The Grove Consultants International
is a process-consulting firm committed to advancing
the art and practice of collaboration. We believe that long-term vitality in both
organizations and communities springs from high-quality relationships. These are created
when people learn how to work together successfully - whether in ad-hoc meetings, on
long-lived teams, or in increasingly complex networks of communications. We are
committed to helping our clients create such collaborative experiences.
The Grove has pioneered enormously productive visual approaches for achieving these
results. Our techniques consistently stimulate participation, focus big-picture thinking,
enhance group memory, and win commitment. We are adept at building client capabilities
in achieving such results. We partner on projects, conduct training workshops,
collaboratively design communications media, and widely disseminate our published tools
and templates.
To explore how you and your organization can experience this way of working together,
we invite you to come into the grove . . .
Although we would be quick
to agree that genuine collaboration could never be reduced
to a methodology, we have also found that there are a learnable set of principles and
practices that create the context needed to bring out the best in groups. Here is a look at
what is in our toolkit:
1. None of us is as wise
as all of us.
2. The greater the level of participation in a process, the greater the level of commitment
to the outcome.
3. Groups are able to be smarter and more creative when they are able to grasp the
whole picture.
4. Change requires a vision of what is possible that people feel drawn toward
5. Groups are much more productive when they can build on prior understandings and
agreements without having to backtrack.
6. Change requires that there be a strongly felt dissatisfaction with the status quo.
7. Change requires practical action steps to mobilize momentum.
Implications for Group Graphics
1. Use your working murals to capture
and nurture the emergent wisdom of the group.
2. Capture all contributions on the working mural. Don't interpret the meaning. Record in a
way that allows different truths to coexist in the same space.
3. Visually depict all the relevant elements and show affinities, polarities and other
significant connections.
4. Capture all agreements and understandings on murals that can be brought forward to
the next meeting.
5. Help the group create a big picture map of all the dynamics impacting the status quo.
6. Use metaphors and images to convey qualities of excitement and hopefulness in a
vision that words alone cannot capture.
7. Help the group construct a graphical roadmap depicting the path forward in a way that
shows all stakeholders how to participate.
An integrated theory of
process lies below the visual surface of all of The Grove's process
tools and methods. It is the formulation of Arthur M. Young
, a physicist and mathematician
who devoted much of his life to understanding the relationship between science and human
consciousness. Young's vision was to update the scientific paradigm and reconcile the great split
between objectivist methods and the non-rational dimensions of living systems. His work prefigures
complexity theory, formulating an understanding of evolutionary process that reintroduces the role
of will and human intention without abandoning the disciplines of sciences.
David Sibbet became a student of Arthur Young in the late 1970s, and applied Young's process
theory, as explained in "The Reflexive Universe", to describing the process nature of graphic
language. The
Group Graphics™ Keyboard
and
Group Graphics®
are explicit translations of
Young's insights about the way simpler processes become subsystems of more complex processes
in all of nature. In the 1980s Sibbet and Allan Drexler used process theory to design the
Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance™ System, which has become widely used as a simple yet
comprehensive framework for understanding teams and enhancing their effectiveness. In the
1990s the theory helped shape the Strategic Visioning system The Grove developed for business
planning. Currently in development is an organizational evolution framework that describes the
stages organizations move through and the crises they encounter as they grow in size and
complexity.
Many of the key precepts of process theory are integrated into the facilitation training The Grove
provides. It helps explain how things can seem whole and parts at the same time, and how new
opportunities are in creative tension with resource constraints, thereby providing a dynamic engine
for group process. (The details of theory can not be explained in a few paragraphs. To find out
more, visit the
process theory
section of Arthur Young's website.)
In 1998 David Sibbet received the first bi-annual Arthur M. Young Award for practical application of
the theory of process by the Anodos Foundation, custodian of the Young archives since his death in
1995.
People need clear frameworks
and roadmaps to guide their work in groups, be it simple
formats for meetings, more involved processes for teams, organizational change, or cross
boundary work. The Grove has developed an integrated set of process models relating to
the different needs of managers, facilitators, and consultants who use our tools and
methods.
The purpose of these models is to…
- guide Grove consultants in their work with clients
- provide common language for clients
- help people who use group process tools such as the Graphic Guides®
to think through
the scope and sequencing of their work
Our primary Grove Process Models are:
•
Group Graphics® Keyboard
•
Grove Facilitation Model™
•
Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance™ Model
•
Strategic Visioning™ Model
•
Intercultural Learning Model™
•
Sibbet/Le Saget Sustainable Organizations™ Model
Each of these tools combines best theory and practice in organization development and visual
thinking with Arthur M. Young’s Theory of Process to create a consistent, integrated "operating
system" for organizations. Although these approaches are the proprietary intellectual property
of
The Grove Consultants International, we regularly
train
and
license
them. Kindly
contact
The
Grove for licensing information. The material shown here is more complete than might normally be
shared on a website. We do this to help orient our clients to our processes.
Reproduction of material from any Grove Consultants International page without written permission
is strictly prohibited.
1. Schedule
