A conversation with David Sibbet, Founder & CEO of Grove Consultants International & Author of “Visual Meetings”

“ If you really listen to people and understand what’s happening, if you illustrate an image that they’re actually describing in their mind, [while] reflecting back maybe a sketch of what they were trying to say, people love it. People absolutely go crazy being listened to. ” -David Sibbet

In this episode of Control the Room, David Sibbet and I break down his unique career path in consulting and facilitating visual meetings and how individuals can use visual elements to amplify their learning in the workplace. From the installation of his consulting company in the mid-70s to the present day, David’s focus on design thinking continues to drive him to help companies achieve a “sophisticated level of systems thinking” in meetings. David reflects on the components of his creation, the Group Graphics tool, and its effectiveness to help teams find focus during workshops. We examine the impact of using “clean language” in the workplace and the ability to have a metaphorical thinking mindset, which he believes can indirectly lead to inclusivity within your organization. David also shares lessons he learned through enduring the peaks and valleys of decision-making when working with past clients. We conclude by taking a closer look at his passion project and non-profit organization, the Global Learning & Exchange Network (GLEN), and the responsibility we must uphold to build a better world for humanity on both local and global levels.

Show Highlights

[1:48] David’s Start in Visual Meetings 
[7:19] The Group Graphics Take 
[16:58] The Group Graphics Keyboard Tool 
[24:13] Clean Language & the Impact of Metaphorical Thinking 
[33:54] The Peaks & Valleys Metaphor
[39:55] The GLEN & The Diversity in Connections 

David’s LinkedIn
Grove Consultants International
The Global Learning and Exchange Network
Visual Facilitation Series

About the Guest

David Sibbet is the founder and CEO of The Grove Consultants International. He is a master graphic facilitator, information designer, and is considered a leader in the booming field of visual facilitation. The Grove is a full-service organization consulting firm based in San Francisco and is a hub to a global network of associates, partners, and other visual practitioners. He co-directs The Grove’s Global Learning & Exchange Network (GLEN) focused on evolving new approaches to collaboration and cross-boundary work. David is the author of the best-selling, four-part Visual Facilitation Series, which includes: Visual Meetings, Visual Teams, Visual Leaders and, Visual Consulting: Designing & Leading Change, co-authored with Gisela Wendling, Ph.D. He holds a Master’s Degree in Journalism from Northwestern University, a BA in English from Occidental College, and a Coro Fellowship in Public Affairs. In 2013 he was awarded the Organizational Development Network’s lifetime achievement award for creative contribution to the field of Organizational Development.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

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Full Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:

Welcome to the Control The Room podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting in distributing power, leaning and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for listening. If you’d like to join us live from a session sometime, you can join our weekly Control The Room facilitation lab. It’s a free event to meet fellow facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real-time, with other facilitators. Sign up today at VoltageControl.com/facilitation-lab.

Douglas Ferguson:

If you’d like to learn more about my new book, Magical Meetings, you can download the Magical Meetings Quick Start Guide, a free PDF reference with some of the most important pieces of advice from the book. Download a copy today at VoltageControl.com/magical-meetings-quick-guide.

Douglas Ferguson:

Today I’m with David Sibbet, founder and CEO of the Grove Consultants International, a full-service organization consulting firm in San Francisco that’s been a leader in visual facilitation and strategy work. He’s also a process designer who helps clients imagine, design, facilitate, and document critical planning and change processes. He’s also the author of the bestselling book, Visual Meetings, and its companions, Visual Teams, Visual Leaders, and Visual Consultant. Welcome to the show, David.

David Sibbet:

Yes. Thank you, Douglas.

Douglas Ferguson:

So, David, let’s start off by hearing a little bit about how you got your start. How did you get into this work of visual meetings and visual leading?

David Sibbet:

Well, I was working for a leadership development organization in San Francisco called the Coro Center for Public Affairs. And we were next door neighbors to a consulting firm called Interaction Associates, run by two architects who believed that the way architects work would be good for teachers and good for people in organizations. And they were inventing facilitation in the mid-70s, which at that time was not a common thing for businesses to do. It’s a term that was more used for people doing personal development work in groups, like National Training Labs or other people like that.

David Sibbet:

And they were the beginning of what is now called design thinking. And I’ve always been able to draw and was trained as a reporter. I have a master’s in journalism. And I was interested in using the latest techniques in our leadership development work, so we began mirroring the interaction method, which had a facilitator and a recorder who would then write on flip charts what was going on. And they were getting a lot of success.

David Sibbet:

And when we began using it in our seminars, we also experienced that it really shifted things. But I really felt constrained by the little flip chart, and began working with really big charts. And I can still remember one of our first meetings where we mapped the power structure in the city. And we had 12 interns who were all on different placements, and so somebody was in the Department of Public Works, somebody was in police, somebody was in the planning commission. And I started drawing little boxes of different sizes and put ones inside others that, in fact, were inside other organizations.

David Sibbet:

And the end of about three hours, we had a whole wall full of a diagram with marks of where the interns were, and lots of lines about how they perceive people communicating. And one of the things that I realized is we’ve gone right past the bio-break. We’ve gone for three straight hours, not a drop of interest. And I just kept going. And for about five years, experimented with all the ways you could use visualization and recording to amplify people’s learning.

David Sibbet:

So it was an action learning type curriculum that we were running at Coro. And after about five years of that work, people found out I was doing this. And I remember Stanford Research Institute offered me what at the time seemed like a whole lot of money to go and spend one day recording for them in Sacramento on a project. And I began doing the math. Coro was a nonprofit, and I had a couple kids. And I decided to strike out on my own and form my own consulting firm in 1977,

Douglas Ferguson:

And was that when The Grove was started?

David Sibbet:

Yeah. We didn’t call ourselves The Grove. I called myself Sibbet and Associates, which is fairly typical of people who start out independently. And I incorporated as a company in 1988, a little bit later. I discovered about three years in who my clients really were. I initially thought organizations would want to do this. But they didn’t know about it. They didn’t know anything about it. So how can you want something you don’t know about?

David Sibbet:

And I started running workshops on group graphics is what we called it at the time, and as a way of marketing really, getting the word out. And a strategy consultant from Vancouver showed up at one, and he said, “Would you come up to Vancouver and run this meeting for me? And I’ll set it up so that if the meeting doesn’t work, no problem, I won’t get in trouble or anything, you just won’t come back. But if it works, I will be differentiated from every other strategy consultant up here.”

David Sibbet:

And he used to be somebody who worked at a big strategy firm, and he was good enough to be on his own. I went up and did the meeting with him, and we worked together for four or five years all across Canada with big conglomerates and other government, British Columbia, and the City of Vancouver. And I realized that my real clients were strategy consultants who wanted to look different.

David Sibbet:

And so within about six months, I had five clients, all of whom were real good at getting work. And so they would run the client, I would run the meetings. And it was sort of a sea captain to harbor pilot arrangement. And in those eight years, I learned strategy from people who were … By doing it basically.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, you had a front row seat. That’s cool.

David Sibbet:

Yeah. And I worked with Apple. I worked with General Electric. I worked with General Mills. I was really working in very sophisticated meetings from then on.

Douglas Ferguson:

You mentioned this notion of the group graphics, which you said you were calling it back then. And that was something, when I’ve read your work, that’s really jumped out to me is this notion of group graphics. And when I see what is typically referred to as like graphic recording or graphic facilitation, a lot of times it’s relegated to someone over in the corner, just capturing stuff.

David Sibbet:

Yeah, exactly.

Douglas Ferguson:

And I’ve even heard design thinking facilitators that I respect and are active members of our community question like, “Does that have value? Does someone creating this stuff have value?” And I really was impressed by your writing around this notion that the group graphics get people involved.

David Sibbet:

Well, when se started, we called and I invented the name graphic facilitation, which hadn’t been used at all. And I was totally working with the chart in front of the room as part of the conversation. So we would have a U-shape with the fourth wall being the chart. And for this first thing I described, doing the diagram of City Hall, I wanted to ask the questions. I’d go and point at the chart and say, “What goes here? Or what goes over here? Or should this be bigger or smaller?”

David Sibbet:

I was using the act of creating the visual as the act of facilitation method. So we went on and did things like diagramming a political campaign, the history, telling a graphic history of it. Or we did sociograms of the group process, how we relate to each other and what the quality is. For these more complex graphics, I much prefer to be the facilitator running the chart. And that’s what I call graphic facilitation. To me, that was not graphic recording, even though at times, I would do recording. But I’d never do it on the side of the room as an artifact.

David Sibbet:

So it’s been a little puzzling to see how … Well, actually, it hasn’t been so puzzling. I know why people like it is people who do processes like they have artifacts like that that say we did something. And so in many cases, I’m not sure whether these artifacts correlate with something really happening or not. I mean, they correlate with a good listener who can draw and illustrate well, creating a visually interesting memory. But most of the work that I was doing for strategy involved the management teams really making their thinking explicit, and papering as many as three or four walls of a conference room over the course of a day or two, and really getting to a what I would think of as a very sophisticated level of systems thinking about their business.

David Sibbet:

In fact, I’ve concluded after doing this for so many years, and also studying systems thinking and many of these other methods, that at the core of anybody who says, “Let’s think systemically about something,” which means you’re talking about, thinking about how parts connect, and how they connect dynamically, and how they connect structurally, you cannot do that without making a display somewhere.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it’s a model. How can you make a model without a visual?

David Sibbet:

Yeah. The display is either between your ears or it’s explicit on the wall. So visualizing is groups systems thinking. I realized early people don’t respond to that kind of language, so I call it big picture thinking. People want to do big picture thinking. And you don’t have to be a student in systems thinking to look at several hours of conversation and begin making connections, and seeing this fits with that, or this doesn’t fit here, or this doesn’t fit there.

David Sibbet:

And part of the art of it is to really be disciplined about having the marker be democratic and record everything that people are saying. So the graphic facilitation discipline is to be extremely clear about the filter you’re using. Like we are right now going to do a flow chart. Right now we’re doing a road map. Right now we’re doing a matrix. Right now we’re doing a cluster diagram. And the reasons we’re using that chart are the following reasons.

David Sibbet:

So early on, we articulated a group graphics keyboard, which are the seven archetypal frameworks you ever use, and what the powers and limitations of each are, so that the facilitator can explain to a group why they’re choosing a particular way of visualizing, and how the group can work with it. And then basically inviting the group to co-create these. We went on in the 90s, when we were doing a lot of strategy work during the whole build up of the internet, of creating graphic templates we call graphic guides, which are the generic, repeating frameworks that we use all the time. And we found we could give these to breakout groups in a big meeting, and without facilitators being trained, as them to have a discussion in filling out this framework, and we’d get many of the same results. So I agree with you. I agree, Douglas, about the puzzles that people have about the stuff on the side.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. It’s like to your point about the marker being democratic, if it’s happening off to the side, it’s so hard to validate your filter if you’re not the one that’s having the dialogue.

David Sibbet:

Exactly.

Douglas Ferguson:

Quite often I’m like, “Is it okay if I capture it this way?” So then I’m validating that I heard the right thing and that it’s flowing out correctly, because if there’s anything translating, if my arm is doing some translation, it ain’t what they said.

David Sibbet:

When we train facilitators, and we do, Grove has been active in training people since the first workshop that ever ran in 1980, we say, “Look, one of the things to get is that you really can’t fail with this method if you really listen to people and understand what’s happening when people are looking at a chart.” So if people speak, and then they see you write something down, if you’ve been listening responsively, and get the keywords that they think are the keywords, and often you can get that through the tone of voice people have, and if you illustrate an image that they’re actually describing in their mind, not imposing an image, but just reflecting back maybe a sketch of what they were trying to say, people love it.

David Sibbet:

People absolutely go crazy being listened to. On the other hand, if you’re a little bit off, and don’t quite get it, what do you think a person’s going to do looking at that chart? They’re probably going to want to correct it. And if you learn how to accept the corrections like a Christmas present, they love you, because everybody likes to feel smarter than the facilitator. So you win when you get it right, and if you handle it right, you win when you get it not correct.

David Sibbet:

And so this has gone on. We do a lot of what we call story mapping at the Grove, where we actually know that leaders need a common image to explain what they’re doing with strategy. So we will create a large mural that can be printed out on big plotters, or used online, that has all the information that they want to convey about a strategy, usually embedded in a graphic metaphor that is appropriate for what they’re talking about.

David Sibbet:

And the first drafts of these are always wrong. And what happens is it stirs up an immense amount of conversation in the company. So this thing circulates around, they go, “Oh no, that should be this. No, we got to add this.” So these vision maps, these story maps go through as many as a dozen revisions before they’re agreed on. We did one for Autodesk recently that was one image that was their entire strategy. And it had maybe 20 images on it, and a whole lot of labels and words.

David Sibbet:

Every single word and every image had been gone over, and gone over, and gone over, and gone over by their management teams and their key managers, to the point where they all knew the story. And it’s turned out to be not just in a meeting, but over the course of several meetings, a way to align people is by having them co-create an image. And again, the secret sauce is knowing how to deal with the fact that first drafts are not right.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yes, 100%. And one of my favorite tricks is actually showing up with a crummy first draft based on some initial stuff I’ve heard, and actually show up and say, “I know this is wrong. But I just thought it’d be fun to react to something.” So that way we don’t have that awkward like, “Okay, where do we start?”

David Sibbet:

Well, that’s the secret of design thinking too is doing multiple scenarios, doing multiple takes on what it is that you’re thinking about.

Douglas Ferguson:

You mentioned the group graphics keyboard, and so I wanted to come back to that and just kudos to you for kind of codifying that for two reasons. There’s two things I really liked about it when I first saw it. One is that it really distilled down these categories nicely, and provided the why behind them. Because so often, especially inexperienced facilitators will like learn a tool, leaning on the structure or the methods, because they’re green, and they don’t have that clear understanding of the why. And if you don’t share the why with people, it’s really hard for them to come along with you. So articulating the why on these, and so clearly, and it’s simple. I think that’s brilliant. And also, I love the mandala. It’s maybe the first time I’d seen that specifically. And this notion that it’s a way of … Its purpose, its why is to demonstrate unity or depict unity. I thought that was really brilliant.

David Sibbet:

Yeah, that’s a Sanskrit word, by the way, that means archetype. And the circle is the most common archetype. I mean it’s a universal symbol of unity. So we chose that word for that particular format of everything in a circle. But in learning that, I ran into a teacher, Arthur M. Young, who had a theory of process in 1976, who was really working to reconnect physics and metaphysics in one system. And his insight was that what makes the world unified, what connects one discipline with another, or one thing with another, isn’t the structure and the look of it, but the way it moves, the process.

David Sibbet:

So he called it a theory of process. So I began looking at graphics as processes, not as artifacts. And then, later, I was asked to write an article for an educational journal. And I realized that these seven formats are actually different modes of thinking. They’re different ways of working your awareness at different processes. And I remembered back to Arthur talking about his system as being the yoga of thinking.

David Sibbet:

So if you think of these different formats as different types of yogic asanas, like postures, when you do a poster or a single image, all you’re trying to do is focus, get people to focus on one thing. And so the way you learn to focus is you learn to differentiate what you’re looking at from everything else. And that is a mode of using your mind, just learning to focus. And then in drawing, how do you focus something visually? Well, you have to do something that’s different than everything else.

David Sibbet:

Then there’s listing. Well, what is listing? Listing is just flowing your attention, just moving it one thing after another, after another, after another. Just flowing with the group. So when you’re listing recording with a group, you’re simply activating the flow of attention. And it doesn’t invite making connections between those elements. It’s just like one thing after the other. That’s why it’s used for brainstorming all the time.

David Sibbet:

Now, if you shift to sticky notes that are spaced out, if you’re looking at a bunch of different objects on a wall, three or four different sticky notes, there’s no way that your brain isn’t going to start comparing those. And you will start saying, “I’m going to do this. Yeah, this should be near, or whatever.” And it basically is a process of activating thinking, where listing doesn’t really activate thinking. It’s more tapping the flow that’s activating the thinking is clustering.

David Sibbet:

The minute you put something in a matrix where you have to cross categories, you’ve got one category and the other one, and then you’re trying to figure out what fits in that cell, you’re now in an analytic process of forcing yourself to examine things out in the cells that you haven’t thought about. Now, if you shift to diagramming, which is like a mind map or an org chart or something, where you got all the pieces and they have the connections, unlike the clusters, when you have them, you are now thinking more organically like a tree grows. And these things, the process starts slow and then it grows, and grows, and grows, and grows, and there’s no end to it. You can keep branching way out into the little things.

David Sibbet:

Now if you take that same format, any one of those first five, and you layer on a graphic analogy, and analogy would be graphically pointing at something people already know. So I’ll, on a big chart, draw an arch of a horizon, and a few little squiggles representing China, Europe, and the US. It doesn’t have to be hardly any detail. And if I put a little blue in there, bang, people are looking at the earth. Why? Because they’ve seen tons of photographs of the arch of the horizon and all that kind of thing.

David Sibbet:

So this analogy, the graphic analogy, brings it to life. So if I put a little road map, which is like a diagram of action over time, on top of a horizon like that, where people are thinking about the whole earth, that’s a different kind of a process than just doing a flat diagram where the content is in linked boxes.

Douglas Ferguson:

There was a quote from your book that said that people are more engaged when the content is more suggestive. So that arch, the squiggles, they’re suggestive. They’re not this flat, linear line with little compartments. That’s very mathematical and containerized. It’s not suggestive and doesn’t lead to more thought.

David Sibbet:

Well, this kind of think has really animated The Grove, particularly around our story maps, is finding the exactly correct metaphor that people can kind of enter into. But that’s also turns out that metaphors are what you can record visually. So somebody’s using a metaphor, you can often draw a picture of it. So that has taken me deeply into thinking about and looking at how do we structure our understanding of complicated things?

David Sibbet:

And a lot of the thinking is metaphoric. And I was reinforced by that by a Harvard Business School article on strategy thinking. And they said they’d done some research, and they said like 80%, 85% of strategy thinking is analogy. How can we be like Amazon? How can we be like Southwest Airlines? How can we be like? And then people compare what they’re doing to something they know about. That’s analogous thinking. So most strategy work is actually analogic thinking, not analytic thinking.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s fascinating. It reminds me of clean language. Have you seen that work at all?

David Sibbet:

I’ve heard a little bit about it, yeah. Say more.

Douglas Ferguson:

So this idea that … Well, this notion that we use metaphor a ton, but it can be a source of malalignment.

David Sibbet:

Absolutely.

Douglas Ferguson:

Because if I say it needs to be magical, and we draw some magic icon or something, then someone else is defining magical in a different way, then we’re in trouble. And so clean language is a set of questions to help us digest what they mean by magical. Well, what kind of magic? That’s a very powerful question.

David Sibbet:

Oh boy. Metaphors really do cut two ways. They illuminate something and they blindside you. So you were asking me what I’m really interested in right now. I’m very interested in where our culture as a whole is blindsided. Where are we trapped in a mental model that is not serving us? And I came across a book that is just fabulous called The Future We Choose by Christiana Figuera. And she was the person who was asked by the United Nations to run the Paris Accord.

David Sibbet:

After the catastrophic climate thing in Denmark, they went and did the Paris Accord. And she’s basically laying out the dim picture that we all see every day on the news about global warming and what happens if it goes up 3% and all the migration that’s occurring and on and on. Everybody knows the news now. But she says, and you got to realize, the next decade is the pivot. She says really, you don’t have to be submerged by the negative news because there’s another choice. And the other choice is to shift your mindset.

David Sibbet:

Now this gets us to … I mean, metaphor and mindset are really close cousins. So she suggests several mindsets that actually would serve us heading forward in the future. And one of them is the mindset of stubborn optimism, which is actually holding the hope that we will figure this out, we will work it out. The second is endless abundance. Now this one’s the tricky one. There’s a mindset of scarcity that drives the market economy and the thinking. If you don’t get yours, you’re not going to get it, that there’s not enough for everybody, so that you’ve got to build your gated community, you got to build your gated business, you’ve got to seal things off. You got to own your intellectual property. You can’t be opensource.

David Sibbet:

This is all derived from the idea of scarcity. She says in the energy field, it’s just not true. There is plenty of solar energy. There’s plenty of wind energy. There’s all kinds of tidal energy. We just haven’t focused on utilizing and capturing it at a systemic level. We’ve gotten into we’re going to dig up our pile of coal and burn it. We’re going to dig up our oil and own it. So this mindset of scarcity is driving a lot of the disfunction. And if you have a mindset of endless abundance, like are you better off with a whole lot of material goods? Or are you better off with really rich friends that love you and support you when you get ill or whatever?

David Sibbet:

I mean, what is it that gives quality to life? So she talks about this. But then she talks about the third one, which is radical regeneration, that we need to focus on not depleting things, and regenerating things that are depleted. So if you start looking around at what’s depleted by the pandemic, what’s been depleted by global warming, and then you think, “I’m going to focus on radical regeneration.” What is it that people need right now?

David Sibbet:

Well, I believe that there are a whole bunch of entrepreneurs who are being hopeful. They think there’s plenty of resource, and they’re going in to regenerating things. Here’s one example is they just announced, Mayor Breed in San Francisco, that they’re going to allow parklets to continue, these little restaurant extensions. So here’s a total emergency response to the pandemic, but it turns out that these parklets make neighborhoods much more interesting, and it’s fun to eat outside when you can, it’s actually kind of European. And it’s regenerating all kinds of areas of the city and they’re saying yes to it.

David Sibbet:

Now, who would have thought that parklets would come out of this catastrophe? So I’m fascinated with trying to find more examples of that, where people are being optimistic, they’re thinking of plenty of resources, and they’re just being hard-ass regeneratives.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I really love that radical regeneration because it re-frames this idea of sustainability. Because I think sustainability’s become such a buzzword that I’m not even sure people know what it means as they’re saying it anymore. So taking stock of the fact that wait, radical regeneration, we’re going to go into extreme re-use and extreme ability to actually generate more. It’s this like hyper abundance. I love it. It’s great.

David Sibbet:

Yes. Yeah, and that was a total accident. I was fortunate enough to be able to travel to Germany and Mallorca recently. And one of the beautiful things about being in Mallorca is nobody was traveling yet. Really only people staying at this very, very neat 15th century villa in the middle of the island, that could have held 30 or 40 people, and we were the only people.

Douglas Ferguson:

Oh, wow.

David Sibbet:

But it was in the bookstore at Frankfurt when I came back. And so these accidents happen where when you’re receptive, stuff comes out. So back to the group graphics, one of the things that I love about working this way, and I hope that it’s still unknown enough that it works this way, is it destabilizes all the habituation that we have. If there’s a big chart in the room that is reflecting what everybody’s thinking, nobody really knows how to game that very effectively. I mean, you’ve got to actually listen to each other.And as this thing develops, even the facilitator doesn’t know where it’s going. And what happens is that parklets of thinking erupt out of the meeting.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I think in a way, it’s similar, Peter Drucker’s calendar review. He would ask an executive, “What’s your priority right now?” And then they go, “Look at the executive’s calendar,” and then say, “Well, why am I not seeing your priority in your calendar, or it’s 10%.” So you imagine at a visual meeting, if there’s direct evidence whether or not the company’s living the priority or not.

David Sibbet:

Yeah. One of the most effective activities as a graphic facilitator is doing a graphic history of a group, or whatever. I remember doing the history of Chicago one time with 60 people. They were standing on their chairs, yelling and screaming. It was amazing. It was like an-hour-and-a-half mele. And the picture itself ends up being what I kind of call a spaghetti drawing. I mean, it starts clean sheet of paper and a timeline. And then you ask people, “What are the huge events that everybody knows about?” Like the earthquake events and things.

David Sibbet:

So you put in a couple of memory benchmarks on the thing. And then people start telling stories. So we’ll do things, most of the time, start strategy work with a storytelling, and get everybody to sign in to a timeline of when they joined the organization. Then you have the old people tell the story what it was like when they joined. And then the next cohort, what was it like when you joined? And then the next cohort, what was it like.

David Sibbet:

But the end of that, you have disturbed every single person’s idea of what the heck was going on, because people’s story about the organization is formed kind of when they joined. And they don’t incorporate deeply the point of view of, say, the new people, the millennials who are the new people are. So using metaphor again, I think of these history telling sessions as a type of story composting. You’re tearing apart the old story, but not by attacking it, but by just adding so much to it that everybody’s little suboptimal story, or simple story starts breaking down. And then out of that breakdown, where you still have all the information up there, people can craft a new story that’s more inclusive.

Douglas Ferguson:

It reminds me of EcoCycle and the burning structures, this notion of the information’s building, and then okay, we got to creatively destruct some stuff, and that out of that detritus, something new grows and emerges.

David Sibbet:

Absolutely.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s so good. So it also reminds me from Visual Meetings the story you told about I think it was the Apple leadership expedition I think you called it, which is really cool. But this notion of, what was it? The peaks and valleys of your career. It was like just these kind of visual … It was like even the prompt is visual. Like not where’s your career going? It’s like what are the peaks and valleys. Like really get visual on this metaphor of how they communicate those stories.

David Sibbet:

That metaphor really helped me out a couple of years later when I was working with Hewlett-Packard. And their laser jet division was charged with coming up with the next several billion dollar businesses by the very successful management team. At that time in the company, they were making the most money for the company. And these people were really petrified with this project they’d been asked to do because before, task groups like this had gone in front of the top management and then been torn apart because the management wanted to show they were smarter than the taskforce.

David Sibbet:

And so I had them tell a story about the HP division, and it turned out that one of the reasons that they ended up defying corporate policy and hooking their new InkJet printer up to every computer rather than just HP computers was that they had a huge failure two years before, a huge belly flop. And the whole company was just not going to go there again. And so they ran the number and everything, says, “It’s never going to work if we just hook up to HP computers.” And so the valley that they went through gave them the guts to go through a peak.

David Sibbet:

And I’ve since kind of seen that pattern. I grew up in the high sierras, in Bishop, California. And if you think about it, a peak and a valley is the same concept, it’s just point at different parts of one thing. I mean, you don’t think of a peak unless there’s a lower part. And the lower part isn’t lower except in relation to the peak. And so the same thing’s true in our lives. Development tends to go through periods of contraction and expansion, failure and success, in between periods.

David Sibbet:

Like right now, my wife is working on a archetype of change called The Liminal Pathways Framework. And what she studied is how indigenous people have dealt with change since the beginning of time. And what they know is that the letting go side of change doesn’t just go to the new side of change. You go through a period of unknowing. There’s a technical term for it, is a liminal phase. You go through this ambiguous time where you don’t know who you are, you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re confused. And in traditional ceremony, those times are supported by the ritual guides in a ceremony and everything to keep people in the hot house, in the crucible of their change, long enough that one of these parklets comes out, one of these new things where they get a message from the divine or something comes in.

David Sibbet:

Well, think of the number of people right now that are in total limbo, that are in between what they were and what they’re going to be. And they don’t know yet that it’s vast. And I think one of the roles now, one of the things I’m working on is how as a facilitator and a consultant can I convince leaders and other people that you can design containers for this sort of in-betweenness and ambiguity, and actually there’s a tremendous amount of value in staying confused longer, and not trying to make decisions and force it through mentally. That sometimes, you really have to sit and stew on something for the juices to mix and cook and something delicious to come out. Notice the metaphor?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. It reminds me of groups that want to open and just immediately close without exploring. There’s no opportunity for the collisions, the recombinant stuff doesn’t happen. And it’s the same thing internally as you’re in that state. Let it play its course.

David Sibbet:

Yeah. Well, we’ve really been successful at The Grove in teaching people visual facilitation, team performance, strategy work, know how to train all that and do all that. And it’s all in the area of known technique, and really good value, but I’ve just been drawn heavily, and The Grove has too, into this social change side, is how are we going to deal with these crises? So we started a nonprofit about five years called The Global Learning and Exchange Network. And you can get to it through GLENCommunity.com. And it’s a group of consultants, now about 70 or 80 of us, including a lot of Europeans and some people in Asia, asking really basic questions about what’s the new kind of thinking we need?

David Sibbet:

What are at the edges of our clarity? How can we embrace struggling and inquiry? One of the thoughts we had is how could we make inquiry on a group basis as interesting as a TED talk? Instead of here’s an expert, here’s the answer. No, here’s the question and we’re going to struggle with it. Well, it doesn’t package the same way, but we’re spending a lot of time asking really basic stuff. And it’s gotten me pretty excited as I begin to see all the different things people are coming up with.

Douglas Ferguson:

You were telling me a little bit about this work in the pre-show chat, and I was really fascinated, or the thing that really drew me in was this, I would say, impedance mismatch, or this kind of friction between this need or urge to address the symptoms, or the short term, or the urgent stuff. Whereas there’s looming, big kind of disaster consequence, kind of important stuff that can easily get ignored. And that’s happening at I would say a global level. And then you’re also working at a local, state level around the wildfires on the same issue. And I think that phenomenon happens inside companies. It happens in communities. It happens globally. But it’s something we humans have to pay real close attention to. And I think facilitators have a duty when they’re in sessions with teams to help them recognize that and get out of that way of thinking.

David Sibbet:

Oh, I know. And yeah, there’s so many echos of that showing up. I mean, of course, Covey pointed this out in 7 Habits quite dramatically. The urgent trumps the important all the time. But it’s also happening in politics in a scary kind of way, is that when people are really scared, the easy thing is to go and blame somebody. And I think people are really, at a very deep level, very scared about what’s happening with global warming, and the economy, and all the disruption that’s going on. They’re really scared.

David Sibbet:

The easy way is to do that. The more challenging way is to think about what’s the real value of diversity? So you have tons of people who are in the innovation business, creativity, design thinking business, who know that diverse imports in a meeting or a design process are going to give you a better result. Also, ecologists know that in an ecosystem, a diversity of connections between different species actually results in a stronger ecosystem. There’s just tons of evidence for that. But the question then becomes what does it take to form a relationship across barriers?

David Sibbet:

Well, it takes time. It takes have you had dinner with somebody before? Are you willing to read some things that they were reading? Are you willing to go out of your way to stretch yourself a little bit beyond your certainty? So this short term, long term thing shows up dramatically in that. And then, it’s exacerbated by this attention economy stuff. They are reinforcing short cycle, urgent, get rid of the little dots on your iPhone, the little red dots. Read all your Facebook WeChats or whatever. Get in there and just stay busy with social media. This is like short-term-itis on steroids.

David Sibbet:

And if you read the stuff on creativity and everything and neuropsychology, it’s becoming clear that one of the best things for really good thinking is to go take a walk. Actually have some breaks, not push so hard, have longer meetings. Now with Zoom, everybody wants to cram everything into a couple hours. So the consequences of this short-term thinking are going to show up. They show up in a lot of false starts, a lot of activity, a lot of burnout. And you’re seeing a big spike of mental health problems in young people who are looking at this world and saying, “Whoa, where am I in this?”

David Sibbet:

So the paradox is that the pandemic has allowed a lot of people to experience what it’s like to slow down, and be at home, and do what you want when you want. And a lot of people don’t want to go back to that regimented, cubicle kind of world. So this big in-betweenness that we’re going on is a tremendous potential resource if we can hold it that way, and cultivate, and nurture the new things that are hopeful and regenerative and abundance oriented. So I’m getting up every morning pretty excited about working on stuff. There’s plenty of opportunity for being a facilitator.

Douglas Ferguson:

I think there’s even more opportunity the more complex the world gets, and the more automated things get too, the more we have to lean into our humanity.

David Sibbet:

Yeah. And again, the mountain valley thing. For people to think that tech is wrong is sort of to split the mountain and the valley. I mean look, we couldn’t be having this podcast now without the technology. I couldn’t be doing all the virtual drawing that I’m doing now. I’m doing a lot of my design work online. And I find that one-on-ones, where you’re looking at another person’s face as big as they`re across the table, and if you take enough time for it, you can form really close connections through video conferencing. And you can do it globally. That’s what we’re finding with The GLEN, our Global Learning Exchange Network, is that some of our relationships with some of the European people are as close as anybody that we can actually invite over to dinner regularly. So it’s not like because tech’s driving the attention economy, therefore all tech is bad. That’s another example of sort of simplistic thinking.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. Well, we’re running low on time, and so I want to be mindful of that, and just give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with just a final thought. What would you like to leave them with?

David Sibbet:

Well, I have a quote in my studio from Buckminster Fuller. And it’s inside one of these little models that I put together of a geodesic sphere. And it said you can’t change humanity where it is. You can’t change man where he is. What you can do is go into the outlaw area and make it so interesting that they eventually copy you. And the parallel quote I have along with it is the function of prophecy is not so much to foretell the future as to shape it. And so I’m prophesying a future of young people who are not burdened by history, and they’re busy making it up with what they’ve got right now.

David Sibbet:

As is always the case, spring comes, my garden grows stuff, the deer eat things, and they grow back. So I’m very hopeful when I talk to some of the younger people, who are very aware of a lot of these things, and are not burdened by the history, the legacy stuff. But I’m also hopeful about the older people who’ve gotten cracked open by the pandemic and aren’t so confident anymore. And they’re asking basic questions. So I’m hoping that people realize there are choices. I really hope that people realize they can connect in our website on The GLEN, GLENCommunity.org is open to anybody to go look. And TheGrove.com is also full of really useful tools and trainings.

David Sibbet:

In fact, I’m going to be going back and doing two things. I’m going to go back and teach the fundamentals of graphic facilitation again, in part, Douglas, because of this confusion about what it is and what it could be. And this is our beginning course. And I’m also going to be launching a year-long master’s program for people who really want to learn how to be visual consultants and have a fabulous life. I mean, I can’t imagine having a more interesting professional career than I’ve had. I’ve gone all over the world, all kinds of organizations, all different levels. People really like to be listened to, and they really like support and thinking about complex things. And that’s what my work has allowed. So thank you for inviting me on this podcast.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for joining me. It was a pleasure chatting, David.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control The Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. And if you want more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together. VoltageControl.com