromised in a big shake it seems. Do current leaders want to or have any resources with which to address this kind of thing? It doesn’t appear so.

ο    We have much to learn from indigenous peoples: We got to meet Ahwanee elders up in Yosemite, and talk to others at UC Merced. A Coastal Miwok basket maker at Yosemite is a living legend and gave us a glimpse into her journey of marrying an Ahwanee and learning their crafts. Yosemite was a precious place to these people, and they were active stewards in their time, burning off the grasses to create a park-like atmosphere among the tall trees and meeting with the Eastern Piutes each year up in the mountains to trade for obsidian and conduct ceremony. California was so richly endowed in those long ago days that the natives didn’t have to create big structures and large organizations to live. In the 250 years Europeans have been dominate on the west coast, we’ve managed to degrade this environment rather thoroughly. Can we find a way through without the earth wisdom of these early people? I personally don’t think so.

ο    Stewardship cultures don’t feel like marketplace cultures: Our experience began with Charles O’Reilly from the Stanford Business School teaching the group about adaptive management, using many business cases to make his points. The group struggled with the comparisons, and were stimulated by them. But I came away even more convinced that the type of values and orientation it takes to be a good park manager are not those of a businessman. The time frames are geologic, not quarterly. The phenomena being sustained is alive and complex, and not at all mechanical. The inspiring park leaders immerse themselves in their areas and learn to listen to the land and its many inhabitants, including whole communities in many of the parks of the world. I kept thinking about Jane Jacobs, whose little known book called Systems of Survival argues that stewardship cultures, derivative of hunter gather societies, are very different at core than the marketing cultures that grow from trading, and we open ourselves to enormous confusions trying to get the one to be like the other. I don’t have a lot of answers to this yet, but the question needs to be asked.

Visual Meetings: A Revolution in Group Productivity

2010-02-17T06:40:15-08:00

This post links you to a video about my presentation on Visual Meetings at a recent TEDxSOMA event at the ParisSOMA loft South of Market Street in San Francisco. My Parisian college Meryem Le Saget introduced me to the sponsor Clement Alterseco, President of FaberNovell in Paris, several months ago and it led to an invitation. ParisSOMA is a shared workspace for young entrepreneurs, very much in the spirit of the TED events, whose motto is "ideas worth sharing." My own ideas have formed over the 38 years I've been a visual practitioner and are condensing into a book for Wiley & Sons on the subject that will come out this summer. My 10 minute fly-over is a fast-paced review of what feels like a real revolution in how we communicate in organizations.

New Years Day with My Dad

2010-01-03T19:58:53-08:00

My father, the Reverend Laing Witherspoon Sibbet, passed away this New Year’s Day at Sutter Solano Medical Center, in Vallejo, California. His death, as did his life, touched me deeply, and I’d like to share some of this story. He was 93, and up until his last sermon on Christmas Day in 2008, a full time Congregationalist pastor. I’ll begin at the end with what I wrote to the family the evening of his passing.

“Dad peacefully left his body tonight at 8:05 when he stopped breathing at the conclusion of a ceremonial last supper we held for him in the hospital. The day was a graceful ballet of our family— gathering and forming a loving container for his passing. He began to doze midday, after some animated attempts to talk and relate to his great grandson, Benjamin in the morning. (A severe stroke the prior day had left him unable to talk or move anything on his right side.) As the afternoon wore on his temperature cooled, his heart slowed, and the doctors were pretty sure he would be passing within the next day or so. At 6:00 we read him a very moving goodbye letter from his grand daughter Sage. Not wanting to leave him at this point, but needing dinner, we decided to have a “last supper.” A nearby Lucky Store provided unsliced sourdough loaf, grape juice, a candle, cineraria in full blue bloom, and tapioca pudding, his favorite. His wife Joanne, my brother James and wife Carole and I created a little altar on the hospital bed at his feet and stood around him in circle as he labored to breathe. He wasn’t in pain, and looked like he was going.

James read the communion ceremony and we broke bread. Joanne held some up to him as we broke ours and remembered the years of ceremony we all know so well. We then drank the grape juice that we Protestants use instead of wine. The taste brought memories of years, as young children, of sneaking little sips from the left-over cups after communion, and of taking it seriously by junior high. We then read from the Psalms, the 100th, and then the 90th — a prayer of Moses to God about the meaning of life in the face of the sweep of God’s immensity. The prayer moves to a climax with

All our days pass away under your wrath; we finish our years with a moan. The length of our days is seventy years— or eighty, if we have the strength; yet their span is but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away. “

I didn’t know this Psalm, or why I read it, but at that line Carol said “he’s not breathing!” And he wasn’t. We all held each other and waited. He gasped and we startled. “He knows it okay to go,” Carol said. Together we then all said the Lord’s Prayer and the 23rd Psalm, and Dad stopped breathing altogether. Quietly— our hearts full and tears flowing—we sang Away in the Manger and felt a quickening, almost a shudder of flight, and then silence.

We sat in the dark for about 20 minutes with the candle, and our memories, profoundly moved by the power and grace of what we had just experienced. Was he really gone? Was he guiding us in this dinner? Was God? Or did he just sense at some subtle level that our field of energy was finally ready for his departure? Is any explanation necessary at all?

We finally told the hospital staff around 8:30 that he had died. “When did he die?” they asked. “8:05 we said.” “And you didn’t come and call us — that’s never happened before!” they were amazed.

As I write James and Carol are with Joanne back at her place in Benicia. I’m listening to Brahms’ German Requiem with Susan. My heart is full and actually joyful, for Dad’s hope and wish was that he would live a full life and then drop quickly. His wish came true. And his spirit is now with us all."

Weekend After Christmas

We’d actually seen Dad recently when Susan and I spent the weekend with him right after Christmas. He had been slowing down since he and Joanne moved to Benicia in January. Going from being a full time pastor to being in a community where he knew no one left him adrift, I think. But it is the custom of retiring pastors to leave their communities, and Benicia is equidistant from his and his wife Joanne’s children. It’s been a blessing that he was closer this year. My brother John and his wife Ann came down from Placerville that same weekend and after a slow walk around Windward Cove (the name he had excitedly discovered for the part of the Carquinez Straits their home faces) we had convinced him to start writing down some of his stories for us. We thought that if he had followed the pattern of writing a sermon every week for all these years, he might be able to continue the habit by writing for all his direct children and grandchildren, of which there are 23 at last count.We didn't want him to stop.

It was our good fortune to get some of the stories directly that weekend. Not surprising in retrospect he was thinking back over his life. Dad was born in Washington DC to David Harper Sibbet (my namesake) and Jessie Gould Laing, both back from the Spanish American Wars in the Philippines. Dad was full of reflections from that time. My grandfather was an attorney. Grandmother was an educated woman and writer from Michigan. She loved to tell stories to her sons.

“Every Sunday afternoon without fail Mom and Dad would take my older brother James and I out to see something interesting” Dad said over dinner. “And there was lots to see in Washington DC. We’d go down to the Chesapeake Bay and watch birds, or to the Lincoln Memorial, or out to see a train,” Dad said. He and his brother were Eagle scouts in a top troup in DC. As the bugler he even got to play at FDR's inauguration, he said. By college Dad was intending to be a doctor, enrolled in pre-med at George Washington University. He told us about winning a scholarship to med school, and then having the donors exercise their prerogative to give it to someone else that year! He wasn’t’ able to go to med school and the following year felt called to the ministry. His family moved to Los Angeles to find clean desert air for James, who had TB.

Dad eventually graduated from UCLA and then San Anselmo Theological Seminar, majoring in rural ministry. He married my mother, Dorothy, the day he graduated. I was born as he took his first parish in Two Rock, California, just outside Petaluma.

Four year’s later, now with a second son James, he received a pastorate in Bishop, California, on the eastern side of the high Sierra Nevada mountains. The next ten years were a very special time, for both our family and the church. Both flourished. John and Gordon were born. Our manse’s large yard behind the church was transformed from an alkaline parking lot beneath 25 huge sycamores to a landscaped garden with we four boys as the groundskeepers. Dad headed up building a new sanctuary, sang in the choir, preached, counseled, and learned about the high desert.

Maybe it was Sunday afternoons with his parents, or the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman—all at the top of my father’s list of inspiring people—but when we drove to the high mountains after church I had a sense that these too were our church. An avid photographer, he took the following picture of his beloved Sierras. He could see these mountains from his upstairs bedroom in Bishop.

Peaks and Valleys

After these ten formative years in Bishop Dad went on to lead a church in Klamath Falls, Oregon for another ten years, then a young church in Woodland, California, and then after a break of several years, the Trinity Congregational Church in Weaverville, California. Though not in the Sierra he was never far from mountains. And his life too had its peaks and valleys. He and my Mom separated in 1972. He married a second time and we brothers got a sister, Elizabeth. That marriage also eventually ended and at age 73 he married Joanne, with whom he has been together since.

When Joanne called us before Christmas and urged us to come over and spend a weekend, she was very concerned that he had seemed to lose his interest in doing anything.

My father was unusual in the amount of energy and initiative he had over his lifetime. He has never been “slow.” He’s one of the most forward-looking, service oriented, energized and optimistic people I’ve ever known. He taught us about gardening and wildflowers. He taught us about visiting the sick in hospitals and serving our communities. And he taught us how to build. The house he built from the ground floor in Redding was a paradise among the rolling oak hills. While in Redding he was also a driving force behind the Redding Arboretum. He also served for years in the California Senior State Legislature and was a syndicated columnist on senior subjects for years. “I’ve never known him to be anything but charged up about life,” Joanne said when we talked. “I never, ever imagined him not being that way, but he’s stopped! He sits in his chair and can’t even walk far enough to take shopping.”

I can see now that Dad was preparing to go. “He tried to write,” Joanne told us with tears in her eyes when we met at the hospital New Year’s Eve, “but he couldn’t. He even asked me to help him open up his word file, and there he had typed out ‘SUNDAY AFTERNOONS” but he couldn’t go further.” My last picture of him was sitting there beginning that very line I believe.

Dad will live on in our memories, and we writers will tell his stories. He left a lot of sermons to work with. It began with the last words he heard two hours before he passed written by his grand daughter Sage, my brother James and his wife Carole’s daughter. “Can you please read this to Grandpa Laing?” she asked, and sent me the letter by e-mail. It pretty much says what we all feel, (and she agreed I could share it here).

Laing:

"I have looked back fondly on the times that you have read books to my friends and I. I have learned to love and appreciate each and every plant, especially roses, because you taught me how to see each one as an individual. I have learned more about God than I think I would have because I have the privilege of having you for a grandfather. There is a picture of the two of us sitting on a bench swing looking out over your splendid garden in Redding. This I will always keep close to my heart. I will enjoy telling my children about what a great grandfather I have. I want you to know that your life story will never fade because so many of us are here to tell your story. I will forever tell your insights to my friends and family.

If you feel you don't have the strength to carry on then I can accept your passing, though if you believe this is not your time to go and you are just letting go because you feel you've accomplished what you set out to do, there is always more to share and more to fight for.

My last words to you would be: No matter how good or bad or right or wrong you believe you are I know that you are a person who is worthy of God’s praise, because everyone makes mistakes and this is our premise to learn what is moral or not. I will love you forever and for always and will hold much pleasure in sharing your stories with my children and grandchildren." Much love always Sage and Ross.

Blessings on your journey, Dad. You are now light, and every glint of it will remind me of you.

___________

The Record Searchlight posted a story above the fold on the weekend about Dad, reflecting on his work as a senior activist. See link to Former Redding Senior Activist Dies.

Our Known Universe

2009-12-24T14:14:08-08:00

Lynn Kearny sent me a link to this stunning graphic portrayal of what science knows about our universe. It's a humbling, inspiring experience to watch, imagining that our lives are part of such an incredible dance of light. On this day when we celebrate the birth of new light in so many traditions, let us remember that however we represent the universe, that it is alive, and whole, and probably aware.

Hopeful News: Coro's Exploring Leadership for High School Students

2009-12-18T17:42:16-08:00

I just recently accepted the Chairmanship of the Coro Center for Civic Affairs, Northern California, Program Committee. Coro was the foundation for my career in organization development, having myself been a Coro Fellow in Public Affairs in Los Angeles in 1965-66, and then on the staff in San Francisco from 1969 to 1977. This is my second round as a member of the Board. As experienced as I am with this organization, I'm bowled over by the energy and excitement Amy Chan and Ben Polansky are generating with our evolving Exploring Leadership program for high school students. We are now serving 180 students a year and the effects are transformative—as this new video supported by Kaiser Permanente will demonstrate. It gives me a lot of hope that young people are once again feeling interest in getting involved in their communities and civic affairs, and that involvement in service learning can have such an impact on their school performance and their lives.

Inside Jung's Red Book

2009-12-14T10:31:15-08:00

Carl Jung's famous Red Book, a 600 page large format journal chronicling his more adventurous explorations of the psyche, is now on display at the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea: “The Red Book of C. G. Jung: Creation of a New Cosmology.” The New York Times has a nice article on their web site and an 8 image sample of some the images. They are very interesting to me as a long-time journal keeper and explorer of my own inner imagination. I think you'll find it interesting as well. Click on this link to get the article. (New York Times).

Drawing is a Way of Thinking

2009-11-24T18:09:14-08:00

I came across this video of designer Milton Glaser talking about drawing as a way of thinking. I couldn't agree more with what he is saying (while drawing). Thanks to Ken Homer who linked me to Dan Roam's Back of the Napkin site who linked to Vimeo C. Coy's creation.

MILTON GLASER DRAWS & LECTURES from C. Coy on Vimeo.

Russ Ackoff Passes Away—His Legacy Will be Remembered

2009-11-10T21:30:13-08:00

I received the following note recently about the passing on of Russell Ackoff from Bo Ekman at Tallberg Foundation. Ackoff was a legend even to those of us who never met him. His systems view is one I fully embrace. Bo's remembrance touched me and I wanted to share it. For an overview of Russ Acknoff's life and work check this link to his Wikipedia biography.

Dear Friends,

Recently the news reached us that our dear friend and inspiration Russ Ackoff passed away on October 29th. Russ was a truly humble and generous person allowing everyone and everything around him to grow. He was a master of mind but also a master of unpretentiousness.

I had the privilege to stumble across Russ' writings already in the early 1960's. We met at an international conference in Tel Aviv in 1974 where I gave a paper on "How to create problems through long-term planning." He liked the twist and we became friends for life.

He has over the years, singularly been the most important inspiration to the evolution of the Tällberg Foundation and its activities. From the very start, we chose the Tällberg approach to be a systems approach. He said that: "The only problems that have simple solutions are simple problems. The only managers that have simple problems have simple minds. Problems that arise in organizations are almost always the products of interactions of parts (of a system), never the action of a single part. Complex problems do not have simple solutions."

This is a typical Ackoffian quip. His writings and talks are full of these gems of clarity of mind and of perception of reality. Russ, if anyone, lived up to Einstein's admonitions "make things as simple as possible, but not simpler." Therefore, any dealings with Russ were an occasion to rise to. No sloppiness allowed. No weakness of logic, no tampering with truth. His stern intellectual demands on himself and on others were complemented with the warmest of spirits.

Russ came many times to Volvo and he inspired us to think very differently about cars and mass communication systems. He also helped us to think very differently about learning processes. Russ was enormously productive. He turned out over 30 books. He was always writing. He became a beloved teacher who never taught. He delegated to the students to define their curricula and to set their own objectives. Russ said "there is no teaching, there is only learning" and developed his institution at the Wharton School accordingly. He broke out of the academic and university bureaucracy which in the end forced him out of the system of the university and the Wharton system. He subsequently created Interact Inc, together with his fellow faculty members. Thus, he could retain his freedom of thoughts, creativity and was freed from the bureaucratic hassle. Thanks to generous support from some major corporations and a steady flow of consulting assignments he could continue his academic work and doctoral programs.

Russ Ackoff came many times to Tällberg, always providing us with extraordinary insights and provocations. He made us understand that through systems analysis and the recognition of the true complexity of problems, you stand a much better chance to understand the dynamics that create the future. He was the first recipient of the Tällberg Leadership Award, that honours principled pragmatism.

Russ was an extraordinary storyteller. His lectures were breathtakingly witty and studded with anecdotes. Russ made us feel as smart as he was. He made us grow.

Bo Ekman

PS A memorial service will be organized on 12 February 2010 in Philadelphia.

TÄLLBERG FOUNDATION
www.tallbergfoundation.org

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111 48 Stockholm
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Brand's Whole Earth Discipline Tackles the Big Issues

2009-10-11T22:35:40-07:00

In the midst of a fall that has turned out to be chock full of work (thank goodness), I took some time out to hear Stewart Brand talk about his new book, Whole Earth Discipline: An EcoPragmatist Manifesto, at the Long Now lecture series at Fort Mason. It hit home. Kevin Kelly, who fielded the audience questions at the end of the lecture, called it Brand’s best book yet.If Stewart's talk is an indication, it is loaded with ideas worth spending some serious time thinking about.

I won’t attempt to mount Stewart’s arguments here, except to say that he opens the book with a twist on the first line of the Whole Earth Catalog. "We are as Gods, and we HAVE to get good at it." He presents a case for re-thinking Green. He concludes, after a LOT of research in his inimitable style that 1. Cities are green; 2. Nuclear is green; 3. GMOs are green; and 4. Geo-engineering is green. Needless to say this waves a red flag under the nose of ideological environmentalists – but Brand is serious, and makes a good case. When Kevin asked Stewart if this book had lots of tools like his earlier Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart stopped and thought. "There are some," he said "but it's mostly about thinking. Thinking is a tool."

To support people understanding what he is seeing, he has complemented his book with a web site that contains links with all his source material, so you can tunnel into his arguments to your heart’s content. This is a new style of publishing, and one that promises to reshape book making into a truly co-creative act. Leave it to Stewart to be on the cutting edge once again.

Whole Earth Discipline will be available on Amazon this month we were told.

Choices

2009-09-05T15:47:53-07:00

For months I’d been looking forward to a special meeting in New Mexico at the Village of the Shining Stones near Abiquiu called the First Peace Gathering. It promised to be a very unique and inspiring event, initiated by an organization called Ehama, the teaching vehicle of two traditional elders named Rainbow Hawk and his partner Wind Eagle. They anticipated elders from the Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, and Native traditions plus youth from Europe to explore how their traditions have been evolving toward a common interest in peace. There would be lots of meditation, story telling, ceremony, and of course eating and social time.This photo called Skypainting by Sabrina Whitelynx reflects the beauty of NM that was calling me.

My good friend Pele Rouge and Firehawk studied with Rainbow Hawk and Wind Eagle for ten years in the 1980s and have gone on to be facilitators of some of the most powerful circles in which I am a member—the Bay Area Thought Leader Gatherings, the Summer Solstice event in Ben Lomond, our Second Life Medicine Circle, and the Pathwalker group. They would, for the first time with their teachers, be co-leaders of the event. I wanted to go and support them. In fact five of our nine Medicine Circle group were going. I also hungered for the desert, the big sky, the monsoon weather, and connecting deeply back into my own indigenous roots as a mountain man from Bishop, California in the Eastern Sierra.

As I have written about in Touching and Technology, my wife Susan was diagnosed with uterine cancer and underwent a full hysterectomy three weeks before I was to leave. Our psyches resisted interpreting this development as truly life changing, and figured she’d be well enough to have me go to New Mexico. “I’ll go to Arizona and see Jerda and Jamie’s little Reilly while you are at First Peace,” she planning.

But at week two and half it as clear that the new journey we were on was going to be one with surprises. While laparoscopy is cosmetically less invasive, a hysterectomy is major surgery, and the removal of the lymph, ovaries, and uterus left Susan in pain, and not able to move around very well. She wasn’t supposed to lift things either.

I realized that I faced a choice, between supporting my community and my own practice and supporting Susan, my beloved.

In retrospect I can’t believe I thought it was a choice, but you have to understand a little bit about how I’m “wired.” Community service came before family in my household growing up. My father, a pastor, was “on call” all hours of the day, and our thriving Presbyterian church in Bishop had 600 plus people who had real lives and all kinds of things happening to them. When it came to the big events—birth, death, sickness, calamity—my dad was involved. He was a volunteer fireman and the sirens meant dropping everything. The youth groups and choir met in our living room as well as the church. We were a public service family.

That continues to be my orientation. My company, The Grove, isn’t a church, but I live out my relationships in the same spirit. I see people as a full collection of everything they are involved with, and all the people who are part of their lives. It’s a rich, complex way to perceive things, but it is my way.

I’d given my word to FireHawk and Pele Rouge that I would come and support them, and I’m a man of my word. Creating a container for 65 people over the course of a week is a BIG challenge, and it helps to have a team – some in front speaking and guiding, and others around the sides and in the middle, holding the intention and space for everyone to come forward and participate.

One of our Pathwalker Circle, Vivian Wright, a very senior and skilled organization consultant at HP, said to me once that she thought that masterful facilitation was 10% leading the process and 90% praying. “What on earth do you mean?” I asked at the time. “Well, once I’ve directed the group in an activity, I sit and hold everyone in my imagination in the light of positive intent, and hold that space with all my attention until they complete. I think it’s an important part of the process.”

Accepting this statement means accepting that humans are not just biological mechanisms, but also tuned into more subtle energies, and that these have a direct interaction with the physical plane. I’m finding myself steady moving toward a deep acceptance of this partnership in my work and personal life. So my commitment to be at First Peace was more than just a desire to have a week of renewal in the desert. It was a commitment to my colleagues in this work we are doing of awakening people to themselves and to their relationship with each other and the Earth. We call it Earth Wisdom in our circle. I think of it as truly identifying ourselves with the whole, with the great spirit energy, with God. It’s really my work now. The projects are just contexts.

I decided to stay home with Susan. The choice itself was a click, a “turn”—nothing physical or tangible. It was my intention that shifted. I knew it was the right choice because my whole being tingled and jumped when I made it, and Susan lit up like the sun when I told her. “I’m so glad,” she said, visibly relaxed. That night in our Medicine Circle in Second Life I shared my decision. “Susan needs me this week, and she has the priority,” I said. To a person everyone was immediately supportive and understood. What a bounty to have friends like this, who know me, and know my deep sense of commitment to my family. They would have done the same I appreciated.

Little did I know that that this choice was also a choice to nurture myself as well as Susan.

The details of the week and those that have followed, which have included complications with fluid buildups and resolution and further healing, are not what I want to write about. (If you want to read about First Peace check Amy Lenzo’s blogging on the First Peace site). What I want to reflect on today is what it means to yield completely to love and service, without reservation, without hesitation.

I have a very busy and complex life. It was a coincidence that Susan’s cancer came in August when my schedule is the most open. But the week I would have been at First Peace, and those following had been the beginning of a return of The Grove’s work. If our situation is a reflection of the larger work world, organizations are no longer paralyzed by the shock of the economic meltdown. Things have changed, especially in the trust, risk, and resources areas, but life goes on. There are challenges and projects that need our help, and that need my particular kind of skilled facilitation. The calls are coming in again.

It would be easy to think that having to care for Susan in all of this would be impossible, that I would move to resentment and stress, but that has not been the case. I have experienced how amazingly rewarding it is to do things for someone you love. I’ve also been able to participate in the amazing response of our friends to this situation. They have come and stayed, cooked, talked, written, and showered us with their love. How ironic that in this cauldron of uncertainty, dealing with the dreaded scourge of CANCER, we have been experiencing some of the sweetest and most moving kinds of love.

Because I couldn’t over prepare for work situations, I went into them with my heart wide open. I’ve had the chance to directly experiencing the power of intention – of actually holding people in the spirit of love. Now this isn’t the way business people talk, and I don’t need to use those words to practice this, but it is the word that is appropriate, for by love I mean total acceptance and compassion. I mean listening to people with the care that I have been listening to Susan as she asks for things, describes her pain, struggles with denial and clarity. This listening has spilled over into my other work. I’m appreciating that everyone I meet during the day has struggles. Everyone is dealing with some sort of healing,.

During the week of First Peace I opened to my own ceremonies of renewal. I began each day out in my garden, walking my little Medicine Wheel and inviting in the energy and spirit of each of the eight directions. I’d end in the middle holding those on the desert in light, and imagining the energy that they were building in their community there spreading back into all their lives around the world. I held Susan and my mother, and my father (in their 90s) and The Grove, and my networks and circles and clients. I imagined that we are all at some intangible level touching each other with our lives.

It turned out that several clients really needed my help the week I stayed home. They were local so I could still be home to cook, do the wash and clean up in time for Susan and I to have evenings together.

We had time to watch a remarkable documentary on healing called The Living Matrix that one of Susan’s poet friends gave her. It featured Lynn McTaggart who wrote The Field, a book pulling together the latest research on human beings’ relationship to electromagnetic fields. It had a segment on energy work where one uses ones hands without touching. It described the role of intentionand prayer in healing and our lives. I began to work that way with Susan.

As I reflected back on my choice to stay home, I began to understand from this experience more richly what Arthur Young meant in his Theory of Process when he described the “turn” in process as that point where our consciousness interacts with matter and mechanism, and chooses to orient and move in a new direction. The circumstances don’t change, the molecular level isn’t transformed at that point, but the direction of movement shifts and that makes all the difference. In choosing to move fully toward serving the person who is my life mate, all resistance and strain fell away well. The “chores” felt more like tai chi moves or dance steps, moving toward another communication of my love. My choice was choice to show up in my day-to-day life the way I imagined I would at First Peace.

I think Susan and I will look back at this period as a transformative one for us personally, and perhaps for our immediate communities. We woke up fully to what 42 years of commitment means to each other. I woke up to the power of service and commitment propelled by love. I deepened my understanding of the role of intention in shaping our everyday lives.

My challenge now is to keep this open heart for all beings. That is my practice. I think that will be my joy.

Symptoms of Inner Peace

2009-09-02T17:21:09-07:00

Spyrock, a fellow member of the Thought Leader Network, sent me this wonderful, reflection on the "Symptoms" of Inner Peace," written by Saskia Davis.

Symptoms of Inner Peace

• an unmistakable ability to enjoy each moment

• loss of interest in judging others or yourself

• loss of interest in conflict

• loss of ability to worry (very serious symptom)

• frequent, overwhelming episodes of appreciation

• contented feelings of connectedness with others and nature

• frequent attacks of smiling through the eyes from the heart

• tendency to let things happen rather than make them happen

• tendency to think and act spontaneously rather than from fear based on past experience

• susceptibility to love extended by others and the uncontrollable urge to extend love

If you have all or most of the the above symptoms, be advised that your condition of peace may be incurable. If you are exposed to anyone exhibiting these symptoms, remain exposed at your own risk. These conditions of peace are highly infectious.

Spyrock and a contingent of our network in the Bay Area went to a First Peace Gathering at the Village of the Shining Stones in Abaquiu, New Mexico recently. They were part of sixty five people from all over the world gathered to share in ceremony and study the teachings of native elders WindEagle and RainbowHawk and their students Pele Rouge and Firehawk. It was an ecumenical gathering, celebrating the way peace is being held by Jewish, Christian, Native American, and other traditions. I was to attend, but my wife's recovery from surgery prevented it -- so I have been loving the continuing communications that have been spreading out from what was a very powerful gathering.

A Message from the Universe — Through Alan Watts

2009-08-16T19:09:11-07:00

This afternoon I followed a cascade of links and ended up watching a half hour interview with Alan Watts from a 1971 television program. His message is important and well worth sharing.

I'm not a Zen Buddhist, but being raised in the High Sierras and spending many a time going back to nature for guidance and counsel allows his message to resonate deeply. It's assumed in our times that things are speeding up. But sometimes I wonder, especially when I listen to reflections like this one. The challenges we face today have long, long antecedents in human's invention of language and our ability to separate ourselves from nature with our abstractions, models, measures, and technologies. Alan's message is a call to come back to our true selves. He does a masterful job suggesting what that might be. My hope is a growing number of people are evolving to the perspective he advocates.

I found this reflection by reading a blog post about the new World Cafe Community website my friend Amy Lenzo created with a team of buddies. She said they researched 15 social networking platforms and chose NING as the most fitting for the World Cafe. I was interested because The Grove is working with the new Institute at the Golden Gate at Fort Baker (just north of Golden Gate Bridge) to help them grow their environmentally oriented Guild communities. We will most likely help them develop an on-line platform. The World Café site had links to other NING sites, like the Presencing Institute Community, so I went there to see how they had designed that site. It featured a couple of videos, one of which was this one of Alan!

I felt like I had dropped into Alice in Wonderland's rabbit hole, and time as we know it compressed. Could he really be talking 38 years ago in such a relevant way? I believe he can. See what you think!!

"I feel called to notice the role of contexts..." Tom Atlee on "Something Big is Trying to Work Through Us"

2009-08-11T17:12:51-07:00

Tom Atlee, the creative energy behind the Co-Intelligence Institute, recently wrote Something Bigger Than Life is Trying To Work Through Us His analysis of our current predicament is crystal clear. We are experiencing the shadow results of our own "enlighted" technologies and practices. The crises will be transformational, (or not) and Tom explores how it might be. He moves into very poetic language talking about what it means to wake up to conscious evolution and see ourselves as mirrors of the larger evolutionary pattern. Bill Veltrop of the Monterey Institute for Social Architecture (MISA) spotted it and sent it along and I'm posting a link here because he is giving voice to my own orientation for these times. As with any paradigm shifts, the emerging expressions are still being crafted. Tom is one of the shapers I respect.

Group Learning Interview With Sibbet

2009-08-08T13:34:59-07:00

I was interviewed for Gordon Rudow's web radio show Fired UP recently on the subject of Group Learning. If you can ignore the over-the-top intro music and rah rah framing from Webmaster Radio, it's a great interview. Gordon began his own consultng business Bonfire Communications back in the 1990s and I was one of his mentors. I'm increasingly impressed with how different speaking in the moment in direct response to other people is from composed writing or designed presentations. I always find myself saying things that surprise, and in this case, delight me. Have a listen. I'd love to hear your reaction. (You might also check Gordon's other interviews. The one with Dawna Markova and Terry Pearce are excellent).

Touching & Technology: A Fugal July

2009-07-30T02:30:10-07:00

I’ve spent the last two weeks in an intimate dance with modern technology and real life. Four streams went fugal in one week. My Palm Treo stopped working and I decided to convert to an i-Phone. Two new client projects launched and one culminated. Susan and my youngest daughter Jerda had her first baby in Phoenix. And we found out Susan had uterine cancer. If there is a limit to what one psyche can deal with, we found it. I went into a kind of shock. I am happy to say the crashing cymbals part of the piece is over. Everything seems to be going well. But I'm left with lots of questions about the kind of lives we are living.

I started thinking about the dance between technology and our sensate lives when our new Kaiser physician conducted Susan's and my checkup interviews in front of this little rolling Healthnet console, a new Kaiser system installed about six weeks ago we learned.

My mind was on the spotting Susan was experiencing. We didn’t know what it was yet, but were pretty sure it wasn’t a good thing. Our new doctor is a lovely general practitioner, but spent more time looking at the computer than she did at us. She didn’t actually touch us at all during this first checkup to my surprise. She DID touch us emotionally with her patient coaching about how we could stay healthy, and how we can use the other parts of Kaiser to help us, and did get us right down to OB/gyn for a PAP smear. But my fugal fibrillation between technology and true touching had begun.

Our fears were realized. The spotting was cancer—endometrial carcinoma, Grade 1—occurring in 1 in 40 women we find. The only good news here was it was the most treatable kind.

An amazing Kaiser on-line web site kept us right up to date as we headed into wrapping our mind around the dreaded diagnosis. Information was at our fingertips, literally. Our doctor answered e-mails within a day! Lab reports were on-line for us to research immediately. We stopped reading after a while. They wouldn’t know really what was going on without “going in” as they say.

The music of our lives began to sound like the themes that come on when something dangerous is about to happen in a movie. In and around our dealing with Kaiser’s diagnosis of Susan I was juggling three clients with a broken phone. It wouldn’t receive or make calls. This was serious. To be in consulting I need to be in the information stream, and a broken phone is like losing the kayak paddles under the Golden Gate bridge. I decided to move to the i-Phone that I carried as a traveling portfolio. It had a phone I used to connect with the internet. Cancer in the uterus. Shifting telecommunications platforms. These are hardly the same league, but to my psyche I felt like I had hit black ice.

I felt a little better as I learned that the integration of desktop, i-Phone and its server-based database called “the cloud” by Mobile Me actually worked, and would result in one calendar and one data base my office could see. But that led to some self induced turmoil getting it stable.

I needed my system working with more urgency than usual as I juggled Kaiser appointments, surgery schedules AND clients calls. My three support calls to Apple and several days to figure out how to stabilize e-mail and toggle between wi-fi and 3G and get my data base sorted felt like someone starting up a chain saw in a peaceful forest.

An expansive, hopeful theme quieted the cacophony. Our long planned trip to Phoenix directly overlapped with possible surgery dates. Susan and I had planned to be with our daughter Jerda as she had her first baby, a little girl. We'd seen from ultra sound pictures Skyped to us earlier. We’d gotten our tickets before any of these other events. How could we not do that? Susan was being counted on to be the grandmother support system.

Our doctor encouraged us to go and have the surgery afterward. Apparently Grade 1 cancer is slow growing. This was encouraging. So we went, Susan first on Wednesday and me following on Saturday.

Theme four’s loud brass announced the culmination of one client project in a Wednesday meeting, and the start of two new projects on Thursday and Friday respectively, with the last being in Seattle. I won’t go into this part, except to say that to do my kind of facilitation I need to immerse myself in the client’s reality. Cancer, communications, new baby’s, new clients. My meditation practice took a small hit. I began meditating in snatches all during the day! Can these all really be going together?

Technology became a friend again. Digital cameras allowed me to get work right back to clients. My i-Phone allowed me to check on Kaiser and stay in touch with Susan on the road. Jets took me to Seattle and back. And amazingly, I was in Phoenix the very Saturday little Reilly appeared. She came early in the morning after some hard, induced labor and I arrived by late afternoon. It was a good thing to sink into the energy field of a new life emerging. It’s all encompassing. Susan was very happy to see me and I her. We didn’t think much about cancer. But I did think about machines. Oh my, we were surrounded by them and so was Jerda.

When Susan and I had Jerda at Kaiser 38 years ago we were Lamaze parents, contemplating natural childbirth at home. I went to the breathing classes with Susan and was part of the team. A big decision was to NOT have wires connected up to Jerda as she emerged, as the docs were already wanting to do at the time. I couldn’t imagine our child coming into the world that way.

Our informally adopted son Eddie Palmer is half Choctaw and his grandfather was Lakota. When his first child came he asked that all artificial lights in the delivery room be turned off and the child’s first experience be the natural light. He wanted this again for his new boy (born July 29). Do these first impressions matter that much? Something says they do.

Mountain Vista Medical Center in Mesa is state-of-the-art. More computer kiosks. Little Reilly was wired from the start, and every beat of her heart was recorded out on a digital display. Everyone watched the ticker tape. I wasn’t there but Susan was staggered by the amount of technology. One of the nurses explained that birthing has become very challenging for pediatricians because of parents suing for ANYTHING that goes wrong at all. Do we trust the machines more than the doctors? Do doctors know how to work directly with bodies any more? When we met Dr. Guzman, Jerda’s doctor we found out they do. He was extraordinarily caring and patient centered. We could see Jerda and Jamie energized by his presence.

We spent three days in the hospital, since little Reilly had a bit of jaundice. Jamie, Jerda’s husband, works for Go Daddy. We wanted to share pictures and things but found out that the wi-fi didn’t work and no out-going mail or attachments were allowed. We were reduced to texting. I was still trying to get my i-Phone platform tuned, finding critical data missing from my system and needing to reconstruct it from e-mails. What happens if the net goes down, I wondered? Are we like spiders hanging in the morning sun? Will some hiker/hacker walking through the technological woods rip down our webs? I suspected the cancer issue was operating underground in my psyche to have these kinds of thoughts during such a miraculous birth.

My technology questions were fueled by a first night in which the air conditioner in our hotel room stopped working. It was 114 degrees outside that day! The temperature went to 85+ in our room and was hotter outside. Susan raged. It was clearly fueled by what her body was doing. We had a good lesson at how dependent people are in this hot region on air conditioning equipment, and the electrical system that supplies it. Air conditioners and cars are fundamental here. It is another Los Angeles, built with no economy of scale what so ever. It seems a direct extension of the idea that we can go any where anytime at a fast speed, and be comfortable anywhere, anytime, even in a scorching desert.

Baby Reilly’s energy wiped away all those kinds of thoughts. We all took turns holding her and feeling our hearts crack open. We followed every smile and cry. I couldn't stop taking pictures of these people I love.

Reilly had a bit of jaundice, a buildup of bilirubin in the blood that needed to be flushed out with fluids and light. While common it can be dangerous, and brought some dissonance to our psyches. But more technology appeared, this time in the form of a blue light bath and neutralized our fears. In a day it had done the job. What did mothers do before this, I wondered. Sat their kids out in the sun, Susan guessed.

Back in San Francisco on Tuesday to prepare for Thursday’s surgery (in a jet of course), I’m now almost stable on the i-Phone and loving it. The graphical interface is a real jump forward from a regular phone. Jerda and Jamie are ecstatic with Reilly and at home. The milks in. The baby’s nursing. They love all the digital pictures.

We go on-line to check appointments and lab results from a CT scan. Nothing! We are alarmed and call. I start imagining a nightmare challenge of managing Kaiser through the surgery experience, assuming that was necessary in today’s specialized and fragmented healthcare environment. I was wrong. We find the appointment will be on-line when it is finally set. We’ll get a call Wednesday night, and we did. I’d given my new cell number to all relevant parties. I’d e-mailed family and close friends to alert them of what is happening. I’d e-mailed clients to let them know I’m on support duty. I found myself slowly believing my new phone number was real and that I’m really on the i-Phone. The touching came back in waves of calls and messages of support.

My experience with Susan’s surgery was an experience of BOTH touching and technology. I moved to acceptance. Our oldest daughter Valentine arrived from Philadelphia, and turned the three or four days of navigating through this time into a wonderful connection with her.

Pre-op involved more people at the consoles filling out forms, but everyone was welcoming and friendly. A nurse in pre-op knew Susan as a poet teacher and came in and chatted about the schools. At the same time Susan became a bar code number that was scanned every time anything happened. Meds are scanned. Temperatures are digital. Everything goes into the computers. I was impressed that all this equipment didn’t get in the way of a very personal touch and experience. There was lots of touching going on now.

It was a three and half hour operation. Susan and I had gone on-line the night before to the Kaiser site and watched a wonderful multi-media presentation walking us through the entire procedure, with graphics and very clear explanations. I could visualize everything. But I wasn’t in the room and this wasn’t an intellectual experience. I knew Susan would be under general anesthesia, but I assumed that some part of her could be reached, so I went into a meditation room Kaiser provided and tuned in. For two hours I had the most amazing sensation of following Susan through this experience. Our trust was in the system now, but also in each other. Perhaps our human connection with source and the pulse of life is even more fundamental than technology. As the hours progressed our trust was tested.

Val and my relief was immediate when Dr. Littel came out and explained that the surgery had been very successful and “clean.” Susan would be in her room in a couple of hours. Lab reports would reveal next week if any further treatments were needed. The “probability” is low, Littel said.

Susan finally came up to her room three hours later, beaming, still a bit sedated and very funny. Clearly a cloud has passed. And in with a lovely young student nurse came the computer console, the bar code reader, the softly beeping hydration machine, the electronic thermometer that works in the ear in a second, the machine that automatically massaged the legs with a pulsing air pump to keep clots from forming, and a plastic breathing toy to keep the lungs from collapsing! But it was the holding hands, the soft smiles, and the tucking-Susan-in that overshadowed all this. We were intent on enveloping her in a blanket of love!!!

We came home in one day! This would not have been possible without new laproscopic surgical techniques, where doctors guide tools inserted through tiny cuts in the abdomen. In a debate on the merits of technology this kind of thing would be on the top of my benefits list. At the same time I wonder why there is so much cancer. Why are we finding out that 1 in 40 women have uterine cancer? Our doctor friend Valerie came over and explained that endometrial tissues are responsive to estrogens, and they abound in our environment, along with molecules that mimic estrogen, in plastics and all kinds of substances. This is technology too---biotechnology. It’s hard to assign clear causes to cancer. Susan wasn’t taking estrogen. She’s not heavy (another source), but the stimulus must be there somewhere. “Our bodies constantly fight against deviant DNA all our lives, and when we get old we aren’t as able to do it,” Valerie said. Hmm. What does this explain? Does it matter when WE are the ones involved?

Two weeks of fugue. High notes of touching and holding, and being afraid. The music begins to soften.

“I’d love some black bean soup,” Susan said from the sunny couch in our living room as I finished this piece. I could only find split pea but that worked. Two hours later and a trip to Safeway we did have black bean soup, for a later day. What an amazing time and country we live in. So much change. So much challenge. So many questions.

I want to make sure that love and touching stays central. The rest doesn’t seem to mean much without it. I’m grateful for all the tools that helped us get through these past two weeks. But I could go for a little bit of soft lute music with long rests and pauses right now.