Check out The Grove blog for a post about the tuned up Virtual Learning Center we’ve created in Second Life. Here’s a picture to whet your appetite. It has galleries that cover the full body of The Grove’s work, all accessible by teleport maps from the pier that you land on when you click this SLURL.
Since late 2004 The Grove has been supporting an ambitious RE-AMP project in the upper Midwest to clean up the energy system there. Its goal is to reduce global warming pollutants 80% by 2030 from a 1990 benchmark. When we started there were six foundations and 27 NGOs who wanted to approach the problem with systems thinking and collaboration, funded by the Garfield Foundation. Now in 2008 the project has 15 foundations and over 93 members organizations, expanded beyond environmental groups to faith and youth groups, and 140 were going to Ames, Iowa for the annual meeting.
In talking over the design, Rick Reed, one of the initiators of the project at Garfield, posed the challenge. “We’ve got to see what we are doing and where the gaps are. How can we possibly do this at this scale?”
RE-AMP is without question the most organized effort in the country at the moment. But are we making progress? It’s challenges like this that always push us to something new… and this time our solution was a breakthrough in visualization at the system-thinking level.
I was in Copenhagen last week after VizThink, training our partner Strandgaard & Co in graphic facilitation. I was struck by how universal a language graphics has become. The fact that I don’t speak Danish meant that I was thrown back on these visual cues to make sense of what I was experiencing.
My sense of this began as we flew in over Copenhagen and I saw the long line of wind machines in the harbor. How quickly these have become icons of change!
I was able to spend a weekend exploring the old city. Here again, the ubiquitous bicycles spoke of a different culture in relation to energy. “Do people ride these in the winter?” I asked Vagn Strandgaard. “All year,” he said.
“I didn’t realize that we would be doing so much personal development,” one participant said in our closing circle at the Facilitation Mastery Workshop, held recently at Islandwood Conference Center on Bainbridge Island in Washington. “The way you and Laurie showed up made it possible,” someone said. “This was transformational for me,” another said.
I’m still deeply moved by the experience, and so is the group. We are all communicating still through a Base Camp website that Grove Senior Associate Tom Benthin (who attended the workshop) set up for everyone. Poems and reflections are flying!
This was the sixth time that I’ve opened to spending a week with a group of people who have attended other Grove workshops but want to work more deeply. It’s come to be a benchmark for me and my own development. In fact, that is a good part of why we conduct the workshop. I do it with Laurie Durnell, the head of The Grove’s consulting group, and our own dance of preparation, delivery, and learning afterward is part of our development.
