Effective Group Coaching

Jennifer Britton has a new book called Effective Group Coaching: Tried and Tested Tools and Resources for Optimum Coaching Results. On her blog she cites Visual Explorer™ as the first of My Five Favorite Group Coaching Tools This Year. An excerpt:

Thursday, December 17, 2009
My Favorite Group Coaching Tools This Year

Every year at this time, I like to look back and take stock of some of my favorite tools and resources of the year, and share them here on the blog.

This year, five of my favorite tools and resources are:

• Visual Explorer from the Center For Creative Leadership. Those of you who joined me in Orlando know the power of this visual tool. I continue to bring it in to team and group coaching sessions, along with workshops and seminars as a conversation starter, and awareness builder. Visit CCL to learn more about the tool in its many different forms.
  
• Facilitative Coaching by Dale Schwarz and Anne Davidson. This book is chock full of exercises and resources for your coaching work. Although geared primarily for a 1-1 setting you could adapt many of these for a group context.
• MindMapping seems to make my list each and every year, but I do so love this tool for program design, brainstorming and getting clients unstuck. Check out the tag MindMapping for some ideas on how I use it. Once again, MindJet.com is the best computer based MindMapping tool around. Try out their 21 day free trial at http://www.mindjet.com.
  
  More at the Group Coaching blog>>

Opportunities to lead and experience full lives: Living the mission at UGARC

What does the mission statement mean to you?
What do you need to do for the mission statement to be fully achieved?
  - framing questions for the UGARC Visual Explorer sessions

Our colleagues at the social services organization Ulster-Greene ARC (UGARC) have been using Visual Explorer™ in a series of creative conversations to build understanding of and commitment to the mission among their 1000+ employees. The method involves gathering about 35 people at a time in three and a half hour sessions, with the Executive Director participating in each one. UGARC has been quite pleased with the process and the outcomes. What they are doing is a fascinating form of leadership, and leadership development. Let's take a closer look.

This post documents the details of the process so others can follow and adapt from it. All you need for the process is a set or two of Visual Explorer images, facilitators, a big enough room, and a worthy mission needing understanding and commitment!

(Thanks to all the fine people at UGARC! Thanks also to Al Selvin at Compendium Institute for helping to birth this process at UGARC; his detailed process notes are invaluable and are linked here.)

Some facts about UGARC, from their website:

We are a not-for-profit agency that serves nearly 2000 people who have developmental delays or disabilities throughout the mid-Hudson and Catskill Mountains (New York state) region. The disabilities include mental retardation, epilepsy, traumatic brain injury, autism, Down syndrome and cerebral palsy, to name just a few.

Our vision: The dreams, desires and needs of people with intellectual and other developmental disabilities are realized through innovative services and advocacy.

Our mission: To offer people with intellectual and other developmental disabilities opportunities to live and experience full lives.

This is challenging and rewarding work, and it is not for everyone. It's vital that UGARC engages people explicitly and deeply around their shared direction. The mission is the reward--and if you don't believe that you may be working in the wrong place. UGARC built a wonderful process for this kind of engagement, a conversation using visual images as something in the middle to work with.

Objectives:

• Staff at all levels will think about the mission with an open mind
• People from different departments will creatively connect with each other
• All staff will live the mission

Outcomes:

• 100% engagement in a non-threatening environment
• More alignment to the mission within and across departments
• Widespread renewal of passion for the mission

Here's a summary of the process.

Thirty five people at a time gather for three and a half hours in a comfortable place. The Executive Director talks briefly about the mission. People spend five minutes writing their thoughts (privately) about two questions:
1: What does the mission statement mean to you?
2: What do you need to do for the mission statement to be fully achieved?
Each person chooses two images, one for each question, from the Visual Explorer set, browsing all the images laid around the room. Groups of 5-6 sit in circles and share their images and their ideas about the two questions (in a process we call the Star Model, described below.) Then the whole group gets back together and talks about what they learned about the two questions, and how was it talking like that, and they have a good chat about the mission.

This is not complicated nor is it difficult. There are a few tricky aspects and clear instructions, and basic facilitation, are necessary. The script for the process used at UGARC is provided at the bottom of this post.

Here are some interesting observations that Bart Louwagie, their IT Director and a catalyst of this process, shared with me recently.

• It's non-threatening. There is not much of a chance "to say the wrong thing."
• 100% participation ensues naturally. It's fun and inviting.
• The mission is in the foreground
• Easy and simple, you can do it with your own staff
• Overall feedback is very positive
• People talk closely with each other in these sessions on many topics using many stories.
• It's also a chance to get different departments (who attend together) to get on the same page
• Now some people are using Visual Explorer in other places like staff meetings, or in their families

The following agenda spells out the process used at UGARC. The details can be adapted of course to fit a variety of objectives and contexts. (Here are slides from one of the sessions, which also produced the "hands on the mission" poster at the top of this post.)



Sample Agenda

8-9: Arrive
- Hand out first handout with the two questions
- Hand out their name tags and a sequential number between 1 and 16
- Hand out the agendas
- Hand out map with assigned areas
- Food-coffee is in multipurpose room.

9-9:15: Introduction, recognition

9:15 Laurie (Executive Director)
- Talk to the mission and the mission statement
- Laurie say that the goal is for us: [COMPLETE]
o All to sign the mission statement with our hand print, which you will do at the end of the session.
o Do a personal commitment by writing to yourself
o We have a FULL day, so stick to time indicated

9: 20 Sue & Bart (Senior leaders)
- Explanation of Visual Explorer with the one sample slide. Model the process.
- You all have a handout with two questions that we would like you to think about and write some initial thoughts down. This is something just for you personally. Spend 5 minutes on both questions.
- Question 1: What does the mission statement mean to you?
- Question 2: What do you need to do for the mission statement to be fully achieved?
Directions:

• Look at all the pictures
  
• Pick two pictures that talk to you, one for each question. 
• Please be silent while you choose pictures. 
• Come back to your seat with the two pictures.

- Talk about time management; why it is important for all to keep track of time so that all have a fair share in the conversation.

9:40
- 15 minute walk around with music and pick their pictures and come right back to your seat.

9:55
- Short 5 minute break

10:00
- Look at the back of your questions form to find the instructions below..

Instructions

Please be seated in your group by 10:00
A. Please make sure to start this phase on time. Spend 1 min reading the instructions.
B. Question 1 first

1. Person A starts and shows the picture to group and makes sure everyone can see the picture during the conversation. Describe the physical image itself in detail. (1 min)
2. Talk to why you chose that picture, “How does the picture speak to the question about the mission?” (4 min)
3. Then hand the conversation over to another person B in the group who says: “If I had picked this picture (the one of person A) this is what I would have seen…” Allow everyone to answer that same question in turn (1 min each), limit back and forth please.
4. Person A with picture “thank you for your input” (0 min)
5. Next person presents their own picture with process starting on number 1.

C. After half hour total all pictures for 1 question should have been reviewed by the group.
D. When all have done image/question 1, same cycle for image/question 2, go back to B. You should start on question 2 by 10:40
E. Finish group discussion of both questions and be back in main room by 11:20.

That's the agenda that UGARC followed. Of course this can be adapted for other contexts and timeframes.

The experience of the staff at UGARC in doing this exercise has typically been quite positive. Here is a reflection from Don Crespino, Ulster-Greene ARC Vocational Coordinator:

As with most trainings, I entered into the Visual Explorer Training not knowing what to expect. The Visual Explorer session was a rare and enlightening experience in the field of working with individuals with intellectual disabilities. I feel that we as a culture are realizing that more often than not, it is our thinking and approach that greatly hinders us from providing quality services (more than anything else). The Visual Explorer exercise managed to unite different types of people and employees on all levels by getting them to experience universal meanings based on seeing the same thing in all aspects of life. The fact that everyone was able to express themselves in an environment where there were no wrong answers, just interpretations based on a few different photographs and everyone uniquely expressing how they see things like our agencies Mission Statement in them, was so thought provoking towards the right thinking and approach in our field of employment.

What do you see? Using Visual Explorer for admissions essays at the New York University Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service

click through to the New York Times article
more on Dean Schall's address
more at the NYU site
more at Leading Effectively CCL blog

reposted from the New York Times, EducationLife section, Sunday, November 1, 2009

Below is the online application page with the instructions for the essay (click image to enlarge).

More from Dean Ellen Schall:

Excerpt from Dean Ellen Schall's Convocation Remarks
Presented to 2009 graduates of the
NYU Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service
May 15, 2009

“In the Wall Street Journal last week, 10 college presidents were asked to answer a question from their own schools’ applications. They all found it harder than they imagined. We have always understood at Wagner that it mattered how we started to engage you, even as prospective students, that we were beginning a conversation, perhaps a relationship - one that could last for years.

"Two years ago, when many of you applied, we decided to add a particular twist to our application - in part to get your attention, in part to signal we were after a different level of engagement. We gave you the possibility of responding to a photo, a visual image, from a collection of images developed by colleagues at the Center for Creative Leadership. As you may remember, we use Visual Explorer, which is what CCL calls this approach, at orientation as well. The basic idea is that it’s easier to get the conversation started when you have an object in the middle. And we wanted to get a conversation started. more>> and more>>

Creative conversations with the women of Kpendua, Ghana, West Africa

"This is the Nyobilbaligu Women's Group having their monthly meeting on my veranda. Using the Visual Explorer cards, this meeting focused on thinking for oneself, creativity, problem-solving, and information sharing."

"[In these photos] three women at our women's group meeting trying to decipher what exactly is in each photo. When they weren't asking their friends for help, they were sitting quietly turning the Visual Explorer cards over and over in their hands."

This item is reposted from the CCL Leadership Beyond Boundaries blog, Visualizing new futures with women in rural Ghana.

From: Cheri Baker
Sent: Saturday, August 01, 2009 5:44 PM

Continue reading this post >>

How Can Leadership Be Taught: Symposium at the Harvard Business School

Visual Explorer #517

Recently I had the pleasure of sharing our ideas about leadership culture with the symposium on How Can Leadership Be Taught at the Harvard Business School. Our conveners aimed at creating a shared body of knowledge for teaching leadership effectively. Our presentations were to try to convey, in a TED-like 15 minutes, what the experience--not simply the content--of teaching and learning leadership is like in each of our worlds. For example Marshall Ganz talked about the importance of the Story of Us in his movement-building work with Camp Obama. Marshall's video of one volunteer telling her own story of moving from doubt and fear to hope was riveting.

One overarching theme was the definition of leadership. A key distinction is whether the focus is on developing individual leaders, or on enacting a collective process beyond the bounds of the classroom. Again taking Marshall Ganz as an example: his work integrates the individual and collective levels of leadership, combining the Story of Self, with the Story of Us, plus the Story of Now (the urgent challenge calling us to act.) Often we as teachers have individual students in our classrooms and a focus on self-as-leader is salient. At other times we work with the whole system or its fractal parts and we "teach" or develop the beliefs and practices of that system to meet challenges together more effectively. Camp Obama looks more like distributed or collective leadership when viewed as a shared political movement.

For my turn, I talked about leadership culture, and how it develops from dependent to independent to potentially more interdependent forms; and how culture change is necessarily at the leading edge of any successful organizational change effort. A big challenge in teaching and implementing these ideas is that, while individual leaders and their behaviors are singular and visible, leadership culture can be almost invisible and difficult to grasp (difficult to view as an object fellow presenter Bob Kegan might say.) Part of the developmental journey is the practicing of the kinds of attention that make culture and distributed forms of leadership more visible, and tangible, and thus more able to be viewed more objectively.

I asked the group to reflect on the following questions, taking a minute to write in their journals or on a piece of paper:

• How is leadership done where you work?
• What does it typically look like in action?
• What is the leadership culture of your workplace?

Next:

Taped under your desk you will find an envelope with three cards. Find one card that especially fits or illustrates your response to the questions. You may share and trade cards with anyone in the room.

Half of the envelopes had Visual Explorer™ cards and half had Leadership Metaphor Explorer™ cards. VE cards are purely images (examples here and at the top of this post). LME cards are metaphors, labeled and illustrated with drawings (here, and below). I wanted to give a taste of each, and to see what happened when I combined the cards. I put on some cool jazz while they browsed for a couple minutes. The 15 minute clock was ticking.

Find a partner. Share your cards in two ways. First, what are the details of the card itself? Next, what does the card mean to you and why did you pick it?

After sharing your cards, take another minute and jot down key insights from the conversation you just had.

The conversations were vibrant and serious, with lots of laughter. People connected very positively with each other. I think they helped each other develop some terrific initial insights about the topic and their relationship to it. The cards and creative conversations helped make culture more visible.

In a longer session the other person or people in a small group (3-5 ideally) also observe your card in detail and connect with their own keen observations and possible meanings, "if I had picked that card I would notice ... ." Dialogue ensues, with tangible images and metaphors in the middle.

A debrief would have been terrific but I was running out of time. So I talked a bit about the three stages of leadership culture--dependent, independent, and interdependent. Particular images and metaphors from Visual Explorer™ and Leadership Metaphor Explorer™ help convey the action logic of each stage of culture, and this helps tie the whole lesson together.

The slides below show these ideas plus some more I did not have time for. One is the idea that leadership culture must develop in concert with the vision, mission, challenges, and strategy of the organization. More interdependent forms of leadership are needed to meet more complex challenges.

Another theme I noticed is that we as educators or developers of leadership tend to target a specific transition in the developmental journey. For example, earlier in the life span one targets basic empathy as a key to being a leader. Later on, integrity becomes more salient, especially in the workplace. Still later, moving beyond the narrow confines of self-identity and solo ambition to more interdependent ways of enacting leadership is important.



I welcome your thoughts!

father and daughter at the symposium

Levels of looking

Al Selvin has been a fine fellow traveler in the development of Visual Explorer from nearly the beginning. The first time I met Al we uploaded VE images into Compendium maps and a prototype of what we now think of as D!gital Explorer was born (see this joint publication for example). Al's ideas about knowledge art started taking off around that time as well.

One of the few ways that Visual Explorer can get off-track is when the level of looking is shallow or cursory. VE works best under conditions of "slowing looking down" (per David Perkins) and paying attention in more artful and more disciplined ways. This kind of attention is one of the potential benefits of using VE and needs just a bit of facilitation, usually, to come alive. Al's post on his Knowledge Art blog, reposted below, unpacks this essential insight.

clipped from knowledgeart.blogspot.com Levels of looking A few weeks ago I facilitated a Visual Explorer session for a social services agency for mentally disabled children and adults in the Hudson Valley. A friend is the IT director at the agency, and asked me to help run a communication session for the IT group and its internal clients. This was the first time in several years that I've done a true, extended VE session with enough time and mandate to set it up and introduce it properly. There were 10 attendees, half from IT and half from other parts of the agency. We did two rounds, the first on the question "What's the place of IT in the organization?" and the second, after discussion, debrief, and a break, on "How can IT best support the organization (and vice versa)?" We spent about 2.5 hours in all. In the first round, the small groups got engaged quickly and the discussions were lively. Even people who hung back at first got excited as it went on. One of the IT guys was at first reluctant to engage and didn't even pick a picture during the browsing period. But after the first two people in his small group took their turns, he jumped up and grabbed a picture, and ended up giving one of the more evocative and insightful descriptions. In both large group rounds, the discussion was engaged and (as far as I could tell as an outsider) did enable people to talk in ways they normally don't to each other. A number of themes emerged, such as the separation between the different groups, surprise by non-IT people about how the IT people felt about their work and their relationships with the rest of the agency, how to better communicate about the goals and benefits of IT projects and deal with resistance to change by helping people to see what they could get out of the new capabilities, etc. Afterwards, a number of the people said that it had been valuable and that the pictures enabled them to have a better and deeper dialogue with each other. I noticed a paradox in the session, which I've seen before. It involves differing levels of looking at and talking about what people see in a picture, and how the picture relates to their situation and concerns. It's relatively easy to get people to talk about what they see in a VE image on the level of what the picture "says", what they think the story of the picture is. This is a wonderful human capability -- something a computer could never do (e.g. "these people are happy because they just won a race", "nothing's really clear, the racers and the audience can't see each other well, there's such a frenetic pace" etc.). But the paradox is that it's not so easy to get people to go to the next level, to really look at and talk about the actual 'physical' details in the picture -- to engage with and talk about what they really see rather than the story or ideas that are suggested to them. In other words, people relate almost instantly to what they see as the "story" of the picture, suggested by the images, facial expressions, etc. -- the visual detail that strikes us on a sub-verbal level, all the time, in conversations with others (for example, the way we "read" other people's moods and interpret what that might mean for us, as we scan their faces or listen to their voices in a meeting). But to go farther -- to be able to say exactly what visual and aural nuances might have given us this impression (the crease of a brow, the elevated pitch of part of a spoken sentence) takes an extra effort and does not come readily for most people. I often think of what I had to learn in film classes in college -- not to just let a film "wash over" me in a tide of impressions and effects, but rather to pay close attention so I could see what techniques the filmmaker used to give me those impressions -- the small details of editing, sound, lighting, composition, color, and many others. This can lead to a deeper level of insight and articulation. As the practitioner in the VE session I'm describing here, I tried to inculcate this to some extent. As people were working in the small groups, I walked around and made a few suggestions, such as pointing out specific visual details and getting the groups to look at them, when it was apparent that the group was in 'story' mode and could benefit from taking a closer look. That did seem to shake things loose a bit and move the conversation to a more engaged level. This same dynamic occurs with other forms of collaborative media. Getting people to look closely and talk about what they see requires a level of effort -- for both participants and practitioners -- beyond what is easiest to do. The "story" level is also a good thing and generates dialogue that takes people out of their normal way of relating, but going farther is where a lot of the potential lies. Posted by Al at 9:27 AM

Visual Explorer™ in Afganistan

Here is a repost from the CCL Leading Effectively blog. Clemsen Turregano goes on to talk about members of the Afgan Army picking Visual Explorer images to define leadership "in their hearts and their heads."

clipped from lbbtest.net Leadership Essentials in Afghanistan Clemson Turregano traveled to Afghanistan to deliver a Leadership Essentials program to the Afghan Army. In a series of posts on the Leading Effectively blog he recounts the experience: “We would have to deliver in Dari. We would be working with a population that although very intelligent, and may not have a had a great deal of formal education. Every one we would be working with had served in war, with the Northern Alliance, the Mujahadeen, or even the Soviets. Some of these men had actually fought against each other, on opposite sides, at different times. more part 1>> and more part 2>> and more part 3>>

Jane Goodall Global Youth Summit: Video introduction to VE

Visual Explorer™ was used to close Jane Goodall's Global Youth Summit, and the event was captured on video. The question posed was "What is one of the most important things that you learned about leadership at the Global Youth Summit?" The power of their week-long leadership experience shines through in their stories and images. Enjoy! Thanks to David Shurna at Global Explorers, and thanks especially to the participants.

The video is a good introduction to Visual Explorer™ in action (another intro to VE is posted here). The main difference from a typical VE session is that in this case, since time was limited, there were no small group dialogues. We recommend breaking into small groups of 3-5 to share the images and stories in great detail, using the dialogue technique called the Star Model.


Notice David's technique of combining the digital images of the selected images with the text written by each person, and making that into an animated power point show. You can view that show by itself, as a powerpoint show, by downloading it here. Below are two examples.

sharing a VE image at the Summit

-----Original Message-----
From: David Shurna [mailto:dave@globalexplorers.org]
To: Palus, Chuck; Horth, David
Subject: Visual Explorer and the Jane Goodall Global Youth Summit

Dear Chuck & David:

I wanted to let you know that I have returned from the Jane Goodall Global Youth Summit and your Visual Explorer activity was amazing! I used the activity at the conclusion of the week long summit as a way for students to share what they had learned about leadership throughout the week. I have attached the PowerPoint presentation that represents all of the images chosen by the students coupled with words about their action projects and their leadership lesson. The session was also filmed and I will be getting this out to you as well.

I was particularly struck by how well this work across cultures. We had youth ages 16-24 from more than 20 countries involved in the activity. Many were from developing countries and English was their second language. The images helped them open up and share powerful lessons and ideas in ways that we had not seen the rest of the week.

I was particularly struck by the variety of images selected and the creative ways in which students expressed their thoughts. One student from Kenya selected an image of a burning house and described the way in which this photo represented the destruction of his country that was taking place right now. Yet beyond the fire, he saw in the image something that represented his hope that he could inspired change when he returned.

Another student from Hong Kong selected the rugby image and discussed the ways in which he felt that he was often beat up, pushed around and discouraged by the lack of progress he was making on environmental issues in Hong Kong. Yet, he said the conference reminded him that we all get beat up at times and we need to have persistence and hope.

Not too many dry eyes in the room after these moments. Thanks so much for being willing to share this incredible resource with our organization. Please let me know how you would like me to post these lessons and information on your blog. Again, video will be forthcoming.

Sincerely,

David Shurna
Executive Director
Global Explorers