Synopses & Reviews
Visualize team plans, processes, and results!Visualization provides teams with a common language and serves as a powerful tool for improving processes and communicating big picture contexts. Building on the bestseller Visual Meetings, Visual Teams offers graphic tools and strategies for creating teams and sustaining results, whether you are co-located or spread around the world. This book highlights the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance Model, a tool used throughout such companies as Nike, Genentech, and Becton, Dickinson and Company. The model is a "map" to creating and sustaining high performance in all kinds of teams.
Some of the most creative teams in business are found in the software, architecture, and information-design professions—and the "design approach" of these teams is the key to their creativity and productivity. Visual Teams presents a "design approach" for building and leading an innovative, high-performance team.
"All of us who help teams do systemic, creative work on complex challenges know that it is essential for these teams to make their thinking visible. In this excellent book, visual-thinking pioneer David Sibbet shows us how."
—Adam Kahane, Reos Partners author of Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change
"Like David's own graphics, this book layersconcrete practices and abstract theories, historical insights, and visions of future possibilities. The book is a master's course in a kind of teamwork that's uniquely suited to our times."
—Kathi Vian The Institute for the Future
"David Sibbet is the world's master teacher in graphic facilitation. In this landmark work he is insightful, entertaining and practical as he helps teams, team leaders, and consultants improve team performance by making it visual."
—Allan Drexler Quality Team Performance
"David is a pioneer in the field of visual thinking and team effectiveness. In Visual Teams, he shares both a hard-won wisdom and the nitty-gritty about what it really takes to ensure that your great ideas prevail."
—Hilary Austen professor, consultant, and author of Artistry Unleashed: A Guide to Pursuing Great Performance in Work and Life
"Visuals nurture the heart as well as the mind. In Visual Teams David brilliantly demonstrates the power of graphics to foster inspiration, alignment, and results—a unique and exciting journey into the joys and challenges of teamwork."
—Meryem Le Saget Meryem Le Saget Consulting, Paris
Synopsis
This book uses visual tools to explore how high performance teams work. The best teams work like creative designers—and a "design approach" is the key to innovation and productivity.
Visual Teams builds on
Visual Meetings by showing users how to knit together best practices described in the first book, and turn them into strategies that work across the whole arc of a team's work life. It would also introduce new practices that are specifically designed to support team creation, development, and results.
While the overt purpose of the book would be to share visual practices for teams, it would also use visualization to help the reader gain insights into teams in general, introducing to a broad public the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance Model and related tools — a system used throughout companies like Nike, Genentech, Becton Dickinson, Chevron and others. Visualization emerges as a power tool for thinking about processes that move across time.
The book would also bridge from the old paradigm of thinking of teams as face-to-face and co-located, to distributed teams and networks as part of the teaming challenge. As teams become more and more virtual in today's global organizations, visualization is even more necessary for providing another channel of communication— one that opens up the group mind to thinking about systems, relationships, interconnections, and big picture contexts and consequences.
Synopsis
Graphic tools and visual solutions for team building and developmentVisual 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™ 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.
About the Author
DAVID SIBBET is a world leader in the area of graphic facilitation and visual thinking for groups. He is the founder and president of The Grove Consultants International, a company whose leading-edge group-process tools and services for panoramic visualization, graphic facilitation, team leadership, and organizational transformation are used by consultants and organizations around the world. Sibbet has been the visual cartographer for the TED conference, and is the recipient of the OD Network Members Award for Creative Contribution to the field of organizational development.
Table of Contents
IntroductionImagining Better Results for Teams xi
I. What Is a Visual Team?
Using Graphics Across the Whole Workflow 1
1. Working Like Designers / Why Visual Teams Get Results 3
2. Why Be a Visual Team? / The Case for Collaboration 15
3. A Graphic User Interface for Teams / The Drexler/ Sibbet Team Performance Model 29
II. Leading Visual Teams
Seeing the BIG Picture 55
4. So You've Just Been Promoted / Understanding Team Leadership 57
5. Managing Four Flows of Activity / Attention, Energy, Information, & Operations 73
6. Supporting Innovation / Providing Visual Tools 83
III. Visual Team Startup
Creating Trust, Focus, & Commitment 93
7. Visualizing Purpose / Orienting to Your Mission 95
8. Seeing Yourself As a Team / Developing Trust 107
9. Clarifying Goals / Using the Graphic Gameplan 117
10. Consensus or Command? / Deciding Commitments 131
IV. Sustaining Results
Innovating for High Performance 149
11. Graphics & Project Management / Implementation You Can Literally See 151
12. Visualizing & Innovating / Understanding High Performance 159
13. Assessments, Dialogues, & Sharing Rallies / The Importance of Learning & Renewal 171
V. Growing a Visual Team Culture
Thinking BIG About Opportunities 183
14. Introducing Visual Teams / Communicating Benefits 185
15. Developing Visual Team Skills / Learning Tips & Tools 193
16. Shared Visual Language / Toward an Operating System for Visual Teams 201
VI. New Technology Tools
A Revolution in Visual Collaboration 219
17. Visual Tools Come of Age / Experiencing High Performance at the Institute for the Future 221
18. Graphics for Distributed Teams / Web & Teleconferences 231
19. Team Rooms & the Net / Physical Places or Virtual Spaces? 241
20. Mobile Technology / Reshaping Tomorrow's Teams 249
VII. Links, Tools, & Other Resources 263
21. Websites & Bibliography 265
Appendix 273
Jack R. Gibb's Original Research 273
Summary of Arthur M. Young's Theory of Process 274
Index 277