When BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company) needed an online team tools resource to support its project teams, it turned to The Grove’s Team Performance System as a must-have. In 2009, The Grove began exploring the creation of an online environment offering a set of practices and materials from its Team Leader Guide. Aimed at equipping leaders with the knowledge and practices needed to lead teams to high performance, the Team Leader Guide offered the perfect jumping off point.

“Teams are an important component of BD because of its relationship culture,” said Wendy Witterschein, director of global learning at BD University and project lead. “Accelerating the performance of teams—from team formation through later phases—is critical. Also key is the need for more tools and ‘on-demand learning’. Having many of the Team Leader Guide practices available online will facilitate both of these needs at BD.”

The Grove converted its Team Leader Guide material into a Flash-based website within BD’s corporate intranet beginning with the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance Model®. The Model, used by teams for more than 30 years, is the foundation for all of the guide’s principles and practices. The BD website offers an interactive version of the Model that allows users to quickly navigate to related information and practices.

Key introductory materials from the Team Leader Guide, including “Team Leadership Styles,” “Is Your Group a Team?” and “Why Teams Fail,” are part of an easily navigable “Getting Started” section. Links to related resources—including Grove products—are available in a “Resources” section.

With the site due for launch in the coming weeks, expectations are high that it will become a central resource for leaders within BD.

“We eagerly anticipate the global launch of this new team tools website so that all of our leaders have access to The Grove’s best practices for accelerating team performance,” Witterschein said.

To learn more about this project and how it might be customized for your organization, contact Bobby Pardini (robert_pardini@grove.com).

The Grove collaborated closely with the Institute at the Golden Gate over the past year to support its program entitled, “Turning the Tide.” In its premiere session in April, scientists, CEOs, philanthropists, youth activists, venture capitalists, nonprofit leaders and social entrepreneurs gathered near the Golden Gate Bridge to “turn the tide in changing the course for our earth.” The Grove facilitated and participated in the thought-leader team that designed the conference, then graphically recorded the sessions during the conference.

“Turning the Tide” was organized around the concept of 21st-century guilds: communities of individuals that share a common purpose or commitment to solving Earth’s most pressing challenges. Four ongoing guilds with active projects arose from the conference, with each guild addressing a critical aspect of a sustainable future.

Business & Environment: Capitalism Reinvented
(Project – CEO Summit)

Health & National Resilience: Building New Ecosystems
(Project – Community Gardens)

Planetary Survival: Sustainable Communities & the Commons
(Project – Eco-Tourism as Social Enterprise)

Next-Gen Legacies: Designing the Future Differently
(Project – International Environmental Emerging Leaders)

The Grove will be designing and facilitating planning meetings and conferences for each of the guilds in the year to come—including the NextGen guild, a gathering of young environmental leaders from the San Francisco Bay Area and around the world, and a diverse group committed to mentoring them.

The Institute at the Golden Gate advances environmental preservation and global sustainability by facilitating cross-sector dialogue and collaboration, encouraging new partnerships, and promoting action.

For more information about this program go to:

http://www.parksconservancy.org/our-work/igg/turning-the-tide/

We receive many questions from customers about the Drexler/Sibbet/Forrester Team Performance System^TM of products. We thought it would be helpful to compile some frequently asked questions with our best answers.

Q. I want to introduce the Team Performance System to a group. What products would you recommend?

A. As a facilitator or manager you will need some background on the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance Model^® (Model) and best practices that go with it.

Reading Material:
We recommend the Team Leader Guide—Strategies and Practices as the most comprehensive book for this. Another book, Team Startup—Creating Gameplans for Success, is packed with best practices specifically for starting teams. The Model Abstract is a short academic booklet that dissects the Model and its stages.
Presentation Material:
To present the Model we recommend the Model Wall Poster and the Model Overview, which can work as a handout or take-away for team members.
Hands-on Facilitation Tool:
The Team Performance Puzzle is a highly engaging way for teams to work together to quickly understand the Model. The Puzzle introduces the model in an engaging way and stimulates discussions about a group’s team experiences.

Q. How do I convince my stakeholders that it’s important to use the Model?

A. Teams focus on execution and getting results but, can be so involved in “the work” that they don’t understand the root causes of obstacles they continually encounter or know how to find solutions. The Model helps teams look at all the critical components of teamwork that support accomplishing “the work.” It gives team members a way to map their own development, a common non-blaming language to use (especially when things go wrong) and a set of best practices to improve performance.

Q. I have managers in my organization who need practical solutions for everyday team problems. What should I use?

A. We recommend the Team Leader Guide. Included on the inside back cover of this book is a map that orients users, in managerial language, to common team issues and points them to best practices to solve their team problems.

Q. When do I use the Team Performance Indicator tools?

A. Wait until a team has been operating together for some time (for example, three months) before using the Forrester/Drexler Team Performance Indicator^TM (Indicator). Teams can use the Indicator for a number of reasons: 1) to get a quick “where are we?” diagnostic and set a benchmark, 2) to encourage high performance by fine-tuning their practices, 3) or to help a team that is stuck.

You may not want to use the Indicator tools when the situation is unsafe, for example if jobs are at risk. You will most likely get unreliable results from the Indicator Self-Scorable Forms in an unsafe situation. If this seems to be the case, show the team the Model, and support a general conversation about areas for improvement, then nudge the team toward better performance with practices in the Team Leader Guide.

Q. Team members did their Indicator Self-Scorable Forms, I’ve got the results, now what?

A.
Reading Material:
The Indicator Guide to Interpreting Results will help you objectively view team members’ assessment of the team.

The Indicator Application Handbook is the most comprehensive toolkit for administering the Indicator, plan meetings around the Indicator, interpret Indicator results and facilitate practices for moving a team forward. It is the all-in-one binder for the Indicator.

Presentation Material:
To discuss results from the Indicator in a team meeting, the Indicator Summary Wall Chart is a helpful facilitation tool. There are multiple ways to present results on the Summary Wall Chart. You can average results ahead of time and chart those results for each stage of the model. Showing averaged results can be safer and may be a better choice if you don’t have time for a detailed discussion. The other way you can show results is to display individual scores with sticky dots. This technique shows more data and therefore is better for a detailed group discussion about where the team has consensus or disagreements.

For more answers to your popular questions about our tools, services, and workshops, visit the FAQs section of our website.

At a time when most everyone’s career is on the forefront of his or her mind, The Grove announces its latest product—The Career Compass.

Our new planning workbook allows individuals to “see the big picture” of their careers, understand their personal preferences, learn through research which career paths are best for them, and make informed decisions about their careers in the context of their larger life. The Career Compass benefits people at any stage of their career—from students planning ahead to professionals making a change.

The Career Compass combines The Grove’s award-winning visual-planning methodology with approaches and techniques used by professional career counselors. We designed the workbook to complement resources proven to be effective by the career-counseling industry, and packed The Career Compass full of information about helpful books and websites. The result is a nine-stage process that can be used for do-it-yourself career planning or with the help of a career counselor.

This 99-page workbook comes in a lightweight binder with folded templates that you can take out, work on and put back. The binder is a convenient place to store other career-planning documents and easily fits in a backpack, briefcase or filing cabinet.

The Career Compass was developed over several years by The Grove’s art director Tiffany Forner, and Mary Robins, a career counselor and friend of The Grove. Mary Robins has a master’s degree in career development and has worked in university career centers and in private practice. She was formerly president of the California Career Development Association and is currently a frequent presenter at career-development conferences.

A Great Tool for Counselors, Coaches, and HR Departments
This hands-on tool can be used in career-development courses or counseling sessions. Here’s what one coach said:

“The entire class loved the work and was amazed by how thought-provoking (the exercises) were, specifically the Work/Life Wheel. When it came down to the Day in the Life, the overall majority felt they could feel and visualize their goals. When I asked my final question …. Would you be interested in doing a workshop with just this material? … all thirty students who participated said yes, they would even come back to do it.

One of the most powerful tools that I have ever used or seen … (The Career Compass) comes across in a creative manner allowing the client to systematically break down the diverse areas of their life, reflect on those areas, plan around them and move forward!”

-CJ Johnson
Certified coach

Counselors and coaches will also love its flexibility as they choose which parts of the process to use in their practice. In addition to the 99-page binder, The Grove offers The Career Compass templates and instructions as bundled 10 packs.

The Second Addition to Our Compass Line of Products
This is our second Compass workbook, following The Personal Compass, The Grove’s visual workbook for life planning. Due to the success of The Personal Compass our customers have been requesting a similar tool that was more career-focused. We hope our latest personal workbook will help you plan for and achieve your career ambitions!

Visit our store to purchase The Career Compass.

Workshops for Career Professionals
The Grove is now offering two new workshops for counselors, coaches and consultants. The first is an introduction to Visual Tools for Career Professionals. The following day we offer a Career Compass workshop co-taught by career counselor Mary Robins and The Grove’s own Laurie Durnell. Take both workshops and come away with a whole new set of tools and techniques to help your clients through personal and career change.

Watch an Introductory Video
To get in-depth information about The Career Compass head to our video library to watch a recorded webinar with creators Tiffany Forner and Mary Robins.

As more of our practitioners are collaborating digitally, we’ve tried to help by updating our popular toolset—The Grove’s Digital Graphic Guides®. With this latest release, we have improved the overall graphic quality of these PowerPoint® templates, enhanced the text fields, and increased the ability to move and scale images. We’ve also added five new templates to the CD: Graphic Roadmap, In the Movies Vision, Meeting Startup—Meeting Room, Meeting Startup—Treasure Map, and Waves of Innovation.

We hear from our customers all the time about how they are using the Digital Graphic Guides. These flexible tools can be used to:

Prepare for Meetings (Face-to-Face Meetings or Virtual Meetings)
Use Digital Graphic Guides to prepare an agenda for your next meeting. The three Meeting Startup templates help you to set your agenda and receive feedback from meeting sponsors or clients. Show slides of additional Digital Graphic Guides to discuss the different exercises you propose to meet the objectives of a meeting.

Gather Data (Pre-Meeting or During a Meeting)
Send everyone a Digital Graphic Guide to complete. Meeting participants can use the slides to prepare their thoughts for a meeting (or project) or send filled-in guides to the meeting designer to identify themes. (Please note that this option requires a multi-user license.)

Run Virtual Meetings or Webinars
The digital versions of our Graphic Guides provide a visual focus for web conferences. Digital Graphic Guides provide a common platform for group discussion. Follow the steps in our Strategic Visioning Agenda Planning Kit for facilitating with Graphic Guides in a digital environment.

Manage Projects
Kick off your project with Digital Graphic Guides. Then continue to use the templates for subsequent meetings or project status reports. The Graphic Gameplan and the Graphic Roadmap are both big-picture, project-management tools that aid in long- or short-term projects.

Create Clear Meeting Follow-up Presentations
After a face-to-face or virtual meeting, use the filled-in templates as a way to provide a record of ideas that were discussed and agreements that were made. E-mail filled-in slides, print 8.5″ x 11″ booklets, or post completed slides on an organization’s intranet for the meeting participants.

Create Presentations
In addition to being a memory aid for meetings, Digital Graphic Guides can be included in presentations to inform other stakeholders of the work that your group is doing. Digital Graphic Guides can be used for stand-alone presentations or copied and pasted into other presentation shells.

With the improvements we’ve made to our Digital Graphic Guides, your communications will look better than ever. And, if you already own Version 3.0 of the Digital Graphic Guides, just call us at 415.561.2500 and we will upgrade you to Version 4.0 for $100. Visit our store to purchase Version 4.0 of the Digital Graphic Guides.

The Grove recently co-facilitated a web meeting for a group of ten consultants from various organizations around the U.S., about the future of graphic facilitation in a virtual environment. The session aimed to promote professional sharing, as well as experiential learning with virtual meeting tools. Participants came away with a better understanding of the skills needed to facilitate in virtual settings and plans to host more virtual “workouts.”

Tomi Nagai-Rothe, a senior consultant at The Grove, facilitated the web meeting, by graphically recording the conversation on an electronic tablet (Wacom Cintiq) attached to her Mac powerbook. After the session, Tomi transferred the hand-drawn information to a Context Map Graphic Guide® from The Grove’s Digital Graphic Guides® CD-based product. This provided a quick and simple way to distribute the participants’ thoughts and the outcomes of the group’s discussion from the virtual meeting, and made it easy for participants to remember and share the thinking with others. (For a larger view of the digital Context Map, “The Future of Graphic Facilitation for Virtual Meetings”, download the PDF.)

Contact us if you want to learn more about our virtual meeting tools—including the Strategic Visioning Agenda Planning Kit and our Digital Graphic Guides—or our one-on-one coaching service for leading virtual meetings.

With so many people operating under cost constraints, skill-based learning now comes in all shapes and sizes at The Grove. We’re focused on equipping you with the tools and skills you’ve asked for, as economically and flexibly as possible, so we’re offering a variety of formats to fit your needs and availability—from public and custom workshops to one-on-one coaching and webinars.

Coaching
Sometimes you only have one shot at getting it right. One-on-one coaching can be a lifeline for just-in-time meeting planning and process facilitation support as you lead key initiatives for your clients or within your organization. It’s also ideal for supplemental and ongoing learning as you fine-tune your skills and improve your practice. Grove senior consultants are available on an hourly and daily basis—by phone or in-person—for visual planning, graphic facilitation and team performance coaching. Call us at +1.415.561.6139 to schedule a coaching session.

House Calls!
The Grove offers workshops designed specifically around your needs, the size and skill-level of your team, and your budgets. The advantage, especially during these times of tight budgets, is in having workshop content built specifically around actual work you and your team need to do anyway—so working and learning are combined. Call our workshop coordinator at +1.415.561.6132 to find out more.

New Public Workshops at The Grove Future Center in San Francisco
In addition to offering our perennial favorites—the Principles of Graphic Facilitation, Strategic Visioning and Team Performance Workshops and—we’ve introduced a few new workshops this year:

A One-day Graphic Facilitation Tune-up for graduates of the Principles of Graphic Facilitation (PGF) who would benefit from structured practice sessions and suggestions for improvement, along with analysis of participant cases

A One-day Graphic Facilitation Master Class, also for PGF graduates, introduces advanced techniques for experienced practitioners and prepares participants for the Mastery Workshop.

The Introduction to Grove Visual Planning Workshop is a great way to get started using our Visual Planning Systems™, especially for those who recently ordered our new Strategic Visioning Agenda Planning Kit. Participants work with the Agenda Planning Cards and facilitate Best Practices that incorporate Graphic Guide® templates for use in face-to-face or web-based meetings.

In response to strong interest in The Personal Compass: A Workbook for Visioning and Goal Setting, we are offering One-day and Two-day Personal Compass Workshops for anyone anticipating a life transition. The focus will be on reflection, dialogue and exploring creative options.

Webinars and Web-based Training
Our How-To Webinars on a variety of topics give you a quick overview of the latest and greatest do-it-yourself tools from The Grove and a chance to pose questions to our senior consultants about their use. Watch our newsletter and e-announcements for coming opportunities.

In addition, watch our workshop schedule for new Web-based Training Workshops—coming soon.

Call our workshop coordinator at +1.415.561.6132 or email training@grove.com to find out more about any of these options, enroll in a public workshop, set-up a custom workshop at your offices or arrange for one-on-one process coaching.

When The Grove was asked by the Learning & Development (L&D) group in Chevron’s El Segundo refinery to help craft a communication to its employees and the organization at large, The Grove dove right in. Using a series of Graphic Guide® templates in what was essentially a half-day Strategic Visioning session, The Grove was able to quickly map L&D’s history, current context, vision and gameplan and use that as a basis for the development of a Grove Storymap™.

“Having templates in the working session streamlined the process tremendously,“ Ann Burress, L&D manager, said. “We were able to do it all in one day.”

Over the course of the next two months, the Storymap took shape and was reviewed by Burress and her team. With a 900-plus employee communication fair looming in October, Burress was eager to unveil the new communication piece to help people understand better the role L&D played in Chevron.

“The map was an exquisite part of the whole process,” Burress reflected months after the event. “The graphics are so engaging.”

Next up for Burress and her team is to broaden the communication plan to include those outside the Products organization. Her team has already created a narrated video of the map and hopes to add other communication materials to the effort in the coming months.

To learn more about Grove Storymaps browse our Case Studies or contact robert_pardini@grove.com.

In these do-it-yourself times many Grove customers are getting great success and value from our tools. The Community Clinics Initiative (CCI), a grant-making program established by Tides and The California Endowment that supports community health clinics in California, worked with The Grove’s Graphic Gameplan Graphic Guide® in its self-facilitated session.

The session, entitled “Networking for Community Health Grantee Gathering,” brought together one-hundred people from twenty-six grantee organizations across California. The event allowed grantees to share their work in a way that highlighted commonalities. CCI used the Graphic Gameplan to help grantees think strategically about visions and goals, and share information in an easily scanable format. Grantees were oriented to the template via conference call prior to the event and filled out their gameplans first thing in the morning. Twenty-six Graphic Gameplans were posted for a two-hour “gallery walk” during which people could see synergies in the work of clinics from San Diego in the south to Del Norte County in the north. The grantees loved the activity, and CCI reports that it was “the best part of the day.”

“CCI chose to use the gameplan template as a tool to help guide grantees as they reported on their projects, and to give everyone a consistent format for sharing progress.”

—Jane Stafford

Project Director
Community Clinics Initiative, a joint project of Tides and The California Endowment

Graphic Gameplans shown above by:
Winters Healthcare Foundation—Winters, California www.wintershealth.org
Vista Community Clinic—Vista, California www.vistacommunityclinic.org
Operation Samahan—San Diego, California www.sdAPI.org
Ravenswood Family Health Center, East Palo Alto, California www.ravenswoodfhc.org

An uncertain economy requires resetting your vision, assumptions, and plans. And tight budgets mean you’ll probably need the tools to do it yourself.

The Grove has developed the new Strategic Visioning Agenda Planning Kit to help you apply our Strategic Visioning Visual Planning System™ (VPS) to your most pressing organizational planning challenges. It’s flexible and even fun, and based on more than 30 years’ experience guiding organizations large and small through periods of change and new business challenges.

The Strategic Visioning Agenda Planning Kit is a portable, card-based system that provides choices for designing a strategic planning process and helps teams choose the right tools for use in virtual and/or face-to-face meetings. It references visual templates and guides that help leaders and teams reach alignment on critical strategies, and communicate these in ways that give everyone a clear line of sight to overall goals.

Our Strategic Visioning Agenda Planning Kit combines four key tools that provide leaders with an effective, flexible way to design one-day and two-day meetings, or a series of virtual meetings:

Agenda Cards
Cards in this deck display time-block agendas for three different types of Strategic Visioning meetings—a one-day agenda, a two-day agenda and a series of virtual meetings, each of which is roughly two hours in duration. Each item on the Agenda Cards refers the planner to activities contained in the companion Best Practice card deck.

Best Practice Cards
Many cards in this deck feature the Graphic Guides^® templates contained in the Strategic Visioning VPS toolkit. The cards provide a visual reference on one side, and a description of the template’s intended use, benefits, estimated time to complete, and steps and tips on the other side. Other cards in the deck provide ideas and how-to instructions for group techniques proven to get results, from productive sessions involving storytelling or envisioning success, to identifying crossroads issues.

Instructions
Simple instructions that help you orient to the cards, engage with clients or teams to plan meetings, design agendas that fit your needs and apply a series of best practices to your Strategic Visioning process sessions.

Strategic Visioning Process Outline
This detailed Process Outline provides a comprehensive introduction to the Strategic Visioning process, an explanation of The Grove’s Strategic Visioning™ Model, on which this Visual Planning System is based, and all the tools to support you and your team.

The new Strategic Visioning Agenda Planning Kit was designed to provide the functionality and convenience our consultants and customers have told us work best while working with their clients or teams. Senior managers from large organizations have been excited by its potential to put an easy-to-learn method of planning and running effective meetings in the hands of team leaders across their organization. They like the continuity and consistency in meeting results throughout longer-term strategic planning processes and widely dispersed teams.

High-performance organizations use planning practices like these on a routine basis.

At approximately 6” x 8” in size in its re-sealable protective case, the Strategic Visioning Agenda Planning Kit fits easily into a bag or briefcase and can be used by individuals or groups on the wall or tabletop.