My New Website Is Up, and We’re Getting Ready for The GLEN

As the new year begins, I am pleased to introduce my newly revamped website at davidsibbet.com. It’s the same URL as before, with lots of new content from my work seeding the field of visual facilitation. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Fusing Visual and Dialogic Practice

Looking ahead in 2017: for years The Grove had as its tag line “transforming the art and practice of collaboration worldwide.” Our work has helped countless organizations and has generated a whole field of visual practice. Now the ‘valley of concerns’ has deepened, and we need to reach further. People who actually know how to collaborate will be needed more than ever.

This is why The Grove will be launching our new membership support network, the Global Learning & Exchange Network (the GLEN) in the next few months. The GLEN will focus on change practitioners—internal and external leaders and process consultants—who feel called to step up to the problems of our time with collaborative approaches. Not all participants will be visual practitioners. Some are steeped in dialogic practice. We believe that empowering people to work expertly with both modalities will advance the field.

What Is a GLEN?

The word ‘glen’ is a Scottish word for a valley, typically one that is long, deep and often glacially U-shaped, with a watercourse running through it. Our GLEN is intended to be just that—a watershed.

Alan Briskin, one of the GLEN Allies, and I explored this watershed metaphor last September in Germany at the Leading As Sacred Practice retreat to illustrate the tributaries and streams flowing into Alan’s vision of collective wisdom. Alan has been inspired by philosopher Jacob Needleman’s seeing “groups as the art form of the future” and saw the tributaries of his own thinking flowing into this larger, ocean-sized vision. Alan co-authored The Power of Collective Wisdom: and The Trap of Collective Folly; he’s been working in this direction for a while. Now his thoughts are part of what is flowing into The Grove’s GLEN.

Navigating Times of Change

I don’t need to characterize just how radically my own country, the United States, has been impacted by growing division and discontent. Other countries are in similar times of turbulence. It’s time for new generative images of cooperation and fulfillment that can transcend growth and acquisition as the only ideals we hold dear. It’s time to turn our tributaries of insight into rivers, and our rivers into a new ocean of knowledge on how to lead and collaborate in times of change.