Welcome to The GLEN

COMMUNITY EXCHANGES and The GLEN Café

Our members design and host exchanges to lean into inquiry, test new ideas, and share insights with dynamic colleagues in relational spaces that invite transformation.

We meet Fridays in an informal café gathering on Zoom.

Check the Exchanges page for all programs.

Sept 26, 2024

  9:00-10:30 PDT

An Interactive Exchange with Grove CEO, Gisela Wendling, Ph.D.,
and Grove Founder, David Sibbet

The Grove’s Seven Challenges of Change:

 Origins & Theory

 “How can diverse perspectives be in genuine dialogue and the patterns that drive change be made visible? How can consultants stimulate and harvest the collective intelligence of a group? These (models) convey with practicality and clarity how leaders can use the powers of imagination and collaboration in service of engaging complex challenges.”

Aftab Omer

President, Meridian University

In 2016 the chancellor of the University California at Merced announced the campus would double in size by 2020. The school needed support in making this transformational change and engaged The Grove. Soon after, Gisela Wendling and David Sibbet designed and led a year-long Leading Change intensive for the Environmental Services (ES) division of the Met Council in Minnesota. ES wanted to prepare 20 middle managers to become expert process leaders for its internal and inter-agency change work.

During this time, Gisela and David evolved a new Grove model called the Seven Challenges of Change™ (7COC) that now guides The Grove’s organizational change practice. It is an integration of Gisela’s Liminal Pathways Change™ Framework (LPF) with an earlier approach based on Arthur Young’s Theory of Process. Both Gisela and David have deep experience with principles and practices arising from the discipline of organization development (OD). Earlier in her career Gisela, for example, headed up the masters program in OD at Sonoma State University and has worked with organizations as an internal and external consultant over the course of three decades.

Following the Leading Change program, which was organized around the new model, Gisela and David published Visual Consulting: Designing & Leading Change. They vetted the language of the model and practices supporting critical action through a series of exchanges with a group of experienced consultants. During COVID, Gisela researched the efficacy of the LPF and published The Liminal Pathways Study detailing why practitioners find it so useful. The 7COC and the LPF are the core models of The Grove’s Designing & Leading Change workshop.

The call will unpack this origin story and explore how the Theory of Process and the Liminal Pathways Change Framework guided the design of the 7COC model. This is not a training workshop, but a sharing of the core ideas that shaped The Grove’s current work with change. You will receive relevant materials and a video of the call.

COLLABORATIONS

The GLEN sponsors partner-led programs with The Grove and others that support the GLEN's purpose.

• We are partnering with The Grove on David Sibbet's upcoming Grove Origins Project, which will build on the initial origins and history of Grove methodologies.