Visual Teams E-Book

David Sibbet

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 533

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Graphic tools and visual solutions for team building and development Visual Teams uses visual tools and methods to help teams--both face-to-face and virtual--reach high performance in today's work environment. As teams become more and more global and distributed, visualization provides an important channel of communication--one that opens up the group's mind to improving work systems and processes by understanding relationships, interconnections, and big picture contexts. Visual Teams shares best practices and uses visualization as a power tool for process improvement by providing teams with a common language for high performance. The book: * Explores how any kind of team can draw on the principles and practices of creative design teams in the software, architectural, engineering, and information design professions * Introduces the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance(TM) Model and related tools--a system used throughout companies such as Nike, Genentech, Becton Dickinson, Chevron, and others Visual Teams presents a comprehensive framework, best practices, and unique visual tools for becoming an innovative, high-performance team.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Introduction

My Inspiration

My Motivation

Why “Visual Teams”?

The “West Coast” School of Facilitation

What Is in This Book?

A Summary of Visual Meetings for Those Who Haven’t Read It

Visual Meetings to Spark Your Own Imagination

Visual Meetings for Engagement

Visual Meetings for Thinking Together

Visual Meetings for Enactment

Visual Meetings and Visual Teams

Acknowledgments

I: What Is a Visual Team?

Chapter 1: Working Like Designers

Help Us Present to Management

What’s the Challenge?

Thinking Like a Designer

Initial Assumptions

How Could We Get True Engagement?

Breakthrough Idea!

Creating True Engagement

Solving a Prioritization Problem

Using Subteams and a Shared Workroom

Ground Rules Helped

Success on Success

Chapter 2: Why Be a Visual Team?

Start with Why YOU are Interested in Visual Teams

The Advantage of Visual Teams

Hindsight, Foresight, and Insight for Action

Are You a Workgroup or Team?

Appreciating New Groupware Tools for Teams

Visual Thinking Applied to Groupware Tools

Same Time/Same Place—Face-to-Face Meetings

Same Time/Different Place —Virtual Meetings

Different Time/Different Place—Internet Connection

Different Time—Same Place Meetings

Anytime/Anyplace—Social Media and Cloud Computing

Thinking About Teams Over Time

Lessons from River Guides

Visual Teams Work Panoramically

Chapter 3: A Graphic User Interface for Teams

The Gibb, Drexler, Weisbord Team-Building Model

Developing a New Model for Team Development

Words Are Just as Important as the Graphics

Creating and Sustaining in One Framework

Designing Graphic Language Into the Model

Why Number the Stages?

Graphics in the “Bouncing Balls”

Keys to Success

How to Use the TPM

Keys to When Orientation Challenges Are Resolved

When a Team Is Blocked at Stage 1, Members May Show . . .

Keys to When Trust Challenges Are Resolved

When a Team Is Blocked at Stage 2, Members May Show . . .

Keys to When Goal Clarification Challenges Are Resolved

When a Team Is Blocked at Stage 3, Members May Show . . .

Keys to When Commitment Challenges Are Resolved

When a Team Is Blocked at Stage 4, Members May Show . . .

Keys to When Implementation Challenges Are Resolved

When a Team Is Blocked at Stage 5, Members May Show . . .

Keys to When High Performance Challenges Are Resolved

When a Team Is Blocked at Stage 6, Members May Show . . .

Keys to When Renewal Challenges Are Resolved

When a Team Is Blocked at Stage 7, Members May Show . . .

Relating TPM to Tuckman

Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Cog’s Ladder

II: Leading Visual Teams

Chapter 4: So You’ve Just Been Promoted

What Are the Basics of Team Leadership?

Team Performance

Critical Leadership Tasks

Setting Direction and Creating Clear Charters

Going Beyond Goals to Purpose and Intention

Leadership and Mastery

How Much Performance Do You Want and Need?

Take Ownership for Your Own Intentions

Facilitating Relationships

The FIRO B Model

How Do You Lead Relationship Development?

Developing Competencies

Building Competency in Communication

Situational Leadership

Getting Everyone Involved in Making Sense Out of Things

Driving for Results

Chapter 5: Managing Four Flows of Activity

Thinking About Meetings, Teams, and Organization Change

Managing Your Attention

General Principles for Managing Attention

Managing Energy and Emotions

Managing Information and Communications

Managing Operations

Taking the Turn to Implementation

Chapter 6: Supporting Innovation

Face-to-Face for Orientation and Trust Building

Same Time/Different Place for Clarification and Commitment

Different Time/Different Place for Implementation Work

Different Time/Same Place Meetings

Managing the Decisions About Tools

Supporting Innovation

Visualizing Emergent Order

Drawing Your Way Into Insights

III: Visual Team Startup

Chapter 7: Visualizing Purpose

Teams Have A Wide Range of Purposes

Handling the Language Problem

Clarifying and Communicating Sponsor Expectations

Practices for Clear Chartering

Working as a Team to Orient to Purpose

Focusing on Values

Telling Group Histories

Providing Space for Orientation

Commemorating Your Purpose and Mission Graphically

Trusting Your Trained Intuition

Chapter 8: Seeing Yourself As a Team

Teams Sail Through Icebergs of Meaning

Creating Common Language

Common Language Best Practices

Create Settings for Relationship Building

Personal Best Team Experiences

Ladders of Abstraction

Sharing Experiences and Success Models

Assessing Competency

The Power of Group Norms

The Balance Beam of Trust

Chapter 9: Clarifying Goals & Action Plans

Clear Goals are The Most Important

The Graphic Gameplan

Why Is It Called a “Gameplan”?

Warm up Looking at Current Team Resources

Clarify Goals

Challenges in Setting Clear Goals

Aligning with Personal Goals

Identify Tasks

Identify Challenges

Agree on Success Factors

Applying the Graphic Gameplan Virtually

Getting Buy-in to Your Plan

Chapter 10: Consensus or Command?

What Are the Choices for Decision Making?

Loyalty and Power, the Drivers of Decision Culture

Collaborative Decision Making

Executive Decisions

Negotiation Style Decision-Making

Rule-Based Decision Making

Decision-Making Tactics

Allocating Resources and Roles

Look at Current and Future Plans for Resources

Role Decisions

Managing Your Organizational Infrastructure

Go Slow to Go Fast

IV: Sustaining Results

Chapter 11: Graphics & Project Management

Otis Loved the Idea of Large-Scale Visualization

Aligning the Business Functions

Human Resources Takes Off

Checking the Road Map

Results for the HR Team in Going Visual

Summary of Visual Tools for Implementation

Visuals for Implementing Large-Scale Projects

Blended Implementation Meetings

Chapter 12: Visualizing & Innovating

We Are Cleaning Up the Midwest Energy Sector

Innovation and Visualization Required

Visualization Emerges As a Core Tool

Supporting the Workgroups

Infrastructure Team Becomes a Real Team

Becoming High Performance

An Annual Meeting Tradition Is Born

High Performance As Artistry

Chapter 13: Assessments, Dialogues, & Sharing Rallies

Strategies for Renewal

Visualizing Progress and Needs: Team Performance Assessments

Mapping Strengths and Opportunities

Sharing Rallies

Creating an Agilent Action Learning Fair

Using Ritual to Facilitate Transition

Plans on Trial

Reporting on the Good News

Charrettes to Galvanize Action

V: Growing a Visual Team Culture

Chapter 14: Introducing Visual Teams

A Formula for Change—DxVxA>R

“D”—Build Discontent with the Current Condition

“V”—Develop a Personal Vision of Where You Can Succeed

“A”—Propose Some Concrete Action Steps

“R”—Respond to Resistance by Working with It Respectfully

Enrolling Leadership

Chapter 15: Developing Visual Team Skills

Communities of Practice

Formal Training Plays a Part

Install New Mental Models by Constructing Them

Play with the Team Puzzles

Use the TPM to Map Best Practices

Share Case Studies and Debrief with the Model

Encourage Meetings Without Slides

Make It Easy to Work Visually

Black Pen, Yellow Pen, and Red Pen People

Lead Team Development Experiences with Thorough Reflection

Explicit Training in Visual Meetings

Chapter 16: Shared Visual Language

Organizations Have Operating Systems

What Does It Mean to Be Organized?

A Guide to Mental Models

From Simple to Complex

Toward an Operating System for Visual Teams

“Chunking” and Nested Processes

Assuming Wholeness—Mechanism with Parts or Unified Organism?

Organizational Development Requires Thinking About Open Systems

Thinking from a Process Point of View

The Twofold Operator

The Threefold Operator— Past, Present, and Future

The Fourfold Operator—Thinking About Thinking

Nesting the Models

Process Theory, a Link Between Science and Organization

VI: New Technology Tools

Chapter 17: Visual Tools Come of Age

Why Not a Project on Graphic Tools?

A Groupware Project Is Born

Our First Groupware Team Meeting

Moving to High Performance

Groupware User’s Exchanges

Visiting MIT’s Capture Lab

Lessons on Teamwork

Fast Forward at IFTF

Chapter 18: Graphics for Distributed Teams

What Are the Choices for Virtual Visual Work?

Teleconferencing With Target Visuals

Web Conferences with Active Recording

Challenges with Graphic Recording a Web Conference

iPad Recording

Multichannel Conferences

SmartBoard Networks

Telepresence Rooms

The Challenge of Supporting Panoramic Thinking

Chapter 19: Team Rooms & the Net

Virtual Team Rooms

Project Management Software

Working in the Cloud

Dedicated Websites

Virtual Worlds

Is a Network a Team?

Chapter 20: Mobile Technology

Team Challenges Are Universal

Practices Are Transforming

Recent Developments Fueling Change

Implications for Teams

The Visual Team Advantage

Simplicity from Complexity

Pioneers of Change

Innovation Games

Inventing the Future of Management

1. Are We at a Momentous Turning Point in History?

2. Why Aren’t Innovations That Are Happening Catching On and Spreading?

3. What Challenges Need Attention?

4. Is the “Inventing” Group a Mirror of What’s to Come?

5. What Is the Role of Visualization?

We Come Full Circle

VII: Links, Tools, & Other Resources

Chapter 21: Websites & Bibliography

Team-Oriented Assessments and Tools:

Bibliography

Appendix

Index

Copyright © 2011 by The Grove Consultants International. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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ISBN 978-1-118-07743-6 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-118-15857-9 (ePDF); ISBN 978-1-118-15858-6 (eMobi); ISBN 978-1-118-15859-3 (ePub)

This book is dedicated to my inspirations, Arthur M. Young and Allan Drexler, and for all the young people worldwide who are working in teams and believe that collaboration is not only an effective but also a necessary competency in our times.

Introduction

Imagining Better Results for Teams

This book is an outgrowth of 35 years of working with organizations and their teams, helping people cooperate to achieve results. I’ve worked all over the world with large and small, private, nonprofit, and government organizations. During that time the principles and practices that guide this work have become clearer and stronger, and it is time to share these widely. In the past ten years particularly, the interest in these tools has increased dramatically, specifically the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance® Model (TPM) and a related system of tools that have been in development since 1980. Increasingly the system is a standard reference in schools of organizational development, and is the system of choice at leading companies such as Nike, Becton Dickinson, and Genentech/Roche. This book provides the often-requested introduction to the use of these tools.

My Inspiration

My work with teams is inspired by three things. First is the long-held conviction that if the communications and innovation strategies that successful design teams use were generally understood, then the whole field of team development would benefit. I’ve found that working like a designer broadens my repertoire of tools when it comes to starting, improving, or collaborating on work that requires shared commitment, innovation, and high performance. Simply put, a visual team is a team that works like designers.

My second inspiration is my work with the Theory of Process formulated by Arthur M. Young. I came across this work in the 1970s. It is the most comprehensive system I know of for integrating the findings of contemporary science with traditional wisdom about how nature works. It has provided an invaluable set of lenses for seeing the patterns of process that underlie any kind of workgroup or team.

My third inspiration is Allan Drexler. He inspired my professional work with teams in 1981 when I met him in a workshop I was leading on graphic facilitation. At the time Allan was (and still is) an organization development consultant working with companies such as General Mills and RR Donnelley. He was focusing on “matrix organizations” —the type of organization in which workers report to both functional managers in areas like manufacturing, human resources, and sales, and also to project managers of cross-cutting lines of business. The built-in conflicts these forms of organization generate are tough on teams. He was passionate about finding answers.

WHO IS THIS BOOK FOR?

New team leaders

Team members wanting better results

Managers wanting to support team environments

Leaders wanting to support creativity and innovation

Young people learning about groups

People interested in collaboration

Coaches

Human resources managers

Human resources development professionals

Consultants who work with teams

Nonprofits working with volunteers

At the time I met Allan I was immersed in working visually with groups and facilitating meetings and organizational strategy sessions. My book Visual Meetings: How Graphics, Sticky Notes, and Idea Mapping Can Transform Group Productivity, is a summing up of this long experience. But I was also very interested in the larger problems of organization effectiveness. As I began working with Allan at General Mills, we began the exciting adventure of creating the Drexler/Sibbet/Forrester Team Performance System (TPS), synthesizing his rich field research in teams and my deep explorations of group process. Our goal was to create a framework for teams as useful as the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicators (MBTI) is for individuals. This intention has carried on since, resulting in engagement in a wide variety of explicit team-development efforts at companies such as Nike, Mars, Procter & Gamble, Mentor Graphics, Otis Spunkmeyer, W. L. Gore, Hewlett Packard, Becton Dickinson, Chevron, Agilent Technologies, the San Francisco Foundation, and the National Park Service.

My Motivation

When Richard Narramore, my editor at John Wiley & Sons, broached the idea of writing a second book after Visual Meetings, I immediately thought of the need to show how visual meetings integrate over time to get real results. But writing about teams would be a different challenge. There are many, many resources on teamwork (a good number of the leading ones are listed in the back of this book). But I appreciated, being familiar with the field, that there still weren’t many books touching on the application of new design and visualization tools to teams. I also knew that Allan and my work on the TPM had developed some fresh approaches to explaining team dynamics through the power of visual language. I’m not a researcher, but I believe that senior practitioners should share their experience as a contribution to the field. I agreed to write Visual Teams.

Since that commitment another deeper motivation has surfaced. I have been president of my own company, The Grove Consultants International, since 1977 (it’s gone through a few name changes but is basically the same business). In that time I’ve been a team leader of our own and client projects many, many times. I’ve also trained a large number of people who have learned their facilitation and consulting craft at The Grove. I know that collaboration can result in amazing, creative results. But I also know that collaboration is a learned capability, and effective teamwork is increasingly challenged by 24/7 work environments, virtual work, ideological divisiveness, and lean, overworked organizations. I am also acutely aware that the scale and complexity of problems in our cities, states, country, and world are also increasing. I see young people in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and in Asia calling for this in their own way. I see my own children and grandchildren heading into that same world. So my motivation has flowed well beyond my personal interest in teams. I feel a deep obligation to share what I’ve learned in a way that young people can benefit.

Why “Visual Teams”?

Visual work has always been a feature at The Grove and in my consulting with teams. It stems from a lifetime passion for design and visual language. The success of Visual Meetings in reaching a new audience of beginning consultants, teachers, facilitators, and human resources staff convinced me that teamwork needs the same contribution.

A WHOLE NEW MIND

Daniel Pink introduces his popular book with this clear stance:

“The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind—computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBSs who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind—creators, empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers. These people—artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, counselors, big picture thinkers—will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.”

(A Whole New Mind, 1)

I’m using the term “visual teams” to point at three developments that in the last 20 years have significantly broadened the choices of how to work together visually to achieve results.

1. The evolution of traditional design tools such as white boards, markers, large paper, tape, cameras, sticky notes, and other tools. They are both higher quality and increasingly interactive digitally.

2. The explosion of groupware and social media since the early 1990s. Groupware includes all of the software tools designed for group collaboration, including the social networking tools. Most of these integrate text, graphics, and video, making it possible to work visually across a wide range of media.

3. An accelerating interest in “design thinking” and innovation. Competition from emerging economies increases every day and puts a premium on creativity. The popularity of Daniel Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, is the crest of a wave of research on cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and emotional intelligence, all pointing to reasons why working more like designers and artists is not only possible but desirable.

We live in a time in which graphics and text are dancing together continuously on our websites, smart phones, magazines, ads, and television. Was there ever a culture more visually stimulated and literate? There is no reason why teams cannot take advantage of all of this. Perhaps they do not realize how easy it is.

The “West Coast” School of Facilitation

The Grove is part of a West Coast (of the United States) school of facilitation and organizational work heavily influenced by the way designers and architects work. (It’s spreading rapidly, so many of you wouldn’t associate it just with the West Coast.) For several years after college I was determined to become an architect and even enrolled in school. But a job offer from the Coro Foundation turned me in a new direction toward leadership development in the public sector (I was a Coro Fellow in Los Angeles right after college). But my interest in design sustained itself as I took my passion for visualization into the realms of information architecture, graphic design, learning materials design, and process design. Initially I supported seminars with Coro Fellows as they learned from their field experiences, and then worked for years on strategy-consulting projects. I developed a strong practice helping architecture firms with their strategies, and have worked extensively in Silicon Valley with design teams at Apple, HP, Agilent Technologies, Juniper Network, and other high-tech firms. I know how interface designers, software designers, chip designers, and other people in “maker” cultures work.

THE IMPORTANCE OF DESIGN THINKING

Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO is one of the leaders in the movement toward design thinking. He writes:

Design thinking taps into capacities we all have but that are overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices. It is not only human-centered: it is deeply human in and of itself. Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as functionality, to express ourselves in media other than words and symbols. Nobody wants to run a business based on feeling, intuition, and inspiration, but an overreliance on the rational and the analytical can be just as dangerous. The integrated approach at the core of the design process suggests a “third way.”

(Change by Design, 4)

As I explained in Visual Meetings, both David Straus and Michael Doyle, founders of Interaction Associates (IA), were trained architects. They pioneered facilitation as a profession in the 1970s, and one of their first projects was writing Tools for Change with a Carnegie Foundation grant. Its goal was showing teachers and others how to use the problem-solving approaches of architects and designers in the classroom!

Geoff Ball, who worked with Doug Englebart and was another pioneer in graphic facilitation, was trained as an electrical engineer. We all approached collaboration the way that architects approach design—playing with patterns and prototypes, visualizing contexts and visions, modeling proposals, and recording everything on paper. My work with Apple Computer during the 1980s convinced me that working like designers was a key to innovation.

The new technologies coming out of Silicon Valley have had a shaping influence. During the 1990s, I led The Grove side of a strategic partnership with the Institute for the Future (IFTF) in Palo Alto on the Groupware Users Project, one of the first efforts to research and map the growing amount of technology and software directly designed to support teams and collaboration. The IFTF and The Grove recruited what grew to be four dozen client organizations and agencies. They supported us in writing one of the first books on groupware, holding twice-a-year user exchanges, and conducting several focused research efforts and reports each year. These tools have evolved to define a huge suite of choices for teams that are empowering distributed work, applications of visualization and multimedia to meetings, and ever-expanding possibilities for innovation. The project continues to this day as the IFTF Technology Horizons work has pushed into the areas of social networking, crowd sourcing, games, and simulations.

Visual Teams pulls all these threads together in a book showing how your teams can work like designers, even if you can’t draw or don’t think of yourself that way.

As you will find in one of the chapters on the use of technology with teams, the TPM guided our work with IFTF and provided a structure for thinking about what-to-use-when across the full range of predictable stages of team development. We considered that and other methodological tools such as Group Graphics as forms of groupware.

What Is in This Book?

Visual Teams pulls all of these threads together in a book showing how your teams can work like designers even if you can’t draw or don’t think of yourself as visually inclined. The book is written in seven sections that each have several chapters. Each chapter is summarized on the section pages, so I will just provide a general overview here. If you find that a given chapter is already familiar to you, the book is designed so that you can skip ahead to the relevant sections. It’s also designed for having as much fun scanning through and reading all the side stories as diving in for a full read.

Section I, “What Is a Visual Team?” provides an overview of visual teams and the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance Model, the working language of the book. Its chapters elaborate on the case I’m making here that design professions, such as architecture, graphic design, information design, software design, website design, and even urban design, hold a storehouse of methods and practices for the rest of you who might not consider yourselves designers. It provides you with some initial tools to assess what kind of team you are leading and what the opportunities are for becoming a visual team. The chapter on the TPM will provide you with a panorama of all the key challenges and success factors for any kind of team, including visual teams, and indicates the specific opportunities for becoming more visual and where it provides benefits.

GRAPHIC GAMEPLAN FOR NEW TEAM STARTUPS

Section III will detail how to use this most popular of all The Grove’s Graphic Guides. An earlier form was also the first graphic template I ever saw used—by Geoff Ball—and convinced me to jump into graphic recording years ago. It builds off of a deeply embedded metaphor—that planning is like a journey. A good action plan describes where you are, where you want to go, and how you plan to get there.

Section II, “Leading Visual Teams,” directly addresses the situation in which a lead performer has been placed in charge of a team for the first time and wants to succeed at the job. If you are in this position, this section will describe tried-and-true principles and practices. It identifies the four big tasks of a team leader, and the inner work required to be an excellent one. It frames the challenge of leaders as one of integrating attention to purpose, energy, information, and operations in a smooth, ongoing flow of work. I also step back and reflect on how more senior leaders can work to support an environment of innovation, and use assessment tools to develop ongoing teams. As you will come to see, an effective team is a partnership between internal leadership and external organizational support. Managing this connection is a key leadership job.

Section III, “Visual Team Startup—Creating Trust, Focus, & Commitment,” steps you through what the TPM calls the “creating” stages of teamwork. These chapters provide specific guidance on orientation to purpose, trust building, clarifying goals, and committing to a common direction. Workgroups that don’t have to cooperate closely while actually doing the work will benefit a great deal from this section. You will also find that the more ambitious your goals are in terms of high performance, the more investment you will need to make in these early stages of teamwork. They are the foundation upon which later stages depend.

VISUAL LANGUAGE

Bob Horn is one of the first to write comprehensively about visual language. He says:

We are just at the beginning of another communications revolution—the modern equivalent of the one that Gutenberg sparked (with the printing press). The visual language revolution is taking place alongside other communications revolutions—the World Wide Web, animation, three-dimensional virtual reality, and intelligent and interactive visual elements. The new mix of technologies and techniques will irreversibly alter communications in the 21st century.

(Visual Language, 240)

Section IV, “Sustaining Results—Innovating for High Performance,” deals with the three stages of team performance after committing to be a true, interdependent team. I share tools for project management and tracking progress, making persuasive visual presentations, using graphic communications and rich metaphors to guide and inspire high performance, and ways of using visualization to support knowledge sharing and organizational improvement in the area of teaming. I also share the story of a high-performing team working to create a multistate environmental cleanup network.

Section V, “Growing a Visual Team Culture—Thinking BIG About Opportunities,” specifically deals with how you can introduce the idea of visual meetings and visual teams to your manager and organization. It argues for ongoing learning and development in this area, and the importance of having robust shared language for teaming—especially if your organization is working globally and/or over multiple sites. The TPS, because it is based on the Theory of Process, functions like an operating system for groups. In those organizations where visual teams have flourished, the human resources development people who supported the trainings found the approach informed much of their other training work as well.

Section VI, “New Technology Tools—A Revolution in Visual Collaboration,” directly addresses the opportunities for virtual teams with new visualization software. This section opens with the rich story of the Groupware Users Project team, a truly high-performing visual team. You can see through the lens of this story how the tools and methods described come to life in a real, ongoing team. Specific chapters on web and teleconferencing, tablets, team rooms, social networks, and mobility follow the IFTF story. I am not trying to write a comprehensive book here on virtual work, but to share the tried-and-true visualization methods we’ve explored and know work well. I do speculate on where this all seems to be heading.

Section VII, “Links, Tools, & Other Resources,” suggests sources for developing a more general understanding of teams. The Grove engaged two Coro Fellows in civic affairs to help us research the area and document the leading tools other than those provided by The Grove. We’ve identified websites that have particularly useful information, as well as links to the many tools The Grove provides.

VISUAL MEETINGS BOOK NOW IN FIVE LANGUAGES

This initial book on how to use interactive graphics, sticky notes, and idea mapping for group collaboration has been a best seller. It was published in August of 2010 by John Wiley & Sons and is now in Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, Korean, and German. Visual Teams shows how to apply these ideas across the full arc of a team process.

A Summary of Visual Meetings for Those Who Haven’t Read It

Visual Teams builds on my book Visual Meetings. For those of you who haven’t read it, the following summary should provide some context. As I said in the introduction to that book, I’ve written many books for professional graphic recorders, facilitators, and consultants that we’ve published through The Grove. Visual Meetings with John Wiley & Sons was written for the legions of people who are not artists or necessarily good at drawing but still want to get in on the visual revolution.

Visual Meetings describes how graphics and visual language can support group process through the entire cycle of learning, from IMAGINING through ENGAGEMENT through THINKING to ENACTMENT. With many examples and stories, I paint a picture of how the design environment of the West Coast of the United States gave rise to highly visual and design-oriented ways of working in meetings, far afield from the specific design professions of architecture, engineering, graphic design, and other fields. (This point of view will be expanded upon in this book.)

Visual Meetings to Spark Your Own Imagination

To begin with, I explore how visualization can be used to have meetings with yourself to stimulate your own imagination, through journaling, metaphoric thinking, diagramming, and other visualization strategies. “Paper is brain interface” as Paul Saffo, a forecaster member of the Groupware Users Project, liked to say. Drawing is the way we develop new perspective, especially in regard to thinking about systems. I suggested ways to used forced metaphors to expand your thinking about your own practices and business, by, for instance, comparing your business to a garden and identifying all the plants as different kinds of clients.

MODEL FROM VISUAL MEETINGS

Visual Meetings is organized around this group-learning model. It illustrates the ways visualization is used for all four stages in the insight-to-action process.

I recommended people read Dan Roam’s excellent books, Back of the Napkin: How to Use Graphics for Selling and Problem Solving and Unfolding the Napkin, in addition to Visual Meetings.

Visual Meetings for Engagement

The second part of Visual Meetings deals with interactive graphic communication as a superior form of engagement for groups. I compress some of the rich information in a comprehensive book called Graphic Facilitation: Tapping the Power ofGroups Through Visual Listening (available through The Grove) and demonstrate that anyone can create the simple frameworks and icons used in visual meetings. I provide a graphic overview of the way we train people to unlock their drawing capability by having them practice at large scale, and some of the more common ideographs and pictographs people use in graphic recording.

Chapters also detail how sticky notes, dot voting, group drawing, templates, and other strategies let people get their hands directly on information. I make the argument that having groups interact with partially completed frameworks and displays greatly increases involvement. I reflect on presentation software such as PowerPoint. While appreciating the extent to which it is an excellent, individual, prototyping environment, it many times results in a pushy kind of presentation that all too often isn’t very involving. (If you want to learn to use PowerPoint well read Nancy Duarte’s book, Slideology, and her companion book, Resonance.) In Visual Meetings the chapters on sticky notes go into great detail on how to use these extremely flexible tools.

Visual Meetings for Thinking Together

In the third section of Visual Meetings I cover the Group Graphics Keyboard, a framework for thinking about seven archetypal types of displays. This Keyboard is an application of the Theory of Process to visual work with groups, and looks at displays as a dual process of display creating and display perceiving. The simpler visualization processes become foundations for the more complex ones, just like in natural systems. There are detailed explanations of each Group Graphic format and examples. I follow this with a description of The Grove’s Visual Planning templates (called Graphic Guides) with lots of examples. I will be describing the ones that are especially relevant for teams in this book in greater detail.

The chapters on visual thinking argue that all systems thinking is based on display making—distinguishing the parts so you can look at relationships. I cover the most common types such as Mind Mapping, causal loop diagrams, total quality management charts, and the like.

Visual Meetings for Enactment

The final step in the learning cycle is to take ideas to action. The chapters in this part of Visual Meetings show how action plans, road maps, and Grove Storymaps support getting results from meetings. These tools are also critical ones for teams and will be treated in much more depth in this book. Visual Meetings describes how involving leaders in creating their own visual communications builds buy-in and ownership.

WORDS FOR TEAMS

At the conclusion of their internship with The Grove, Daniel Cheung and Victoria Bensen gave a presentation to staff on what they found about tools for teams.“The word teams seems to be used to cover the entire work of people in organizations,” they said. “Some even said the word is so overused that it doesn’t communicate anymore.” They reported that one person said that “collaborative work” is becoming a more common designation. Another distinguished between “workgroups” and “teams.” I began writing down all the words I’d heard used for groups that need to cooperate to get results. Here is my list. What’s yours?

TeamWorkgroupTask groupTask forcePartnershipDuoTrioFoursomePartyBandFamilyCouncilCommitteeCrewFunctionUnitSquadGangPossePodCellTroopTroupeCohortForceCampCommunity of practice

The final chapters look at how visual meetings are being amplified by new technology. I touch on tablets, web conferences, object-oriented programming, and virtual worlds.

Visual Meetings also has a good resource section for anyone wanting to put these ideas into practice.

SCAN OR READ?

This book was designed to be scanned like a website, read like a book, or both. The items in these boxed margins contain stories, tips, and checklists relating to the content being addressed in the chapter.

You may notice that some boxes have dark blue heads with reversed type and numbered steps, such as the example here. These are intended to be exercises that you can do and are written in that spirit: as instructions.

All of the sample charts and tools included in this book have captions that explain them.

The graphic template designs included from The Grove are copyrighted and available for purchase at our online store: www.grove.com. Ideas, of course, can’t be copyrighted. My hope is that the abundance of examples included in this book will encourage your own templates and charts.

EXERCISES

1. Read through the exercise once.

2. Dip into the book to get some of the context.

3. Take a break and do the exercise with your team.

Visual Meetings and Visual Teams

A visual team, in one sense, is any team that is adept at visual meetings! However, in actual practice, visualization works well beyond meetings to support the in-between communications, reporting out and evaluating results as well. Visuals provide a common language for teamwork across the entire spread of the organization. Katzenbach and Smith, the McKinsey & Company consultants who wrote the widely respected book, The Wisdom of Teams, point out that one of their “uncommon findings” was that “many of the highest performing teams . . . never actually thought of themselves as a team until we introduced the topic” (Katzenbach 1993, page 4). I think the same is true of visual teams.

You could think of this book as the summing up of a professional lifetime of developing strategies for collaborative work. Whether or not you think of yourself as a team, if you are interested in how people can work better together you will get a bushel full of good ideas. In a time of networks, multiple team assignments, virtual work, and even virtual organizations, the common idea about what a team is and isn’t is evolving rapidly. I hope this book helps build your confidence so that you can become part of a bounty of innovation in how people can work more effectively together.

Acknowledgments

I would love to repeat all the acknowledgments I made in Visual Meetings about all the people at The Grove Consultants International, the International Forum of Visual Practitioners, the Organizational Development Network, the Pathwalkers, the Thought Leader Gathering, and Coro who have been so helpful in shaping my career as a visual practitioner, but the list is long. Here, I want to give special thanks to those who have supported my development as an organization consultant and team developer.

Allan Drexler was my mentor and teacher for most of the 1980s and into the 1990s. Our companies are still partnering successfully in the shared ownership of the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance Model. We cocreated the National Training Labs five-day workshop on Creating and Sustaining High Performance Teams—conducted continuously since the early 1980s by Allan and Russ Forrester, who joined our training team in the early 1980s. Russ and Allan have evolved an assessment business built around the TPM, and authored the Forrester/Drexler Team Performance Indicator, a self-scoring assessment, and its companion field book. They live on the East Coast of the United States and have teamed on many projects.

It was my good fortune to meet Arthur M. Young, the developer of the Theory of Process, when he first published it in 1976. I was part of his Institute for the Study of Consciousness from 1976 through the early 1980s and continue a relationship with Young’s primary students. The TPM is one of the most successful applications of this theory to organizations, and was recognized as such by the Anodos Foundation, which is carrying on Young’s work. A colleague, Jack Saloma, now deceased, introduced me to Young and was an intellectual partner in developing some of The Grove’s organizational applications. Frank Barr and Michael Buchele also contributed, as we wrestled through their application of the theory to bioprocess.

My experiences teaming with the Institute for the Future has been integral to understanding the TPM applied to new technologies and supported by tools for visualization. Thanks to Bob Johansen, distinguished fellow at IFTF, as the leader of our groupware team. We were joined by Paul Saffo, Andrea Saveri, Alexia Martin, Robert Mittman, and Stephanie Schacter from IFTF. Tomi Nagai-Rothe, Suzyn Benson, and Mary O’Hara-Devereaux participated from The Grove.

Mary O’Hara-Devereaux came to The Grove from collaborating on a project at the University of Hawaii’s Medex program. With her help we applied the TPM to training nurses in Kenya and Costa Rica. Later we collaborated on writing the book Global Work. During that same time I was working with the training team at Mars, Inc. (led by Martin Prentice) to design a worldwide facilitation training centrally focused on the TPM. This team was instrumental in teaching us how to train with the TPM cross culturally. Albert Gibson, Mary Jane Eckart, Eileen Matthews, and Joan Scarrott all deserve special thanks. Eileen and Joan became masterful graphic facilitators in the process. Recently Mars supported a Russian translation of our Team Leader’s Guide.

Joan McIntosh deserves special thanks. As The Grove’s director of marketing during the early 1990s, she codeveloped with me an application of Team Performance at 3M, and became so extensively involved that she ended up moving to the Twin Cities, where 3M is located. She has been a steady advisor and friend. As founder of the Change Agent’s Café, Joan made it possible for a network of us to work with these ideas for nearly 20 years. I owe special thanks to Lenny Lind, Sandra Florstedt, Meryem LeSaget, Jim Ewing, and John O’Connell, an early pioneer in new games. Meryem is a consultant and professional writer about new management ideas who included the TPM in her French book, Manager Intuitif. She has become a student of the Theory of Process and its other applications. Another Grove partner, Vaugn Strandgaard, led in bringing the TPS to Denmark and Europe. Jonas Kjellstrand and Roy Bartilson helped in bringing the system to Sweden.

The TPS as a system would not have developed without amazing client-partners and the help of my longtime colleague at The Grove, Ed Claassen, who worked with me on many of the client projects. At Agilent Technologies, our longtime partners Christine Landon, Leslie Camino-Markowitz, and Teresa Roche facilitated the TPS being included in a new first-line manager’s training program in the late 1990s. Ed worked with myself and Bobby Pardini, and Linda Castillo at Agilent, in creating the first Team Leader Guide. Tony Jimenez at Chevron worked closely with Ed to develop a self-teaching team performance module for their manager trainings. Wendy Witterschien at Becton, Dickinson and Company worked with Bobby Pardini at The Grove to adapt these materials to a flash-based, self-learning program available system-wide in that company. Kathy O’Connell and Kathryn Santana Goldman were codevelopers at Genentech/Roche of a team refresher application of the TPM. Nancy Stern brought in Strategic Visioning templates. Jennifer Clonmell had the TPM translated into five langauages for use at Citicorp. At Nike, Inc., Hannah Greenfeld, Steve Bence, Jigna Desai, and Nate James were instrumental in testing The Grove’s new Team Performance On-Line Survey and contributing to a greater understanding of the integration of the TPM and other team development models. Most recently, W. L. Gore supported worldwide team training. Ed and I traveled to Germany, New Jersey, Arizona, and China, learning a great deal about how widely practices vary within a common set of archetypal challenges. As a colleague, Ed’s intellectual partnership has been invaluable.

I also owe a lot to those clients who have championed visual meetings applied to their teams. Thanks to Susan Copple and Jim Lyons of HP, who created an opportunity to work with the BLAST team. Thanks to Joel Birnbaum, former head of HP Labs, and Barbara Waugh and Srinivas Sukimar. John Schiavo, CEO of Otis Spunkmeyer, and his team have been champions, including Ahmad Hamade, Steve Ricks, and Robyn Meltzer in particular. Thanks to Scott Kriens, former CEO of Juniper, who sponsored ambitious applications of visual meetings, and Joceyn Kung, the consultant who introduced us. I learned about design organizations working with Bryce Pearsall and Dale Hallock, leaders of the DLR Group, and Jon Petit, Griff Davenport, and Steve McKay, DLRG partners with whom I’ve had many discussions about how design teams work. Thanks to Chris McGoff at The Clearing for collaborating on bringing this kind of work to government. My work with Tom Wujec and Autodesk have added immeasurably to my understanding of the role of design. In that regard I also owe thanks to Dave Gray of XPlane (now Dachis Group), Kristina Woolsey at the Exploratorium, Luke Hohmann of Innovation Games, and Bob Horn of MacroVU®.

This book would not have been possible without The Grove team. Laurie Durnell, our director of consulting, and Tomi Nagai-Rothe, a senior consultant, teach the TPS and adapt its tools to ever widening groups. Donna Lafayette manages our team performance workshops. Tiffany Forner, our art director, and Bobby Pardini, director of design services, have jumped in repeatedly. Rachel Smith, director of The Grove’s digital facilitation services, helped on the chapters on the new technology. Anne Merkelson and Julia Sibbet helped with insights into social media and marketing. Thom Sibbet, director of client services, has been a close link to our team performance customers. Our customer support team—Noel Snow, Andrew Underwood, and Ed Palmer (our IT manager)—has provided very practical feedback about how clients use the tools. Very little of my work life would be possible without the support of The Grove’s chief administration officer and my assistant, Megan Hinchliffe. I also want to thank Daniel Chueng and Victoria Benson, the Coro Fellows who interned with The Grove and helped develop the bibliography. A special thanks goes to the John Wiley & Sons team—Richard Narramore, my editor, Deborah Shindlar, senior production editor, and Lydia Dimitriadis, editorial assistant.

A final note of thanks to my wife, Susan, a poetry teacher and writer herself. We share our San Francisco studio. Her unstinting support of my writing makes it a joy to undertake.

I: What Is a Visual Team?

Using Graphics Across the Whole Workflow

I: What Is a Visual Team?

Chapter 1: Working Like Designers The book begins with a link to Visual Meetings and the idea that the ways of working coming out of design teams in Silicon Valley and other centers of innovation are transforming the way teams work in general. Themes in the book are introduced through the story of the Boise LasterJet Advanced Sales Teams.

Chapter 2: Why Be a Visual Team? This chapter explores the difference between workgroups and teams, and shares a tool for assessing the difference. It introduces a graphic portrayal of the types of teams and some opportunities for visualization.

Chapter 3: A Graphic User Interface for Teams This chapter describes the TPM, its key success factors, and reviews my work with Allan Drexler in setting out to create a “Meyers-Briggs” of team building. It will review the assumptions we made in its design and provide pointers for deeper study. I explain the reasons for moving from a “building” to a “performance” metaphor and using a “bouncing ball” as a graphical user interface for thinking about team process. It will also show how this framework bridges to other popular visual frameworks for thinking about teams.

1. Working Like Designers

Why Visual Teams Get Results

Let us begin our exploration of visual teams with a story about a task group at Hewlett Packard (HP) that deeply shaped my thinking about what was possible when a team learns to use visualization to support its work. Then, in the following chapter, I’ll describe the specific, practical ways visualization can help your team. Remember, this book is designed to be scanned as well as read, so if any chapter isn’t relevant to your situation then just skip ahead!

Help Us Present to Management

When Susan Copple called and asked if I would help a team at HP’s Boise Printer Division prepare a visual presentation for top management, I didn’t suspect that we both were on the edge of a breakthrough assignment that would transform the work of my company, The Grove Consultants International, and many HP divisions that picked up on our success. I initially thought it was just an interesting communication design job.

“Our team is a cross-functional task group that has been assigned the job of finding our next billion dollar businesses,” Susan said. “We’ve been at it for about two months, but are running into some challenges in figuring out how to present our findings. Can you help us design our presentation of findings to top management?”

We have been assigned the job of finding our next billion dollar businesses . . . Can you help us design the presentation?

Susan was the quality professional on the team and had worked with me before. She told the team that I was a designer who helped with presentations, even though most of my work at the time was as a strategy consultant, facilitating visual meetings and change processes. But several decades of visual work and design of many different reports and output media from meetings left me quite experienced in what is now thought of as “information design” or “presentation design.”Susan knew this. She also knew the team wasn’t looking for help with its work, but how it could communicate it.

TELL ME YOUR HISTORY

At the beginning of any team consultation it makes sense to know how it came to be and what work has been accomplished so far. This is the way we began with the Boise LaserJet Advanced Sales Team as they began to consider how to design presentations to top management from their research finding the next big opportunities for the LaserJet division at HP. Mapping the story visually is a guaranteed way to get everyone talking.

At that time in the mid-1990s, the Boise Printer Division was one of the most successful within HP, and had in fact set records as the company’s first billion-dollar revenue division. Personal computers and LaserJet printers that often accompanied them had exploded in sales growth following the initial HP printer’s introduction in 1984. Profits rolled in. But successes in high tech don’t last forever. Top management picked Jim Lyons, one of its most creative marketing leaders known for new ideas, as well as some other promising staff at their Boise site to conduct a two-month research project and recommend where to look for the division’s next big wins.

What’s the Challenge?

Jim, Susan, and some of the team met me in a conference room at the San Francisco airport on one of their trips to headquarters. I brought large paper and magic markers. I asked team members to introduce themselves and tell me the story of their project. I found out they were called the BLAST team, for Boise LaserJet Advanced Sales Team. They repeated the goal Susan had shared with me, which was to identify the next multi-billion dollar business opportunities for their division. Soon I had six-to-seven feet of graphics detailing out how they received the request, conducted internal research by phone and e-mail, held many meetings to begin making sense of their findings, and were now facing the job of figuring out how to report that to their management. They didn’t want their report to be the end of it. They really liked their ideas and wanted to see the division move on them.

But I began to feel that something was amiss. It was a gut feeling, not anything anyone said really, but the team didn’t feel at ease with its work. Jim was a very bright, somewhat tightly wound manager who had lots of ideas. Another engineer and a business-planning professional were pretty active in the conversation. Trusting my instinct, I asked if there was a problem.

“Yes,” Jim said. He went on to explain that in the relatively recent history of the division, two prior teams had been assigned similar projects, and at the point of sharing their results ran right into a wall of resistance and even hostile response from upper management. “It was a career-limiting experience for many on the team,” he said. This new team was scared stiff that it would come to the same end. So this was the underlying reason they wanted outside help. They simply weren’t confident that their traditional strategies would work. This challenge gave them the courage to step into becoming a truly visual team, innovate, and surpass all their original thinking about what was possible in a situation like theirs.

Thinking Like a Designer

At this point in the meeting I was working like a designer. My mind was racing with possible “solutions” to their problem, even though I really didn’t know enough yet to be confident of any. But this is what designers do—they let themselves play with ideas in various stages of realization. Let me depart from the story a bit, and take you inside some of the thoughts that at the time were flashing through my mind.

Design teams know that something needs to be produced to fulfill specific goals and objectives, often within specific constraints and criteria.

Even though there are many kinds of design, design teams have much in common across all disciplines. Design teams know that something needs to be produced to fulfill specific goals and objectives, often within specific constraints and criteria—budget limitations, specified materials, and the amount of time that can be spent on the project. The excitement of design is being creative within these constraints.

Design is also, in most cases, a collaboration among many different people who have a stake in the outcome. Anybody who has worked this way much, be it designing a meeting, designing a new organization, designing a presentation, or designing a product or piece of software, knows that early ideas will evolve as users give feedback. In software design in particular, a process called “agile development” explicitly presents solutions that are just good enough to deliver some value, and then iterates and improves them at a rapid pace. Brainstorming many ideas, playing around with tests and what are sometimes called “prototypes,” working quickly, and making improvements are all basic tools in a designer’s tool kit.

Brainstorming many ideas, playing around with tests and what are sometimes called “prototypes,” working quickly, and making improvements are all basic tools in a designer’s tool kit.

If this sounds like a description of any productive project team, you are reading my mind. Many project teams are implicitly being asked to work like designers and come up with something specific. This is precisely what brought me to write this book. After years of working with visual meetings and applying many tools like the ones I just described, I’ve come to appreciate that design thinking is a generally useful way for any team to work that needs to both produce results and be creative.

I knew what the goal of the BLAST team was: multi-billion dollar businesses. I also appreciated another hidden goal, which was to have this experience be a career-building experience, not a career-limiting one for the team itself. And I appreciated the constraint of only having a few more months to pull everything together, and of having the report presented to one of the most successful management teams in the entire HP business—the vaunted LaserJet management!

Initial Assumptions

From the time of the first phone call, some initial assumptions about the BLAST team’s challenge guided my work. These are products of many different experiences and study of organizations. It’s the mental “software” of any consultant or designer. The key is to be aware of them.

Successful people (and organizations) may think they are open to new ideas, but they have a lot of attachment to current success.For people to accept anything new, they need to experience and feel, not just think about it.Slide presentations are often one of the least-involving ways to engage people’s feelings.I immediately assumed that the management group to which the BLAST team would report was very smart and very happy with its success, and needed to be fully involved in the excitement and potential of the new ideas if they were to have a prayer of coming true.

How Could We Get True Engagement?

I knew from long experience with visual meetings that using large murals is a very involving way to present. They allow the user to tell stories and hop around in response to questions in ways that a fixed presentation can’t. Susan knew of The Grove’s work in this area for other parts of HP and I assumed that was probably one of the reasons she thought I could help. The team immediately agreed to avoiding slides, but didn’t have experience with being a visual team in a true sense. And I didn’t think eye-catching murals would be involving enough.

I then reflected on what I know is true universally: that everyone LOVES to see drawings and sketches unfold in real time. But it didn’t seem possible to use graphic facilitation or live recording as a way to present about this subject. Management was looking for answers, not a facilitation experience.

Like many designers, I’ve found that holding two seemingly unrelated ideas together and seeing if I can make a connection can often spark some original thinking. In this case it did. My one idea was to use murals. The other was that live drawing is engaging.

Breakthrough Idea!

“Is there a conference room anywhere near the management team’s offices?” I asked. The BLAST team looked puzzled. “Yes,” someone said. “Why do you think I find this interesting?” I asked. They were still puzzled.

“I have an idea,” I said. “What if I flew out to Boise a couple of days before your presentation, and we, as a team, created the big murals in the conference room during those days?”

A huge smile spread across several faces. Of course! Management would not be able to stay away, and like camels poking their nose under the tent, would come in and get to see all the ideas emerging in real time, with real drawing, and lots of engagement! And if they didn’t come, we knew we could get them to! This would ensure that the ideas weren’t experienced as a big PUSH in the face of the successful managers, but would PULL them in.

“PUSHING” INCLUDES

Dense slide contentFully formed ideasDirect instructionsNo interaction

“PULLING” INCLUDES

Simple, open frameworksIncomplete ideasQuestionsInvitationsInteractive visualization

For those of you who are familiar with facilitation or have read Visual Meetings, you will recognize the push/pull idea—a very useful way to think about group dynamics. Pushing—which is presenting content, requests, answers, or anything already worked out—usually creates resistance and “push back.” Pulling—which involves asking real questions, having blanks and open spaces, using silence, waiting—creates participation. Nature abhors vacuums and so do people.

Creating True Engagement

So our team now had a working idea, but the challenge was to identify which murals we would create in this workshop setting as part of the presentation. Again, as a facilitator of many planning sessions in organizations, I had more assumptions.

People’s understanding of new ideas is filtered through past experience.People’s assumptions about context are as critical as responses to the new idea.If new ideas can find a basis in past success, they have a better chance of being adopted.

“Context” is a word for everything that surrounds an idea. In the case of the BLAST team it included the division’s relationship with its own larger group within HP and the company as a whole, and it included its assumptions about how long the printer market would hold, workforce capability, and so forth. To get their new business ideas to take root the team needed to describe the soil and environment.

I began asking the team questions about the history of its division. I was actually looking for something very specific. I wanted to discover where in the past this particular management team had succeeded by being rebels and risk takers. I knew if the team could connect top management with its own risk-taking experiences early in the presentation, it would be more receptive to the BLAST team ideas.