The Grove Thoughts from and for The Grove Worldwide Network

The Grove is facilitating DLR Group’s third, five-year strategic visioning process this year and adding an exciting new element – the involvement of their emerging leadership in helping facilitate the process. With DLR’s permission, we’d like to share a bit of the design.

In 2000 we helped this growing architectural/engineering firm’s 40 partners envision their goals for 2005 and key initiatives, using a classic Strategic Visioning process. In 2004 the process repeated and involved about 70 leaders, projecting out to 2010. This year the firm is focusing on 2015 and involving the whole organization.

An earlier goal was to develop a leadership culture within the organization, now in 11 offices in North America. The downturn is hitting architecture firms VERY hard, especially the big ones focusing mostly on corporate work, but DLR Group diversified early and is doing relatively well. In the midst of all of this year’s challenges they are making additional investment in leadership development. They think it’s more important now than ever. (more…)

I’m always stunned by spring in Baltimore, and not just by all the trees that break into a riot of blooms at this time of year. For 23 years in April I’ve been going back to facilitate the annual Visioning Retreat for the Leadership, a program run by the Greater Baltimore Committee. Fifty five leaders from public, private, and community organizations participate in this one year program, one of the most evolved in the country for people who are still full time employed. It’s a cross gender, cross race, maximum diversity group. If you’ve ever watched The Wire (on HBO for five seasons) you’ll appreciate just how tough things are for many in this city. But there is another side, which is the incredible resourcefulness of local leadership as they struggle to deal with problems. It is these “buddings” that inspire me the very most. I can’t share the confidential stories, but I’d like to share the format for this retreat. It is a time-tested success model.

We begin the retreat with an introductory exercise on a big bird’s eye mural of Baltimore that I create the evening before. We ask “what would you support or change” and everyone introduces themselves with their offering. I record it all, and this is the result. It hangs up the rest of the retreat as everyone focuses on what is being called for from his or her as leaders.

What Would You Support or Change in Baltimore?

(more…)

Colin Ware provided the keynote at this year’s VizThink conference in San Jose and a follow-up workshop on “How Do Patterns Structure Visual Thinking.” He’s a researcher from the University of New Hampshire and quite academic, but in his talk I found validation for a growing consensus that intention is the key player in perception.

He began with an inquiry into the primary uses of visual language. I took a lot of notes, which you can read here if you click to magnify. But then he went to the findings from his research.

Colin Ware on Uses of Visual Language

(more…)