I’m writing to share about a wonderful collaboration with Alan Briskin and Amy Lenzo creating a new “gyrocompass” image for their on-line, six session series on Activating Collective Wisdom, launching this June. The Five Practices of Collective Wisdom is a distillation of work Alan Briskin has been doing over many years on the subject. How this image came to be is a wonderful story of emergent creativity.

Some Context

Gyrocompassv5The collaboration began in Germany last year at the Leading as Sacred Practice (LASP) Retreat held at the Beuerhof Farm in the Vulcan Eifel region of Germany East of Cologne. Alan presented about these five practices and led a rich inquiry into what is deep listening, as well as how to suspend certainty, welcome emergence, keep the whole system in mind and prepare for the extraordinary when working with groups. I graphically recorded the session. Read more…

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.

Read more…

trump_clinton_vote“This is what our democracy stands for, the smooth transition of power.” Obama’s words came in the deliberate, stately cadence that we’ve all heard so many times over the last eight years. “I’ve asked my team to do everything possible to ensure that the new President elect can hit the ground running” he said. “George Bush’s team did that for us when we took office.”

We are going to miss this intelligent, civilized man and his family. Riding waves of populist anger, the quintessential infotainment tongue surfer is our next President. And where will this take us all?

As a student and practitioner of change, I hold a few assumptions as I think about all this.

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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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