Grove' Best Practice Profile

Grove:

Grove provides integrated solutions to a wide range of facilitation and organization-change challenges. They pioneered creative, visual approaches to traditional organization-change work that consistently stimulate participation, focus big-picture thinking, enhance group memory and win commitment to action.

Description:

Grove

The Grove's Strategic Visioning™ Process engages an entire organization in combining its best hindsight and foresight in aligned action. It uses large, graphic templates or Graphic Guides® to step groups through the development of traditional strategic analysis, creative visioning work, focused action planning, and organization-communications design. The Strategic Visioning Process illustrates an optimal path through these activities and, like other Grove tools, invites variations and improvisation.

The stages are:

• Preparing: Sponsors, process-design teams, and consultants determine the Outcomes, Agenda, Roles and Rules for the process, and plan for involvement of critical stakeholders.

• Exploring and Learning: Participants review the history of the organization for insight into values and core competencies, scan the relevant environment, and study industry structures and competitive patterns.

• Agreeing on Current Realities: Complete traditional SWOT analysis, trends, assumptions and imperatives, and reviews of existing constraints and givens.

• Opening to a Vision: Tap the group's stories about the future—its aspirations and concerns—and find shared themes about future direction.

• Creating Strategies: Ground the visions in clear strategies that articulate the bold steps and initiatives needed to move forward.

• Implementing Change: Involve the organization in creating action plans for strategies and initiatives, changing processes, and refining value propositions.

• Living the Vision: Determine ways to walk the talk every day and keep the vital strategic conversations alive in the organization.

Methods Used

Results

Techologies Used

• Large 4'x 8' preprinted graphic templates.

• Powerpoint templates that match the preprinted, allowing one to easily create a powerpoint slides that capture items recorded during the use of the preprinted templates.

Lessons Learned

• The process must be followed.
• Facilitators of the process should avail themselves of the training, though a seasoned facilitator can use the template guides to learn the best use and process for each template.
• The results are positive and exciting.
• Groups walk away with a vision of the future and elements of the vision which easily can be translated into strategies.
• The process itself is quite scalable, and individual templates can be used for many other processes.

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