My brother James, a graphic designer who lives up in Northern California (Comptche near Fort Bragg to be prescise) called recently to say he was participating in an art show of Mendocino artists that would include art from the artists AND their families. He asked if he could include two of my pieces and I agreed enthusiastically. The show is called Generations and will be all February at the Oddfellows Hall in Mendocino. James' painting of a seated woman is on this flyer on the middle right.
I have some hopes in this regard. Book three was written for leaders and managers, not visual practitioners. It's so important that leaders in our time have the tools to support real systems thinking. Here's the challenge. Most public businesses run on three month cycles wherein they work to make their results good enough to impress Wall Street. Non-profits work either hand to mouth on yearly grant cycles. Most CEO's are on three-year tenures (on average). Government runs on two year and four years cycles. Planning horizons are rarely more than 5 years. Yet most of the issues that will have the biggest impact on my grandchildren are operating on much longer cycles.
The challenges of global warming and peak oil have been identified for several decades. Paul Hawkens in his book The Next Economy, sees 1973 and the oil embargos as the threshold when design came to trump cheap resources as a competitive advantage, since less will have to be more in the coming years. He published in 1983. That's 30 years ago! How many times have you been in planning sessions that have this kind of time horizon?
The advantage of mapping and diagramming and tracking data visually is literally being able to see some of these big patterns. But is that enough?
By good friend Bob Horn and I were thinking about all this yesterday as I shared the new book. He's been applying his MacroVu mapping to the challenge of global warming, identifying the "must haves" to take us to sustainability in the year 2050. I've heard blow-by-blow how hard it is to get anyone to focus at this scale, but he's making slow progress. Yet he came back from Rio wondering why the environmental movement has no song and no rituals and celebrations. I heard another fellow from Yale on Moyer's & Company talking about how there is no "issues constituency" around global warming. People who are concerned feel isolated. It's too big to think about!
As the Visual Leadership series of books is now complete, I’m appreciating that methodology alone is not enough, as useful as it might be. We all need to consider what we are aiming to achieve with better methods.
My Intentions
Having sent a good part of December with most of Susan and my seven grandchildren and our four children, it’s increasingly clear that I care most about having the world they live into be a hopeful one that is making progress on the big issues. I’m Chairman of the Board of the Coro Northern California Center, an organization where I first connected with leadership development in my eight years on staff in the 1970s. We are entering into a Coro 2020 planning process to see how we can increase the ability of leaders being innovative in these times. It will be a context where I can take responsibility for actually implementing some of the ideas in Visual Leaders. The book will stay in orbit for a while. In the meantime results need to come from connecting its ideas with my own ground of being. That is my new year’s resolution.
I’m hoping to also engage in dialogue with those of you who get these books and want to explore their implications. We don’t have a formal web site yet, but do have a Facebook site (The Grove Consultants) where I’d love to answer questions. If you comment here I will also respond. If you get the book and have time to post a review on Amazon that would also be appreciated.
In any event. Best wishes for this year!
Fast Company excerpted my new book Visual Leaders (out January 7) in their recent on-line edition. They liked some observations I wrote about how to deal with social media by thinking about messages as being buoys in a foggy sea of possibilities. I shared a set of principles that are elaborated on in the article. To see more click here.
I just got a note from Lydia Dimitriadis at Wiley saying "Just wanted to let you know that some advance copies of the new book came in today! It really looks fantastic- great job on the design! Thanks, and congrats on another beautiful book!" If you are planning to order it on Amazon, please do it the first week in January. It will help with ratings. In the meantime enjoy this little intro video that will greet you there. I'm excited. This one is in four color!!
The Grove's partner in Amsterday, Patrick Van der Pijl, founder and CEO of Business Model, Inc., has knitted together the approaches represented by the four best-selling books shown below in a service offering clients are clamoring to use. He was on the core team that created Business Model Generation, now in 25 languages and selling over 500,000 worldwide. He combined that with The Grove's Strategic Visioning Graphic Guides and translated Visual Meetings into Dutch. Visual Meetings has been a best seller and is now in 15 languages. Business Model You applied business modeling to individuals. Finally Gamestorming is Dave Gray's reframing of faciitation practices as games. This too has been very well received. Click here to see a nice video BMI put together from a recent symposium in Holland describing the integration. The Grove will be partnering with BMI to offer Business Model Visualization workshop in the SF Bay Area in the new year.
Visual Leaders, the capstone book in the Visual Leadership Series John Wiley & Company has supported (of which Visual Meetings was the first), will be in the stores the first week in January. Help spread the word. If you are planning on buying the book on Amazon, do it January 7 to help us get the most visibility.
My friend and colleague Olé Qvist Sorenson presented at a recent TEDx conference in Copenhagen. His video is wonderful. It's a simple, inviting, clear demonstration of why visualizing in groups is so much fun and so helpful. Enjoy a look. Olé's company Bigger Picture, regularly creates large-scale visualization for clients, as well as white board animation movies and many other visualizations. He's been a very inspirational example in a growing, world-wide network of visual pratitioners.
Rachel Smith, The Grove's Director of Digital Facilitation Services, spoke at a recent TEDxUFM gathering, organized by Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatamala City. The presentations were simultaneously translated for the bi-lingual audience. Rachel really makes the case for visual notetaking in education. Her story about her niece Elizabeth is very inspiring. Enjoy!!
A third book in my Wiley & Sons trilogy on visualization is nearing completion of its first draft. Wiley agreed to print the book in full color, and I am having a terrific time loading it with examples of how leaders of all kinds can take advantage of what I'm calling the visualization revolution. This cover image illustrates the big picture focus of the book. It's written to help leaders and managers increase their visual IQ, learn to work with visual practitioners, and guide their organizations in become more literate visually, in both face-to-face and virtual environbments.I making sure there are lots of practice exercises and suggestions for new leaders.
Wiley plans to have the book in the stores in January. We'll for sure have a link and other information at www.grove.com. In the meantime, I'd like to share the table of contents to give you a sense of what will be included. Any comments and feedback would be welcome.
As with Visual Meetings and Visual Teams, I have been able to not only write the book and do the drawings, but design it myself in InDesign. I've actually moved to doing the writing in InDesign, so that from the very first drafts I can see what I'm getting on each page. It's a thrilling process to be able finally to create in both text and graphics. If you want to read the TOC, click on the images and they will expand.
I’m all stirred up from reading Walter Isaacson’s richly reported biography of Steve Jobs— half in the large, 650-page book and half in my iPod, downloaded to the Kindle app. (I’m VERY curious about the rise of e-books and learn by doing).
Steve Jobs is the first biography of this caliber where I have some ground truth. I’ve lived the Apple revolution. I consulted to the company all during the Scully years. I count Alan Kay, the original conceiver of the “Dynabook” when he was at Xerox as a friend and colleague. I worked closely with Gil Amelio at National Semiconductor. I think I’ve owned, used, and depended on just about every product they’ve made since the Mac SE. In fact I created my own book, Visual Meetings, on the Mac and opened with a chapter about how we used visualization to guide the Leadership Expedition we conducted for all of Apple’s top management during the 1980s. Apple’s example has shaped our visual practice at The Grove. The idea of doing for group process what Apple did for computing—i.e. provide a graphical user interface—has been a guiding vision. So I’ve had a VERY interesting time following this story.
I no sooner finished than I came across a link to an article in Forbes magazine called "For a Preview of the iPad3-Watch this 23 Year-oldApple Video" about a classic video created at Apple during the 1980’s by John Scully and his higher education marketing team called “The Knowledge Navigator.” It was created for a presentation he gave at EduCom about Apple’s product vision in 1987, a couple of years after Steve was fired and left to start NeXT. Here’s a screen grab of the beginning.
Oh my! I thought. I know this video. We used it during the 1990’s in our Groupware Users Project with the Institute of the Future as an example of video prototyping. Now a fellow named Chunka Mui was claiming it’s the template for the iPad, and it was produced by Scully! Isaacson paints a very unfavorable portrait of Scully in his biography, portraying him as a financially oriented technocrat with no product vision, someone who nearly ruined Apple until savior Steve reappeared.
Like many generalizations, it has large elements of truth, but it doesn’t provide a full picture. Isaacson seems more interested in the person than the context in this story about Steve, and has produced a wonderfully rich report of a real business genius. But I’m interested in back stories and unstated truths as much as popular myths so I found Mui’s article fascinating. I’ve long believed that Scully’s era actually laid a foundation in more mature business practices that provided a basis for Job’s triumphant return, even as it presided over the eventual loss of their lead position to Microsoft, Dell, HP and other players in the personal computer industry.
Mui is the managing director of the Devil’s Advocate Group, a consultancy that helps business leaders design and stress test their innovation strategies and also the coauthor of Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance (Harvard Business School Press, 1998). He includes BOTH the original Knowledge Navigator Video and a follow up and little viewed video about the Knowledge Navigator Implications that includes Alan Kay, Steve Wozniak, and others projecting the future of computing. His point is that they, in truth, laid out the template for the iPad that Steve and now Apple is following, and prefigures what will come on the iPad3. I’ll let you have the fun of agreeing or disagreeing with Mui and am not going to summarize his article here, but strongly advise you watch the two video that are embedded and see what you think! I do want to share some reflections that I had. (CLICK THEM TO WATCH)
Malcolm Gladwell wrote an excellent review of Isaacson’s book in a New Yorker article on November 14, 2011 called “The Tweaker” that helped put Isaacson’s book in some perspective. Gladwell compares Jobs to the great English engineers and designers who continuously perfected known ideas like the cotton gins until they truly worked. These tweakers were not the inventors, but as important to progress and results during the industrial revolution as the originators of the ideas.
It’s clear from the video’s in Mui’s article that much of the “inventing” of the iPad was rooted in the work of Alan Kay and the imagineering of the wonderful higher education marketing group headed by Bud Colligan, the leader the Knowledge Navigator project as Director of Higher Education Marketing at Apple from 1985 – 1988. It’s also clear from my own experience with the iPad that the iPad2 is a wonderful tweak of the iPad1 which was a tweak on this original Knowledge Navigator idea. Apple was roundly criticized when the initial iPad came out for moving Apple’s focus to a more consumption oriented functionality rather than the interactive creation platform its computer tools made possible. I myself realized we were looking at a crude version of what we would see in later version of this product over the years. As great as the early Mac’s were at showing what was possible, they were really protypes and only became truly useful to designers like myself in the 1990s, after MANY tweaks. Isaacson writes that Jobs himself was upset by the criticism of the iPad and supported moving the iPad2 to being more of a creation platform, with new versions of iMovie, cameras and the like. I’m sure the iPad3 promises to take yet more leaps, if Apple follows its recent history.
I think Gladwell misses something that Mui doesn’t point out so clearly either—that Steve wasn’t the only tweaker. Apple and Pixar quality innovations are collective, not individual. Individuals in our society often get and seek credit, but it is the combined intelligence that is, in fact, doing the tweaking. What I loved about Isaacson’s book is illustrating how many times Jobs did not know what he was doing, or had the wrong idea and had to be argued down, and how many people were involved every step of the way. What Jobs did have was an ability to keep everyone focused on what they were tweaking for—simplicity, integration, and quality infused throughout—from marketing, to packaging, to the feel of the glass as you swiped them on.
My teacher, Arthur M. Young, inventor of the Bell Helicopter, told many stories about how important group debriefs were after ever crash of their big models during the development phase of the helicopter, after it was invented in model form. Even the clean-up boys should be involved, Young believed, because he never knew where the insight for the important improvements would come from. If you read the comments attached to Mui’s article, there is a long one by Bud Colligan. It’s the story of a group process-and of collective intelligence.
Coincident with reading Mui, I read another article by Bill McKibben in Orion called “The Era of Small and Many, reversing the trend of generations” . McKibben argues that hopefully we are moving from a culture of “the few and the big” to one of “the small and the many.” He recounts the fact that for the first time in generations the number of farms is back to increasing. He describes the new “distributed energy” movement. And he looks at Facebook and social networking as examples.
If I actually look at how the Apple tools that I use work, I’m relying on Microsoft Office 2011 for word processing and e-mail. I’m using Adobe’s Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign CS5 for my book making. And I’m using Safari and my MacBook Pro for the actually writing and designing and the iPad for reading and note taking in meetings. Wacom makes the tablets. If I listed all the people who actually contributed important tweaks to all these tools it would outstrip the credits on any current film. Jobs success was insisting on a few key principles, and having the ability to literally bully an entire workforce to deliver on them—such as having everything work together in a user friendly way. Thank you Steve. But let’s keep in mind that it was the many that made this actually happen, and that perhaps it can be accomplished without the bullying. I hope and pray that the Apple culture moves beyond the myth of the brilliant individual to lionizing the incredible power of the small and many who choose to work toward a common goal.
It’s easy to overfocus on the big and the few in our culture. There are many interested in NOT having the small and many be empowered. But I share McKibbon’s sentiments as he ends his article. “It’s possible they (the big and few) can delay the transition too long—the physics and chemistry of climate change, for instance, demand quicker change than many of our systems can easily manage. But all the money in the world can’t, in the end, hold back history. It’s heading toward something different and new and interesting. Or many many somethings, each of them small and beautiful.”
Steve argued for simplicity, integration, and infusion of Apple’s quality in every detail of their products, marketing, and retail experience. And he was able to inspire an army of “tweakers” to deliver on that ideal. Let’s tweak on Jobs, and figure out how we, the many, can do this to some of the ill designed features of our current society!
My second Wiley book, Visual Teams: Graphic Tools for Commitment, Innovation, & High Performance, arrived in a box at the precise moment we finished a review of our Team Performance System at The Grove’s Quarterly meeting! Needless to say I and our team was pretty exited. Everyone wanted to know what was new in this book that they could talk about.
Here is my answer.
1. New Success Stories: It tells the stories of many high performance teams that used visualization extensively to achieve results. These stories from HP, Otis Spunkmeyer, RE-AMP, Agilent Technologies, the DLR Group, and Gary Hamel’s MLab demonstrate how visual meeting methods can be used over the whole arc of team’s life.
2. Best Practices: There are comprehensive lists of best practices keyed to the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance Model (TPM). The book is loaded with side stories explaining principles and activities for applying visualization to teams.
3. GUI for Teams: The book explains how the TPM uses graphics to explain team dynamics in ways that are intuitive and memorable—providing a robust language for cross boundary teaming. The Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance Model provides the guiding framework for the book, and the explanations of the keys to success that mark high performance teams will be an invaluable reference for anyone using this model.
4. Decision Strategy Framework: Visual Teams pulls together the Grove’s materials on decision strategies and tactics to provide a succinct chapter on stage four, commitment practices.
5. New Tools: Throughout Visual Teams outlines ways to work virtually with new technology tools, using the Four Square Map of Groupware to show the choices. A final section focuses in on the technologies that are having the biggest impact—tablets, interactive whiteboards, smart phones, social networking, and Telepresence.
6. Theory of Process: Using a computer analogy, Visual Teams argues for the power of having a real operating system for thinking about group process in the form of Arthur M. Young’s Theory of Process. This is the clearest short summary yet of those ideas, with lots of examples of the derivative “application programs.”
7. Links and Resources: Two Coro Fellows helped develop a comprehensive, annotated bibliography and list of links to some of the best material available on teams, in addition to resources for visualization. This book does not attempt to duplicate the extensive lists of resources in Visual Meetings, but extends that material.
Following is the table of contents.
Thus arrives the second in what will probably be a trilogy of books on visualization. My editor Richard Narramore at Wiley has asked for another proposal for a book on Visual Leadership: The Art of Organizational Transformation. Stay tuned!!
I received a note from an experienced architect looking to get into the field of graphic facilitation, inspired a bit by another practitioner and my book Visual Meetings. I took some time to respond to his questions and thought I might share them more generally here.
Dear Robert,
Thanks for your note. I was planning on being an architect myself back in my 20s, even enrolled in school, but another job opened up and I went in another direction, the but the architectural field is really the source of our approach at The Grove—in that designers have always worked visually and interactively. Let me try and answer your questions.
RE TRAINING: Our Principle of Graphic Facilitation workshop is for people who want to be professionals, and is filling up rapidly these days. We have another one day workshop on Visual Meetings on September 27 that is more of an overview. It still has room. It’s designed for a bigger group and focused on builidng awareness of all the possibilities.
Wiley & Sons has contracted for a second book in the Visual series that began with Visual Meetings: How Graphics, Sticky Notes & Idea Mapping Can Transform Group Productivity. It is due to be published in the fall of 2011 and is titled Visual Teams: Graphic Tools for Commitment, Innovation & High Performance. The cover and table of contents are shown here for those of you who are helping with stories, references, and other support. It's due out in the Fall. Any comments or feedback at this point would be welcome.
Summary: Visual Teams will explore the way in which truly high performance teams work and how they use visual tools to support their communications. It will make the case that learning to work like creative designers is effective across a wide range of types of teams, and is a key to innovation and productivity. It will build on Visual Meetings by showing users how to knit together best practices described in the first book, and turn them into strategies that work across the whole arc of a team’s work life. It will also introduce new practices that are specifically designed to support team creation and ways of getting group commitment to common goals, innovation when implementing, and high performance and great results over the long term.
While the overt purpose of the book will be to share visual practices for teams, it will also explore how visualization can help teams and team leaders gain insights into the dynamics of teams in general, introducing to a broad public the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance Model and related tools — a system used throughout companies like Nike, Genentech, Becton Dickinson, Chevron and others. Visualization emerges as a power tool for thinking about processes that move across time. As I pointed out in Visual Meetings, 80% of the tools developed for Total Quality Management are tools for literally seeing workflows across functions.
The book will also bridge from the old paradigm of thinking of teams as face-to-face and co-located to one where distributed teams and networks are an integral part of the contemporary teaming. As teams become more and more virtual in today’s global organizations, visualization is even more necessary for providing another channel of communication across distance and culture. It is visual language that opens up the group mind to thinking about systems, relationships, interconnections, big picture contexts and consequences.
The book will conclude with a rich resource section linking to leading tools and methods in team development.
VISUAL TEAMS Table of Contents
I. What is a Visual Team?
1. Working Like Designers: Why Visual Teams Get Results
2. Why & When Should Teams Work Visually?
3. A Graphic User Interface for Teams: The Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance™ Model
II. Leading Visual Teams
4. So You’ve Just Been Promoted; Understanding Your Purpose as a Leader
5. Managing Four Flows of Activity: Attention, Energy, Information & Operations
6. Providing Visual Tools & Supporting Innovation
III. Visual Team Startup: Creating Trust, Focus & Commitment
7. Visualizing Your Purpose & Mission
8. Seeing Yourself as a Team & Building Trust
9. Clear Goals & Graphic Action Plans
10 Deciding to Commit: Consensus or Command?
IV. Sustaining Results—Innovating for High Performance
11. Graphics for Implementation & Project Management
12. High Performance Presentations: Getting Buy-in & Support
13. Sharing-Rallies & Team Based Learning
V. Growing a Visual Team Culture
14. Using Visualization Throughout Your Organization
15. An Operating System for Visual Organizations
16. Supporting Ongoing Learning and Development
VI. High Tech Tools for Visual Collaboration
17. Visual Tools Come of Age: High Performance at The Institute for the Future
18. Web & Teleconferencing On Distributed Teams
19. iPads, Smartphones, Video & Other Groupware Tools
20. Team Rooms & Studios—Physical Places or Virtual Spaces?
21. Teaming & Social Networks
VII. Links, Books and Other Resources
22. How You Can Develop Visual Team Proficiency
It’s Sunday. Tomorrow is Martin Luther King day and love & forgiveness are on my mind. Why this year, you might wonder? I, like many in my generation, was shaped by the life of our young, hopeful President John F. Kennedy, and by Rev. Martin Luther King, spokesperson for our cultural consciousness. When they were killed the web of trust and security bubbling over our post WWI cohort of young people exploded.
I drew these portraits of these men in the 1970s when I was working with Coro training young people for public affairs and they live on my studio wall over my books on leadership. Their hope sparked mine. The glittering name is a card from an early associate who believed in me as a carrier or this fire. I work to remember these messages from the edges of my consciousness. Today I’m the President of a successful consulting company, back on the board of Coro, and supporting many organizations that are reeling under the economic turmoil of our times. It’s my turn to serve.
In late February 15 chairs of these new advisory councils and 15 conveners will gather at the Fetzer Retreat Center in Kalamazoo and prepare for a two year process. They will meet four times with their councils, and have an additional three meetings with each other, prior to a global gathering in Assisi in September of 2012. I will be co-facilitating the kickoff meeting with Lonne Hartfield, an experienced expert in art & religion from Chicago. The designer of this kickoff experience, and my main partner to date, is Patricia Novick, an unusually creative, community oriented minister and organizer, also from Chicago. She saw me work back in the 1970s and has always remembered the quality of presence and listening that she felt in that event. She wanted that kind of approach to the Table of Chairs meeting in February and introduced me to the new president of Fetzer, Larry Sullivan, and his staff at Fetzer.
So I have been immersed in beginning to understand this Fetzer mission about love & forgiveness, and deeply engaged in imagining what living our these values actually will mean, for me, and for all the new people being invited to help with the Fetzer mission.
Like many words in English, “Love” and “forgiveness” are two words that carry a tremendous weight of multiple interpretations and associations. And like seeds, when carried as a question rather than an answer, begin resonating along a very wide spectrum of phenomena. This post is a beginning inquiry.
Two days ago I was having breakfast with my life partner of 43 years, Susan Herron, a published poet and inspiring poet teacher in the schools. She reads the New York Times in the morning, being an East coast girl school at Brown, UVA and Radcliffe. I read the SF Chronicle, having been a reporter for the Chicago Tribune and wanting to check the news against what I know from my local sources. Together we get the big picture.
Susan loves (and hates) David Brooks, the op ed columnist for the NY Times. He’s very articulate, and fresh in his opinions. On Friday, January 14, he wrote about Obama’s speech in Tucson reflecting on the shootings there of a congresswoman, judge, and others. Brooks titled his piece “Tree of Failure.” He was in inquiry about what has happened to civility, and will this speech make any difference in that regard, as well received as it has been.
“Every sensible person in public life…feels redeemed by others,” he wrote. “You may write a mediocre column or make a mediocre speech or propose a mediocre piece of legislation, but others argue with you, correct you and introduce elements you never thought of. Each of these efforts may also be flawed, but together, if the system is working well, they move things gradually forward….as a result, every sensible person feels a sense of gratitude for this process.”
Brooks could have been writing about my work as an organization consultant and process designer. He was writing about institutionalize public life. “So this is where cilivity comes from —“ he continues. “From a sense of personal modesty and from the ensuing gratitude for the political process.”
He goes on to explore how we have moved from a culture that reminds people of their limitations to one that encourages people to think highly of themselves, and forget their sense of sinfulness, giving rise to narcissism, like mindedness and true belief.
Quite by coincidence I picked up Edwin Hutchin’s book Cognition in the Wild (1995) yesterday, preparing in the back of my mind for writing a second book in a visual series for Wiley & Sons. Hutchin’s did the bulk of this research for a PhD. And then five years under a MacArthur Foundation grant. He was exploring the extent to which our knowledge is socially embedded, in contrast with the reigning idea that knowledge resides in peoples’ individual consciousness. He studied navigation teams on large ships to gain insight. I haven’t fully absorbed all his ideas, but they ring deeply true in my experience. He concludes that far more than we suspect is encoded in our social “dance” and not in individuated concepts.
I received a confirmation when I picked up the latest New Yorker Magazine and found another long article by David Brooks called “Social Animal: How the new sciences of human nature can help make sense of a life.” (Jan.17 New Yorker). Neither Susan or I knew Brooks was writing in this area, but it makes sense as a political analyst. Without citing Hutchin’s, he basically concurs with the idea that much more than we know if embedded in our socialization process and the cues and norms we accept in interacting with others.
What does love and forgiveness mean, then, in our collective lives?
Brooks helped me out citing a famous passage by Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the theologians I remember from my college years. “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime;” Niebuhr writes. “ therefore, we must be saved by hope…Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.”
I remember Adam Kahane last year talking at Global Business Network about his new book, Power & Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change.” He said his inspiration was a quote by Martin Luther King, who said that “"Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love."
I can’t help but wondering if forgiveness and power are linked, and that Brooks, Kahane, and King are pointing in the same direction. Perhaps what keeps us from the civility and love that we all innately wish to express is our denial of the abuses of power, against those of other colors and creeds, against those who stand in our way, against the tiny parts of life we simply step on without noticing. Perhaps forgiveness must begin with loving ourselves and accepting our power AND our limitations, and forgiving those who intentionally or unintentionally abuse us. Maybe the reason Fetzer has linked love and forgiveness is because they are only in the realm of words different things.
Tomorrow Patricia Novick is giving several speeches around Chicago about Martin Luther King. He was her mentor as a young staff member of the Northern offices of MLK. I was a reporter in Chicago at the same time writing stories about the efforts of community organizations fighting red lining in black neighborhoods. We didn’t know each other then, but are still touched by the example of one life burning bright with the spirit of love & forgiveness. Now it’s our turn to carry the flag of civility. It’s our turn to support love and forgiveness expanding as a social norm in our times.
"Oh my!" came Susan's cry from the front room. I could tell from her tone it was something wonderful. It was 7:00 on Saturday morning and one of the first full weekend's lay out in front of us. I was intending to sleep in. But her call pulled me to the living room on the west end of our flat, and there, stretched over the entire sky was a full rainbow. The sun was just rising, and cutting under the clouds, turned millions of droplets into prisms of light. My heart soared.
I'm not sure why my body responds this way to beauty. Perhaps my eyes trigger endorphins? Or could it be the cascade of associations with rainbows, or the story of God's covenant of hope after the flood. I ran for my camera, knowing this bow was ephemeral. And of course my "camera mind" was now looking at the all the wires! What a metaphor for our lives now, I thought. Wired we are, and looking through all this maze for rainbows.
"I wonder if we could see it from the garden?" Susan said. I ran to put on clothes to see. We live next to the Argonne Community Garden, and our peekaboo view of the bay turns into a panorama in the upper garden, which is elevated and open. The light rain coated my polypro pullover. I protected my camera. The rainbow was still there in the upper garden. I took more pictures, until the bow began to fade. I walked back, my spirit full of thanks for living in such a place. The garden felt rich and healthy, its 70 plots wrapping around the Argonne Child Development Center.
Back at our flats I shook off the rain. "It's still going, stronger than ever," Susan said. Sure enough. Okay. Time to go on the roof! I popped on my raincoat and spiraled up the back stairs and up the ladder to our roof. From there the city spread out in the morning sun, still streaming under the clouds. I could see the golden turrets of the Russian orthodox church way out Geary to the West. The green hills of the Marin Headlands peeked up North. To the East the spiries of Saint Ignatius topped the high ridge that separates the Richmond district from the East part of the city. The Outer Richmond sat brilliant in the direct sun under the clouds. My memory was flooded with the many times that I have risen in the morning to meditate up here in the dawn.
The rainbow persisted for a long time, arcing over our home, garden, city and sea in a quiet testimony to the radiance of light. "Spirit as light is the essence of life force," I thought. It's one of the principles of peace from Rainbow Hawk and WindEagle.
As I write this now sitting back in my front room, the windows now bright with morning, the rainbow gone, I'm filled with gratitude. Now, here, this morning, my heart leaps in joy! I can still see the gulls playing in the dawn— sun--blazing white against the gray, wrapped in light.
I'm fascinated with the role visualization plays in our view of organization and what is possible during change. I received an e-mail to update my VizThink data on VizThink.com and rediscovered a webinar I gave prior to a big VizThink conference held in San Francisco in 2008 that deals directly with this subject. It's an hour long dialogue with Tom Crawford that includes a very thorough exploration of how The Grove uses Storymapping for visioning and alignment, and what kinds of explorations I was making in Second Life at the time. Now with Visual Meetings being so well received, it seems more relevant than ever, and addresses interesting questions of methodology. So, if you are interested, here is the link. VizThink.com/Visualizing-change-webinar. The references to the conference and other programs are not current, of course.
I went to the Organizational Development Network annual conference in New Orleans this week and overlooked the fact I was on the very last page of my journal, a constant companion. This forced me onto the iPad for notetaking and I really had FUN! I used Sketchbook Pro app for the iPad, saving them to iTunes and then to a folder I could upload here. I of course attended only a few of the dozens of superb workshops and talks. If you are interested in either OD or iPad noteaking you might check these out. You can click on the images and they will pop up large scale on your screen. This one is choreographer Garth Fagan's keynote. Since I experience facilitation as a dance it was one of my favorite. The rest of these will be posted column width.
BILLY ALBAN & BARBARA BUNKER and their session on Sustaining Large Group Practice. It consisted of four case presentation that were loaded with good information.
DAVID ROCK on Neuroleadership. He was one of the keynotes and quite provocative. His books on the subject are Your Brain at Work and Quiet Leadership.
CAROLYN HENDRICKSON and SUMANT RAMACHANDRA presented on "Building Adative Organization" with a case study in culture change at Hospira. This session was loaded with practical, useable approaches. Sumant was the client and Carolyn was the consultant.
This session by ALEX & TANYA DUNNE was called "iPads & Organization." It wasn't about iPads at all, but about how design methods can be used to foster innovation and insight. It was very creative and interactive with good demonstrations of the designer ways of knowing.
DICK & EMILY AXELROD took their group into the topic "Engagement is the New Change Management" with experiences in small group conversation that made their point, framed with some of the tenants and practices from their new book on the subject.
I spent some time talking with Lim Leng, Managing Director of Pivotal, a strategic OD firm working in Singapore and Thailand. IN the process we were looking at the design of complex organizations and I mapped Galbraith's ideas from a book of that title onto the arc model of Process Theory. This is a puzzle you can try and make sense out of, appreciating that the approaches listed toward the top allow many degrees of freedom while the ones at the bottom are more constrained. The freedom of rules isn't regarding the process of the business, but the flexibility of having processes that actually have low uncertainty. These can swap out all kinds of workers easily.Galbraith's operating assumptions were that org design is driven by decision about how to communicate, and decisions about how much to communicate are driven by level of uncertainty.
I experimented with a new presentation platform called Prezi to give a talk recently at the Organization Development Network Annual Conference in New Orleans. The presentation was about how graphic facilitation is evolving at the intersection with new technology. I give illustrations of how visual meetings support imagining, engaging, thinking and enacting —the full cycle of action— and then provided examples of how combination with new tech is pushing the envelope even further. This image is the entire Prezi presentation.
When you click on The Future of Visual Meetings Prezi Show., it will connect you to the Prezi presentation I gave, stored on my account in the Prezi cloud. It will take a good 5-10 minutes to load all the images so be patient.
You won't hear my stories and some of the images won't mean much, but the experience will demonstrate at least what the visual component of the presentaiton looks like. Prezi uses zoom, pan, and pathing features to navigate across the big image, and will zoom into very smalll parts and blow them up, so in effect you are layering all your visual information in different sized chunks. It took me about 3 hours to get comfortable with the interface and learn to set up the show, but now I'm hooked. It's a really fresh approach -- and you can break out of the path you set up (that gets activated by clicks), and go directly into ANY part of the bigger picture with the zoom and pull-back functions.Prezi sells a desktop version of its software so you can design and store your presentation offline. From this initial experiment I'd say if you want to view on-line it would be better to have simpler graphics. The text blocks seems to load with no problem. They have great examples of other presentations on the site.
Recently I met Mei Lin Fung, producer of Future Talk, a monthly TV show produced in Silicon Valley. She works visually herself and when she hear about Visual Meetings she invited me to be on her show. We produced a half hour session on visual facilitation and its application to complex problems in government. It was a three camera, eight person, all volunteer crew—producing live and unedited from Palo Alto's Community Media center. It is now available permanently on FutureTalk.blip.tv. I talked about my work with visual meeting, showing some examples, and then demonstrated by taking notes on my IBM Thinkpad tablet when Mei Lin was talking. Enjoy!
Cheryl Esposito has been hosting an internet radio program called Leading Conversations, for several years, featuring thought leaders in the area of organization transformation and development. This Friday, September 24, at 10:00 PST I shared insights about the process of writing Visual Meetings, the impact of visual language on meetings and organizations, and what it means to work with a full range of visual styles--as mirrored in the Graphic Language Keyboard.
Click on this DAVID ON VOICE AMERICA link to hear the show. Cheryl is part of the SF Bay Area Thought Leader Gathering and shares my sense that when humans work with ALL their faculties -- spirit, soul, mind, and body - that wonderful things can happen.