Aug 29, 2025

Aug 29, 2025h in Cognition & Communications, Inspiration, Mental Models, Personal Development, Personal Transformation, Philosophy, Social Change, Spirituality, Uncategorized by

This is a story reflecting on humility, elevation, and active imagination.

SeagullIt started in Eckernförde, Germany, a fishing port and resort town on the Baltic Sea almost in Denmark. Its name means “squirrel” the name of an old fort there, and low German for fjord. The week we were there was glorious. A sunny departure from the overcast, rainy July. Being a seaport there were many sea gulls, our guests on the long walks along the Baltic to the old downtown. As is my custom, I wanted a small symbol of this trip that I could keep in my studio. We found a small shop that had little seagulls sitting on piers. Perfect!

Immediately I had an answer. “It’s okay to be one of many,” the little gull said. “Soar anyway!”

As I heard the little gull in my mind, I remembered long ago reading Johnathan Living Seagull, a little fable about a seagull that dared to soar higher than the others, and experienced humiliation and rejection for a while, but persisted anyway. I had been touched by that story. I not only dream of flying but love to fly in my own imagination through worlds of ideas and understandings.

So, I named by new journal “SOAR ANYWAY.” And this command has been working away in my awareness. I trust that just holding a thought like this will pull out my deeper wisdom like a magnet collecting iron ore at the beach.

Here are some examples.

Amateur Facing Change

These days I am increasingly questioning how I spend my time, knowing that so many things I believe in and care about are under assault. I am sometimes feeling like a person watching a mudslide, feeling helpless. And then I read posts by people saying, “take a stand, resist, confront—we’re losing too much.”  My name is David, after all, and he defeated Goliath. In fact, one of my early inspirations was the editorial cartoonist Robert Bastian (who passed in 1970) and his image of a small guy with a sword looking up at a giant Goliath, over a caption that has Goliath saying “Amateur.” I’ve loved being an amateur, and turned it into an art form as a graphic facilitator who is not an expert, but a supporter of listening. Now as a write and coach I ask myself, what can I do that would like that stone?

But I have questions about this association. Is this thought just a branch off the tree of the American exceptionalism narrative, that we must compete, excel, dominate and be the best? Is just being me and doing as much as I can with my remaining time be enough? Am I really okay with being one among many?

And what does “Soar Anyway” mean? I do believe that I have a higher self, an inner beingness that was there in the beginning. I believe it is connected to other life and to the light. I’ve had experiences of personal incandescence when my sense of purpose was bright, and I felt at one with others and nature. I can feel soaring my body, then. I feel it a bit just writing this.

Walking with Jesus

Another reflection came. Just this morning, I was walking our little dog down to get the newspaper, a real paper-printed newspaper. (I think it’s an homage to by training as a journalist back when Chicago had four dailies.) I was wearing the Birkenstock sandals Gisela gave me last year. I wrote about these several posts ago in a piece called “Walking with Jesus.” A feeling of being with my Christ energy has sustained itself when I walk with these sandals. I can’t go fast. I have to feel my steps. I imagine Jesus just being himself, confident of the Kingdom of God, walking lovingly and humanly through a country dominated by the Roman Empire. Is that what it might mean to “Be okay with being one among many?”

You might think that Jesus felt elevated or better than others. But the scriptures don’t paint that picture for me. They share about a man who experienced doubt, and rage at injustice, and compassion for the lowliest. He was just one, but open to the divine.

Humility at the GLEN Café

Let me share a final reflection, actually a continuation, because my inquiry is going to continue, I suspect. This morning at the GLEN Café (This is the Grove’s Global Learning & Exchange Network), the revolving host, Bud Wilson, suggested that we use as a check-in the prompt “humility.” He asked everyone to stand and reflect on how humility shows up in our bodies and then share what we experience. A fascinating dialogue ensued, where we explored the connection between humility and awe, humiliation and cruelty, shame and the inner feeling of “not enough.” I keep thinking about my seagull and even shared the story with everyone. We ended reflecting on how many are being shamed these days, for being the wrong color, the wrong sexual orientation, for not having money, for not being “exceptional.” And we had all touched in on our own experiences of being humble, being humiliated, feeling shame.

I conclude this reflection knowing deeply that I am indeed only one among many, and that I am going to soar anyway, into words and active imagination, into coaching and supporting other creatives, and the hope that a new narrative of hope and inclusiveness will emerge from these times.

 

 

Nov 09, 2024

Nov 09, 2024h in Cognition & Communications, Community Building, Global Learning, Leading Change, Personal Development, Personal Transformation, Sustainability, Systems Theory by

innerprocessHow does one sense seismic change at a systemic level? There’s not much debate that one happened with the landslide election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. But it is not clear, really, what this will mean.

I entertain the idea that each of us is interconnected with the whole at a bio synergetic level, in that we, as humans, can sense energy fields and probably fields of consciousness. At some level I think all living entities can feel each other. But it is not easy to be conscious of these connections. However, these assumptions lead me to honor looking at my own reactions (spirit, heart, mind and body) for some sensing of the whole.

Relief

I’m surprised at how calm I feel with political messaging disappearing and the uncertainty of who will win settled. I was anticipating sustained political unrest whoever won, but this isn’t happening, right now. I don’t live on social media so I may not be aware of what is happening on the dark net. But I’m very relieved there is not blood in the streets. My nervous system seems to be quieting.

Rising Compassion

In my heart I keep thinking about young men and their bleak prospects, at least for the unentitled, the incel, the trans, the ones that want to work withscreenshot-2024-11-09-at-2-24-44%e2%80%afpm their hands. We’ve underfunded vocational programs, kept social foot on the gas of “higher education” as the respected goal, and cranked up the social algorithms that are, in the name of “free speech” mainlining ever crazier material to young people on their phones and computers. My own extended family reflects some of this challenge. But rather than judgment I find myself feeling compassion. It’s clear that people at the economic bottom of the most extreme wealth differential since the 1920s are struggling and fed up. High butter, egg, and milk prices matter when you live on the edge.

Anger

I can barely watch, as a former journalist in the four-newspaper city of Chicago, what is now passing as journalism. It seems like a swirl of opinion and pundits on all channels. Benjamin Franklin created newspapers because he knew the colonies needed a sense of identity. Now local news sources are shrinking as rapidly as the ice flows in Greenland. And we are left with a national media clearly complicit in the attention economy’s appreciation that more catastrophic, violent and bizarre their reports the more people will watch. Disasters like the recent hurricane and floods don’t happen once—they loop the most jarring pictures days after day. I know from 2016 that CNN, who brought Donald Trump and the Apprentice to audiences, covered Trump 30% more than the other networks, purposely provoking and criticizing in what now seems like a political version of prime-time wrestling. Their bottom line turned black as a result. Everywhere I look people seem to be making money off the blame game and the escalating back-and-forth charges.

Fear

I’m a system’s thinker, after 45 years of organization consulting and visualizing the widest range of meeting and planning processes you can imagine. There are some things about systems that are well understood.

  1. They don’t change through tinkering and single solutions.
  2. There are always unintended consequences.
  3. The system called the “Ecosystem” is undergoing massive destabilization due to global warming that will destabilize many of its subsystems.
  4. Growing trusted systems is much hard than disrupting them.
  5. A tightly interconnected system is easier to destabilize than a more loosely coupled one (this is why nature is more resilient than large corporations).
  6. Systems do not present themselves so you can see, touch, and feel them like an object. Understanding one requires pulling together many perspectives and representations and long study. This is why research takes so long.
  7. Feedback loops help regulate systems, but if the feedback is not received and decisions adjusted, feedback’s stabilizing influence can result in overshoot and collapse.

This causal loop diagram of climate change, food insecurity, and social collapse provides a dramatic, graphic reflection of how difficult it is to understand (and stabilize) systems. (It is from SpringerNature).

systemcollapse-copyI’m getting more fearful as I type this list, presented as a tightening in my chest.  The chances of severe dysfunction couldn’t be higher, even if Trump were not in office.

Politics is Perception

I learned this through eight years of running Coro’s Fellowships in Public Affairs in the SF Bay Area. I lived through the time when TV became a factor during the rise of Diane Feinstein and meetings transformed from discourse to sound bite generators. People can’t really understand the systemic implications of decisions and policies right away, so spin substitutes for fact and analysis. We are in a time of myth making amplified by technologies we’ve never experienced operating at such a massive, manipulative level. And AI is just getting started in this game. Just as finance has been taken over by the financial computer jockey’s in the financial hubs, perception will be owned by the ones with the most ubiquitous and advance technologies. No wonder Elon Musk and the tech billionaires want to be in on politics. Their systems ARE the politics now.

Community

I believe that with system destabilization real, geographic communities will become more important again. We’ve need to know food and water sources more directly. We’ll need to know who can do what. We’ll need each other for support. This may be true of organizations that think they can sustain themselves virtually without real relationships as the continuity and “glue.” In the last week I’ve thought more about my own town of Petaluma than ever before.

Realizing Visionary Futures

I’m emerging from the election time even more committed to The Groves purpose of helping people and organizations realize their visions. The skills of collaboration, facilitation, and leading social change could not be more important.

Inner Stability

A concluding thought: If I can’t find coherence in my outer world very easily, I believe I can work on staying grounded in my inner world and my relational world. I can choose to be inspired by the example of Buddha, Christ, and people like Thich Nhat Hanh, who remained lovingly oriented all through the Vietnam War. I can choose to see my urge to blame and “other” people as my own experiences in not being accepted playing out in my projections. I believe that most people respond to love and respect, and that my ability to be that way starts with loving and respecting my own self, and the flow of my own soul’s journey.

I also believe that I can call on the land and nature itself to support me, even as my body slowly declines with age. I grew up in the mountains, and they remain magnificent, despite everything!

It has felt good writing all this. We are in this together As we say in our circles, I have spoken.

blue-marble-earth

 

Apr 07, 2024

Apr 07, 2024h in Cognition & Communications, Graphic Facilitation, Inspiration, Mental Models, Personal Development, Personal Transformation, Uncategorized by

 

Sometimes guidance just appears. No warning. It happened to me at the end of a three-day Leadership Transformation Workshop in Minnesota, in the last five minutes on a Friday to be precise. I got up to go to the table in back where I had my journal and almost fell over. My left leg felt like it had gone completely asleep. I was helped back, sat, and realized it wasn’t asleep. It just wasn’t connected any more. I had had a stroke!

Stroke2024Thirty minutes later after a drive to a nearby emergency room I was in a CAT scan and found that I had a half inch long hemorrhagic bleed (stroke) on the surface of my right, central cortex, near my left side motor controls. I could feel the skin on my leg. I could move it with my big muscles, but I was not in control of it. Needless to say, I was on my back at 30 degrees angle the next two days, awakened every hour for a complete check on my cognition, eye movements, hands, leg lifts—all through the night.

I’m happy to say that this was a “small” stroke. I was released Sunday at noon and flew back to San Francisco, with referrals from the neurologists there and complete records. A second CAT Scan and an MRI did not detect anything else. No cancer. No clots. No aneurisms. No progression. And they saw I could make it around with a walker already, which they provided from my trip home.

They didn’t measure my psyche, of course. That is outside the purview of most modern medicine. Although staff at Health East’s University Hospital ICU, where I was sent, by ambulance, after the initial scan in ER, was uniformly comforting and caring, they were not “measuring” the larger impact. The therapist was more focused on the exercises I should do repeatedly. They did keep asking me my name, date of birth, and if I remembered why I was in the hospital.

I’ve lived my life gifted with immense curiosity and this experience has me fascinated. If I were massively crippled, I’d probably feel differently, but I just came in from a slow walk around my neighborhood two weeks later and am feeling pretty good. But my mind is whirling. What does it mean to have a stroke?

  1. I now know that merely saying this word shakes people up. It covers so much and is so common, that everyone has some connection. It is a big deal. Our staff at The Grove and my kids think it is a big deal. So does Gisela, my partner and wife. No flying or driving until I get cleared by the neurologist I meet with tomorrow. Everyone at the University Hospital said that this isn’t a repeating kind of thing, especially with a person with normal blood pressure and no hypertension.
  2. I also know that my body knows how to heal. My brother, John, who has practiced reflexology, muscle testing, and applied kinesiology for as long as I’ve been facilitating, came over and completely checked me out. He was amazed at my progress, aided by a lot by moving around like a Tai Chi practitioner. I figured my right leg knows how to move. Teach the left. Rock back and forth. John agreed and encouraged my movements. I also kept imagining I was in Avatar hooking up to one of the flying dragons. My leg’s nerve endings reaching up. My brain coming down. Both eventually reconnecting.
  3. I have discovered that there are many many tinier muscles that bring stability to a leg, and it isn’t so clear how to reconnect them. Why does my left leg seem to snap back instead of just bending back? I feel like I’m on some kind of plateau in recovery. The leg feels weaker, although I didn’t hurt it in any way. Maybe the neurologist at Kaiser, who I see for the first tomorrow, will have some ideas.
  4. I know that situations like this have cascading effects, and this is no exception. In my case my ability to hear high frequencies has been declining and is now gone. My hearing aids compensate, but not enough to hear the soft, mumbled words of a person with a high-pitched voice. In an echoey room or sketchy zoom connection I miss key words. This isn’t acceptable if your job is to record what people say visually (and accurately). The room in Minnesota was a real struggle in that regard. I’ve been concerned for a while, but it took the stroke for me to say “enough.” Gisela agreed it was truly time for me to stop facilitating meetings and that she and The Grove team could take over the remaining work on our books. Fortunately, since she has become CEO of The Grove the team is growing again and are managing beautifully. Our clients have been wonderfully accepting.
  5. So, I not only had a real physical stroke, small though it may be, I have retired from a kind of work that I’ve done for 52 years, if you count my doing the first Group Graphics workshop at Coro in 1972. That is like having a professional stroke. And I am now experiencing truly liminal space. The “recovery pattern” is not clear. All kinds of things are possible. For the first time in years and years I don’t have to carry the responsibility for payroll. I don’t have to schedule my life around big meetings. But my psyche is busy trying to re-establish itself just like my leg. “You could start a You Tube channel.” “You could write a new book (it’s already mostly written).” “You could work on that novel you discovered you wrote in 2006 (and wasn’t bad).” You could conduct Vision Labs at your own home.” “What about executive coaching?”
  6. The biggest insight is that I need to take some time to experience myself in a completely new way. I’m suspecting that much of my adult life I’ve been guided by programming that is very deep and has a lot to do with how that little baby back in Two Rock initially encountered the world, and what I thought would work to keep my parents in touch with me, and what was okay and not okay regarding being myself. Ooops. You mean I learned to repress things to please my parents? But what things? And was getting attention for being an amazing artist and craftsperson what I really wanted, or a substitute for something else, like nurturing love? It’s helped that during this recovery time I’ve had time to continue reading Gabor Mates’ The Myth of the Normal. (If you want to understand the stress of our times it is a must read.)

I’m posting this piece in my blog because I think those of you who really care about awareness and facilitation and helping people get through life would appreciate knowing what a colleague like me is going through at a true turning point. I suspect I will look back on this event and this time as a gift, even if it just appeared out of the blue.

Nov 22, 2023

Nov 22, 2023h in Cognition & Communications, Collaboration Strategies, Contribution to the Field, Graphic Facilitation, Inspiration, Leadership, Mentorship, Personal Development, Personal Transformation, Strategic Planning by

 

giselasqureThis September Gisela Wendling became CEO of The Grove Consultants International, the comp20-dsatdellafattoriasmallany that I began in 1977 as Sibbet & Associates, and led through its incorporation as Graphic Guides, Inc. in 1988 and then the name change to The Grove in 1993. I want to share some reflections about our succession process, which is guiding me into the wonderful territory of life change.

Some Context

The Grove Consultants International, as many of you know, was early in the business of visual facilitation. We called the method Group Graphics® and found that strategy consultants who wanted to differentiate loved the process and propelled our work at Apple, General Mills, Federal Industries in Canada, General Electric, and Bongrain. Because no other consultants were working this way, we could use our methods as a calling card. People remembered us whenever we facilitated meetings.

We added a teaming practice in the 1980’s after Alan Drexler and I co-developed the Drexler-Sibbet Team Performance ModelTM and its related survey. This has grown into its own business, with many tools, workshops, and licensees.

In the 1990’s The Grove grew rapidly with large, multi-year engagements with National Semiconductor, Hewlett Packard, and Mars, Inc. We developed large-scale Storymapping, and in the mid-nineties, Ed Claassen as our COO collaborated with me and the team to develop the Grove’s Strategic Visioning (SV) process and Graphic Guides.® These are the large graphic wall templates which are now ubiquitous. Again, we were one of the first to popularize this way of working. We conducted SV processes all over Silicon Valley as the Internet gained speed. We moved to our Presidio offices in 1998.

Visualization, teaming, and strategy guided us during the rocky 2000’s. The .com crash, 9/11, and then the great recession in 2009 impacted our company and the scale of projects clients would consider. But all three of our service areas continued to deliver results. After 2009 we moved to re-emphasize our origins as the Visual Meetings Company.

But life intervened. In 2013 my wife Susan died of cancer, after 46 years of marriage. Laurie Durnell and Bobby Pardini took over co-leadership of the company as I dealt with this enormous change. I was supported by my close friend Rob Eskridge, my counsellor Chayim Barton, and a dear colleague Gisela Wendling. Gisela’s life-long interest in change and Rites of Passages allowed her to help me hold Susan’s passing as a potential transformation. And it was. To our surprise, we fell in love and were married in 2016.

In 2014 Gisela joined The Grove as VP for Global Learning and senior consultant and we co-developed our Designing and Leading Change program to bring forward her work and take the Grove’s work to a new level. We also began the non-profit Global Learning & Development Network, or GLEN. While we could not have anticipated the pandemic, our focus on change and working virtually allowed us to pivot quickly to on-line workshops and direct help for our struggling client leaders. We could also see their organizations coping with the increasing impacts of climate change, economic ambiguity, climate migration, wealth gaps, political polarization, and many other challenges. Change was in the air.

Succession

Having Gisela at The Grove transformed our work and renewed my interest in consulting. She led a master’s program in organization development at Sonoma State after receiving her doctoral in human and organization systems and development. We co-authored Visual Consulting: Designing & Leading Change with Wiley after a successful Visioning and Change Alignment process at UC Merced. The integration of dialogue, visual practice, change management and use of self, began to define a new approach.

This fall Gisela decided after a week-long silent retreat in Holland and a short vacation in Belgium, to step up to the role of CEO and lead The Grove into a new era. Her passion is to help leaders and their teams “Realize Visionary Futures.” Her becoming CEO is coincident with the publishing of her new book, The Liminal Pathways Study. We collaborated on the design and illustrations, but the creative vision was hers and I followed!

Living the Liminal Pathway

Gisela’s Liminal Pathways Change Framework (LPF) re-envisions the archetypal three-phased process of Rites of Passage as identified by the French anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep. Phase one is Separating. Phase two is the Liminal or “In-Between” phase. Phase three is Integration. Gisela’s framework highlights the inner and outer dynamics at play in each phase and the sequence of turning points that occur over the arc of a complete process. It is this process that is now unfolding for me.

I have let go of the formal position I held. I must also let go of large meeting graphic facilitation, involving our growing network of associates who are good at this. A year and a half ago, we let go of the Presidio offices, which we hadn’t used for three years during the pandemic to move into the warehouse where Grove Tools, Inc. run by Thom Sibbet as President, had a spacious upstairs office.

Entering Liminal Space

I am now deep in liminal space. I want my next moves to come from my deeper self. Already new rivers of interest are arising and flowing together but I am resisting being rushed. I asked for a vision this summer on my vision quest on Mt. Shasta and the takeaway was “constancy.” This is a different calling.

It is clear that I will be focused this next year in support as The Grove team responds to a new leader. Gisela is deeply appreciative of our historic ways of working and is visually very astute. The change work is proving to be an integrating approach. But the complexity of the post-Covid hybrid world is considerable and finding the best responses is challenging. Leaders of change need support as do their teams. I believe with Gisela’s leadership we can provide it.

At the same time, I’m fascinated with the way this liminal time is affecting me. I find myself feeling vulnerable, the way I did early in my career. I am also feeling full of all the capabilities that have developed over the 52 years of work all around the globe. In my field I would be considered an “expert” at process design and visual facilitation. But more and more I feel that my ability to connect broadly across many disciplines, organizations, and cultures may be more important than knowing how to use visualization. I’m asking myself, “What is the role of an elder?”

Working with The Light

Years ago, a workshop by Michael Meade provided a seed of insight that has been growing in my liminal space. Being an elder, he said, is the process of making a shrine to the spirit as the body falls away. And it is the blooming of my spirit that has my attention these days.

Another teacher, Dr. Niek Brouw, a Dutch somatic practitioner I and colleagues worked with in the late 1990s, defined spirit as our ability to handle light. It is reflected in our spine, the neurofibril optic trunk line that holds our bodies in coherence and connection. The idea of working with light itself has my attention. It is the work that our teacher Thomas Hübl invites.

This month Netflix brought out a short mini-series on Anthony Doerr’s amazing book, The Light We Cannot See, a story about Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a blind French girl at the end of the war who intersects with a young German soldier in the French town of Saint-Malo as American troops freed France from the Nazis. The light within is as vast as the light in the world, he writes, and this young woman, is connected this way. It guides her in incredible acts of bravery broadcasting coded coordinates through readings of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea that were instrumental in final days of the war.

I find myself moved by this story, and the need for using my inner light to guide me in this next phase, and for The Grove’s inner light to grow stronger as we move to support leaders who are daring to bring about visionary changes. I have a growing feeling that the confusion and incoherence of our times cannot be met just with logic and neatly arranged symbols on paper but needs the connection of people who share a vision of a world where people respect each other across differences and, and in Gisela’s words, are “empowered to be free and have choices.”

As I wait for my new direction to emerge, I stand by to respond to those who are responding to our broadcasts, who believe that authoritarianism and overcontrol is not a solution. I am recasting my understandings of graphic facilitation as a chance to embody differences and hold space for movement, evolution of the practice, and emergent insight. I’m wondering if returning to the origins of this work and teaching our new understandings might again transform the field.

My mentor Michael Doyle, co-founder of Interaction Associates and one of those bringing facilitation to organizational work in the 1970s, said as I began The Grove. “You can compete and defend, or you can share and lead.” I’ve followed his advice and carry it with me to this next phase. Stay tuned.