ds_2017_journal_image_01_2017As 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.

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Life After Death—The Gift of Consciousness - David SibbetMy life mate of 46 years, Susan Herron Sibbet, passed away three years ago today. She died in my arms, with our children side by side. Our house had become a sanctuary.

Today, amazingly, she lives on in the form of two books that are being published. One, announced today by Sixteen Rivers Press, is called Great Blue and is a compilation of 52 poems from the whole span of Susan’s writing career, lovingly curated by her writing circle. Her friend Carolyn Miller’s painting is on the cover.

Synchronistically, today is also the day Susan’s “imagined memoir” about Henry James’ amanuensis, Theodora Bonsanquet, It’s called The Constant Listener and will be out in the fall.

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I am preparing to write a new book called Visual Consulting: Designing & Leading Change, potentially as a fourth in the Wiley visual leadership series. This one will be co-authored by The Grove’s VP of Global Learning, Gisela Wendling, Ph.D., an expert on personal and organizational transformation. It seems right that after so many changes in our own lives, that we focus now on our learning about change, and engage the exploding global network of visual practitioners about how to become skilled consultants with this orientation. Our leading of The Grove’s new Designing & Leading Change workshop the past two years is fueling this new project.

WileySeriesCovers - Preparing to Write—Visual Consulting

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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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