Visual Consulting

Designing and Leading Change

David Sibbet, Gisela Wendling

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119375333
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Consultoría

Visualization—in your own imagination, on the wall, and with media—supports any consultant who is learning to design and facilitate transformational change, leadership development, stakeholder involvement processes, and making sense of complex challenges. This book, from leaders in the field, shows you how. Building on Peter Block's Flawless Consulting, it explains how to visually contract and scope work, gather data, provide feedback, plan interventions, implement, and support on-going sustainability in organizational and community settings.

Unlike Block's work, Visual Consulting addresses the challenging problems of guiding organizational and social change processes that involve multiple levels and types of stakeholders, with interests in both local and global environments. It demonstrates how visualization and design thinking can be used to get more creative and productive results that are "owned" by everyone. The practices described apply to organizational as well as diverse, cross-boundary consulting projects. In this book, you will...

• Learn powerful visual tools for all key stages of the consulting process, including marketing your services
• Understand the predictable challenges of change and how to successfully guide organizations and communities through them
• Learn how to collaborate with clients to get sustainable results
• Find tools for using visualization comprehensively, for both inner and outer work
• Successfully guide change in both organizations and communities

The fourth installment in the Visual Facilitation series, this book teaches you how to activate the full range of visual tools, methods, and models to support stepping into successful, contemporary consulting relationships.

Part I.
Imagining Visual Consulting
Jumping into the Flow

1. The Potential of Visual Consulting
Integrating Methods to Get Results

You are about to begin a learning journey into an intersection of three fields that are giving rise to a new way of working we are calling “visual consulting.” One is the field of visualization, and visual facilitation in particular. A second is dialogic practice, as used in consulting. And a third is change consulting, specifically designing and leading change in organizations and communities. What they have in common is an orientation to process thinking and process leadership. Applied in the interests of clients seeking innovation, culture change, alignment on new visions, process transformation, and sustainable results, they come together as “visual consulting.”

Like anyone learning something new, you'll need to orient to what it will mean for you. What is your interest in visualization? What's your interest in consulting? And what does this have to do with designing and leading change? Stay with these questions as we begin with a real client story that illustrates the power of visualization in a consulting engagement (Figure 1.1). It contains a number of practices you can add to your tool set right away. Starting with a story will help make the later chapters come alive.

Figure 1.1

California Drought Calls for Change

In 2013 I, Gisela, joined Ag Innovation Network as director of Water Programs and took on the role of facilitating the California Roundtable on Water & Food Supply (CRWFS). It had 25 members. They were beginning their third year of dialogue identifying top water issues in the state and writing white papers to respond. The program was funded by the California Water Foundation and others. I would be acting as a process consultant/facilitator, with the support and help of Ag Innovations staff. The participants were leaders in big agriculture, small agriculture, science, environment, state and local government, lawyers, regulators, and general water managers from all around the state. They were already a trusting group appreciating the off-the-record safety of the Roundtable, and our commitment to publish only what they consensually agreed upon. Being a diverse group this was the challenge. What was the most pressing issue to focus on this year?

My Way in to Water Management

I began by using a tried-and-true group process, being experienced in large system change and a wide variety of organizational development practices and skills with extensive experience in process design and facilitation of dialogue. In spite of some early training in draftsmanship, drawing on the wall is not my forte. This story is about how the visualization I used helped the Roundtable come to significant consensus on a critical issue in our state—water management. It is also a story of how I reached out to David, who is very skilled in visual representation and facilitation, and together we took the work further, and began a professional journey that has convinced us of the power of more deeply blending these fields we are in. We'll share more stories about our findings as we go along.

I knew asking the right questions is the key to good dialogue. I asked, “Given what we are looking at, what key question should the Roundtable take on for this year?”. . . My question surfaced a deeper question that led to a new focus “What would it take to create connections, re-connections, or effective alignments to address these systemic issues?”

Inviting a Conversation on Issues

The Roundtable had already developed an explicit group charter. Building on that, as well as individual interviews with all members, I facilitated a series of half-day meetings. In these full-group sessions we sat around tables set in a big “U” shape that suggested everyone was equal. I would create agendas on a flip chart. Confidentiality was key. My first task was to invite a conversation about what key California water issues they had on their mind. “What key question should the Roundtable take on for this year?” was on their mind. Historically this group was best at re-framing issues. An earlier report had argued for moving from “water conservation” to “stewardship.” A second year they pushed to move from “water storage” to “retention.” To get the group going this time I asked everyone to go around and have each person speak to what they considered to be the top issues and crises. They began to realize how many ways the water system was broken and disconnected.

In a second meeting they broke into small groups and identified the disconnections on sticky notes. We then clustered them on a big wall and identified 18 clusters. The huge wall of disconnections vividly visualized the complexity and extent of the systemic dysfunction. We typed up the clusters into a meeting report that was then fed back to all participants.

Asking the right questions is the key to good dialogue. I asked a lot. My questions and t...