Notes from the Creative Leadership Academy
- January 26th, 2012
Last week, I was privileged to attend part of the Creative Leadership Academy held at The Boulders in Carefree, Arizona. I listened to inspiring talks by “provocateurs” Chris Waugh (IDEO) and Luke Williams (Frog Design fellow and author of Disrupt), and I participated in the workshop Cultivating a Kaleidoscope Mind, presented by Laura Seargeant Richardson and Ben McAllister of Frog Design. I also delivered the closing workshop, Visual Meetings and Teams: The Key to Practical Application of Creative Leadership.
Visual Teams: Illustrating the Keys to Team Performance
- January 16th, 2012
My second book in Wiley & Son’s visualization series (yes, a third on Visual Leadership is in progress) goes far beyond Visual Meetings. First it shows team members and team leaders how to apply visual methods across the whole arc of their work, including use of new virtual tools. Second, and maybe more importantly, it provides a comprehensive guide to using the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance Model® (TPM) as a graphical operating system for leading groups.
As those of you following The Grove know, we have been working with Arthur M. Young’s Theory of Process since our founding in 1977 by developing many different application tools. The TPM is far and away the most popular such tool, being the reference framework for teams at companies such as Nike, Becton, Dickinson and Company, Genentech/Roche and Chevron. In Visual Teams I explain how we developed the graphics for the “bouncing ball” model, and use many visuals and examples to explain how different teams deal successfully with the seven core challenges that all high-performing teams face.
Case Study: Graphic Recording Movies
- January 16th, 2012
Education Elements is a company that serves K-12 schools seeking to implement blended learning solutions in the classroom. Looking for a way to get across the central concepts about blended learning that would help potential clients understand the approach, Education Elements turned to The Grove for a memorable way to illustrate them. Together, we developed a series of three custom graphic recording movies, each about five minutes long.
Each movie answers a central question: What is blended learning? How is digital content selected? Who is Education Elements, and what do they do? The visuals that accompany the narrative help convey the main points in an engaging way, giving administrators, parents, and other stakeholders a better idea of how Education Elements can help their schools.