For the past six months two seemingly different circumstances have been “working” me. The first is a commitment that Gisela Wendling, Holger Scholtz and I made last summer to organize a special retreat at his family farm, the Beuerhof (in the Vulcan Eifel region of Germany East of Cologne). We are calling it Leading as Sacred Practice. You can infer from the name that this is moving into new territory.

The second circumstance is moving from San Francisco after 40 years!
The Sacred Life of Boxes

 

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Crucible - Crucibles of Change: Learning to Love TransformationCrucibles are on my mind. A crucible, as you may know, is a container that can stand a lot of heat and is used in chemistry and metallurgy to combine elements into new forms. As a student of metaphor, I love applying the image to change. It points so aptly to the fact that humans need containers and heat to melt down and transform old habits and thinking so something new can emerge.

Those who know me can infer why crucibles might be on my mind. I’ve been in one, and am just finding out about the new me that is emerging. Might these circumstances qualify as being personal crucibles?

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I’m just back from Amsterdam doing some workshops with our Grove partners, Business Models, Inc. Gisela Wendling, The Grove’s Director of Global Learning, and I conducted a public workshop on Visualizing Change for 25 consultants and an internal workshop on Mental Models & Mindsets for BMI as the kickoff to their International Week. I want to share this experience of teaching systems thinking through drawing practice, which echoed my first meeting with Patrick Van Der Pijl, BMI’s founder, at a VizThink conference in Berlin 3-4 years ago.
MentalModelsChart - Business Models & Mental Models

 

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'75EarlySibbetPhoto - What's the Future of the Visual Facilitation Field?Recently I was interviewed by a bright, young reporter from Communication Arts about The Grove’s work in visual facilitation. “I’m talking to a lot of different people and really wanted to talk with you, an acknowledged leader in this field,” she said. “I want to get to some of the underlying theory and structure of what is happening.”

This opening triggered an immediate cascade of memories back to the 1970s when Interaction Associates, Geoff Ball, Fred Lakin, and I were on fire about Group Graphics, the future of technology, facilitation, and organizations. After all, we were in the curl of the massive wave of rethinking that all of my generation was doing about established institutions. Why not take on knowledge work and how we know what we know?

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