DavidSibbet.com

Knowledge Navigation: Apple's Preview of the Future

I’m all stirred up from reading Walter Isaacson’s richly reported biography of Steve Jobs— half in the large, 650-page book and half in my iPod, downloaded to the Kindle app.  (I’m VERY curious about the rise of e-books and learn by doing).

Steve Jobs is the first biography of this caliber where I have some ground truth. I’ve lived the Apple revolution. I consulted to the company all during the Scully years. I count Alan Kay, the original conceiver of the “Dynabook” when he was at Xerox as a friend and colleague. I worked closely with Gil Amelio at National Semiconductor. I think I’ve owned, used, and depended on just about every product they’ve made since the Mac SE. In fact I created my own book, Visual Meetings, on the Mac and opened with a chapter about how we used visualization to guide the Leadership Expedition we conducted for all of Apple’s top management during the 1980s. Apple’s example has shaped our visual practice at The Grove. The idea of doing for group process what Apple did for computing—i.e. provide a graphical user interface—has been a guiding vision. So I’ve had a VERY interesting time following this story.

I no sooner finished than I came across a link to an article in Forbes magazine called "For a Preview of the iPad3-Watch this 23 Year-oldApple Video" about a classic video created at Apple during the 1980’s by John Scully and his higher education marketing team called “The Knowledge Navigator.” It was created for a presentation he gave at EduCom about Apple’s product vision in 1987, a couple of years after Steve was fired and left to start NeXT. Here’s a screen grab of the beginning. 

Visual Teams Has Arrived—What's New About It?

My second Wiley book, Visual Teams: Graphic Tools for Commitment, Innovation, & High Performance, arrived in a box at the precise moment we finished a review of our Team Performance System at The Grove’s Quarterly meeting! Needless to say I and our team was pretty exited. Everyone wanted to know what was new in this book that they could talk about. 

 Here is my answer.

 1. New Success Stories: It tells the stories of many high performance teams that used visualization extensively to achieve results. These stories from HP, Otis Spunkmeyer, RE-AMP, Agilent Technologies, the DLR Group, and Gary Hamel’s MLab demonstrate how visual meeting methods can be used over the whole arc of team’s life.

Advice to Beginning Graphic Facilitators

I received a note from an experienced architect looking to get into the field of graphic facilitation, inspired a bit by another practitioner and my book Visual Meetings. I took some time to respond to his questions and thought I might share them more generally here.

Dear Robert,

Thanks for your note. I was planning on being an architect myself back in my 20s, even enrolled in school, but another job opened up and I went in another direction, the but the architectural field is really the source of our approach at The Grove—in that designers have always worked visually and interactively. Let me try and answer your questions.

RE TRAINING: Our Principle of Graphic Facilitation workshop is for people who want to be professionals, and is filling up rapidly these days. We have another one day workshop on Visual Meetings on September 27 that is more of an overview. It still has room. It’s designed for a bigger group and focused on builidng awareness of all the possibilities.

"Visual Teams" Writing in Progress

Wiley & Sons has contracted for a second book in the Visual series that began with Visual Meetings: How Graphics, Sticky Notes & Idea Mapping Can Transform Group Productivity. It is due to be published in the fall of 2011 and is titled Visual Teams: Graphic Tools for Commitment, Innovation & High Performance. The cover and table of contents are shown here for those of you who are helping with stories, references, and other support. It's due out in the Fall. Any comments or feedback at this point would be welcome.

"Visual Meetings: A Revolution in Group Productivity" Lunch & Learn Webinar Available Here

Pierre Kwand of People On-The-Go, a company that provides webinars for breaking business topics, interviewed me recently for one of his Lunch and Learn Programs. The presentation used Prezi to review the key concepts in Visual Meetings: How Graphic, Sticky Notes & Idea Mapping Can Transform Productivity. I'm happy to report that the book is still selling at the top of its categories on Amazon--so well, in fact, that Wiley & Company are signing me up for a sequel called Visual Teams: Designing for Commitment, Innovations and High Performance (due out in the fall). If you would like to listen to the Lunch and Learn talk just click here. The talk is in three segments.

 

Love & Forgiveness

It’s Sunday. Tomorrow is Martin Luther King day and love & forgiveness are on my mind. Why this year, you might wonder? I, like many in my generation, was shaped by the life of our young, hopeful President John F. Kennedy, and by Rev. Martin Luther King, spokesperson for our cultural consciousness. When they were killed the web of trust and security bubbling over our post WWI cohort of young people exploded.

I drew these portraits of these men in the 1970s when I was working with Coro training young people for public affairs and they live on my studio wall over my books on leadership. Their hope sparked mine. The glittering name is a card from an early associate who believed in me as a carrier or this fire. I work to remember these messages from the edges of my consciousness. Today I’m the President of a successful consulting company, back on the board of Coro, and supporting many organizations that are reeling under the economic turmoil of our times. It’s my turn to serve.

Thanksgiving

"Oh my!" came Susan's cry from the front room. I could tell from her tone it was something wonderful. It was 7:00 on Saturday morning and one of the first full weekend's lay out in front of us. I was intending to sleep in. But her call pulled me to the living room on the west end of our flat, and there, stretched over the entire sky was a full rainbow. The sun was just rising, and cutting under the clouds, turned millions of droplets into prisms of light. My heart soared.

I'm not sure why my body responds this way to beauty. Perhaps my eyes trigger endorphins? Or could it be the cascade of associations with rainbows, or the story of God's covenant of hope after the flood. I ran for my camera, knowing this bow was ephemeral. And of course my "camera mind" was now looking at the all the wires! What a metaphor for our lives now, I thought. Wired we are, and looking through all this maze for rainbows.

Visualizing Change Webinar

I'm fascinated with the role visualization plays in our view of organization and what is possible during change. I received an e-mail to update my VizThink data on VizThink.com and rediscovered a webinar I gave prior to a big VizThink conference held in San Francisco in 2008 that deals directly with this subject. It's an hour long dialogue with Tom Crawford that includes a very thorough exploration of how The Grove uses Storymapping for visioning and alignment, and what kinds of explorations I was making in Second Life at the time. Now with Visual Meetings being so well received, it seems more relevant than ever, and addresses interesting questions of methodology. So, if you are interested, here is the link.  VizThink.com/Visualizing-change-webinar. The references to the conference and other programs are not current, of course.

OD Network Notes—Taken on the iPad

I went to the Organizational Development Network annual conference in New Orleans this week and overlooked the fact I was on the very last page of my journal, a constant companion. This forced me onto the iPad for notetaking and I really had FUN! I used Sketchbook Pro app for the iPad, saving them to iTunes and then to a folder I could upload here. I of course attended only a few of the dozens of superb workshops and talks. If you are interested in either OD or iPad noteaking you might check these out. You can click on the images and they will pop up large scale on your screen. This one is choreographer Garth Fagan's keynote. Since I experience facilitation as a dance it was one of my favorite. The rest of these will be posted column width.

Visual Meetings Presentations at the 2010 OD Network Conference in New Orleans

I experimented with a new presentation platform called Prezi to give a talk recently at the Organization Development Network Annual Conference in New Orleans. The presentation was about how graphic facilitation is evolving at the intersection with new technology. I give illustrations of how visual meetings support imagining, engaging, thinking and enacting —the full cycle of action— and then provided examples of how combination with new tech is pushing the envelope even further. This image is the entire Prezi presentation.

When you click on The Future of Visual Meetings Prezi Show., it will connect you to the Prezi presentation I gave, stored on my account in the Prezi cloud. It will take a good 5-10 minutes to load all the images so be patient. 

Future Talk TV Show Features David Sibbet & Mei Lin Fung Talking about Visual Facilitation Applied to Complex Social Problems

Recently I met Mei Lin Fung, producer of Future Talk, a monthly TV show produced in Silicon Valley. She works visually herself and when she hear about Visual Meetings she invited me to be on her show. We produced a half hour session on visual facilitation and its application to complex problems in government. It was a three camera, eight person, all volunteer crew—producing live and unedited from Palo Alto's Community Media center. It is now available permanently on FutureTalk.blip.tv. I talked about my work with visual meeting, showing some examples, and then demonstrated by taking notes on my IBM Thinkpad tablet when Mei Lin was talking. Enjoy!

Check my Interview with Cheryl on Visual Meetings: 20/20 Vision for your Organization

Cheryl Esposito has been hosting an internet radio program called Leading Conversations, for several years, featuring thought leaders in the area of organization transformation and development. This Friday, September 24, at 10:00 PST I shared insights about the process of writing Visual Meetings, the impact of visual language on meetings and organizations, and what it means to work with a full range of visual styles--as mirrored in the Graphic Language Keyboard. 

Click on this DAVID ON VOICE AMERICA link to hear the show. Cheryl is part of the SF Bay Area Thought Leader Gathering and shares my sense that when humans work with ALL their faculties -- spirit, soul, mind, and body - that wonderful things can happen. 

Visual Meetings Launch Party Video

Firehawk Hulin and Amy Lenzo helped The Grove make a video introducing our new Visual Meetings book on Amazon. Take a look here and let me know what you think of it!  Thanks. For more information click Visual Meetings.

Visual Meetings at The Clearing

This last week I was at The Clearing in Washington DC , co-facilitating a workshop designing an interagency approach to logistics for crises like Haiti. At the conclusion The Clearing's founder,   Chris McGoff, introduced Visual Meetings and invited everyone to join staff and associates of The Clearing in a post-meeting reception and book signing. Chris's new company is making graphic facilitation a central part of their offering, since their mission is to tackle the most complex problems government faces. They don't believe they can do this without visualization, partnering with The Grove. It was impressive to be sharing about this work right inside a conference room filled with the evidence. Many a person in the meeting said they were so relieved not to have to go to a meeting full of PowerPoints. A couple of the participants got extras for their kids -- a request that made my day.

Visual Meetings Arrives at The Grove

Imagine holding the book you see here in your hands, and knowing that you wrote, illustrated and designed all 262 pages! I got that chance last Friday when Visual Meetings arrived from Wiley & Sons. The process began in December of last year when   Richard Narramore called and wondered if I would like to write a book about visualization for groups, following the success of Dan Roam’s book Back of the Napkin. Little did I realize then how fun it would be to deliver this sweeping review of 35 years of leading visual meetings all over the world. I’m writing here to share some of the process I went through for those who might be interested in how books like this come to be. If you want to skip this post and go right to getting the book, then click on this link to a special page on our web site at The Grove—About Visual Meetings. It has all the details. If you want to hear my personal story of this journey read on. 

Danone's Virtual Victory—Six Cities Without a Hitch!

Imagine a three channel, six city, tele-computer-graphics meeting with over 40 people involved and lasting four hours. I can and actually helped facilitate one recently when Danone—the water, yogurt, and baby food company from France— decided to review its plans for talent management in Asia with its teams in Tokyo, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Singapore and San Francisco in a virtual rather than face to face setting. Here’s a picture of our video link (I was represented only by my graphics).

Dan Briklen has Developed a Workable iPad Notetaker

My coaching colleague Ward Ashman shared a link to TechWeb's interview with Dan Briklen, inventor of Visicalc and now developer of a real note taker app for the iPad. Click here to see what it can do. I was up and running in ten minutes and was delighted to find that I could write with my finger in the zoom screen and have it appear on the page as decent handwriting. This is just the tip of the iceberg, I believe -- and so does Dan. "The iPad isn't a viewer it is a controller," he says. "People want to have direct control."

I read in the news recently that productivity apps are outselling the other kinds as users begin to give Apple the feedback about what this tool is really for. Did those of us who are in visual practice have to figure this out. I don't think so!

Reflecting on Independence Day

I woke up this morning thinking about freedom and independence, not just because it is the celebration of the United States freeing itself from England, but also because it is the anniversary of my freeing myself to create my own business. That was back in 1977 when I set up a personal consultancy focused on organization development, communications, and graphic & design. My logo was a bright yellow spot, looking a bit like a light bulb. Here’s the image. (Note: I don’t live on 6th Avenue any more.)

Looking back the feeling of excitement about declaring “independence” didn’t last very long. I wasn’t very “free” in those early days, in the ways that mattered most. Deciding to be “independent” I was also deciding to take on a new set of responsibilities. I now had to do my own marketing, selling, writing, fulfillment, invoicing, and all the other things that make a company a company. My little startup was really nothing more than idea, and the next three years were a slide into challenge after challenge as I struggled to figure out how to run a business.

Learning from Leaders of National Parks

For eleven days early this May I accompanied twenty nine national park superintendents, deputy regional superintendents, and head rangers on a brand new immersive leadership training called the National Parks Institute. There were park execs from all over the United States and eleven others countries—including Chile, Paraguay, Lebanon, the Bahamas, the Dutch Antilles, Kenya, Australia, China, and New Zealand. I was the “facilitator.” I put this in quotes because it was a unique role – part master of ceremony, part process designer, part graphic facilitator, part participant observer, and part California Native speaker. It was a transformational experience for me and for the others. I want to share some of its impact here.

Here we all are at the end of the tunnel leading into Yosemite Valley.

Visual Meetings: A Revolution in Group Productivity

This post links you to a video about my presentation on Visual Meetings at a recent TEDxSOMA event at the ParisSOMA loft South of Market Street in San Francisco. My Parisian college Meryem Le Saget introduced me to the sponsor Clement Alterseco, President of FaberNovell in Paris, several months ago and it led to an invitation. ParisSOMA is a shared workspace for young entrepreneurs, very much in the spirit of the TED events, whose motto is "ideas worth sharing." My own ideas have formed over the 38 years I've been a visual practitioner and are condensing into a book for Wiley & Sons on the subject that will come out this summer. My 10 minute fly-over is a fast-paced review of what feels like a real revolution in how we communicate in organizations.