Announcing Latest Book: Visual Teams
- September 7th, 2011
The success of my book Visual Meetings brought publisher John Wiley & Sons back for a “sequel,” and I recently finished Visual Teams: Graphic Tools for Commitment, Innovation, & High Performance in time for a fall launch. Visual Teams builds on the concepts covered in Visual Meetings (top 5% of all business books during 2010) and will be available in stores October 11 and is available to pre-order now through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million.
For those of you familiar with the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance Model® (TPM) you will notice in the title the key words for the right side of the model—the pathway to high performance. Visual Teams is built around the idea that if teams learn to use visual meetings and other visualization methods across the full arc of their work, they will be much more productive, creative, and influential in their organizations. The book also uses visual language to unpack the TPM itself, and delves a little deeper into its theoretical underpinnings, most notably Arthur M. Young’s Theory of Process.
I organized this book around the TPM. Initial chapters make the case for teams working like designers—experimenting, creating prototypes, and using visualization to test ideas and share information and mental models. I’ve pulled forward a full treatment of the TPM, adding what visual teams would do to handle each stage of the model. I have a special section for team leaders and how they can manage the four flows of attention, energy, information and operations on their teams—building on our work with Agilent Technologies for its first-line manager training, in which The Grove’s Team Leader Guide was a source book for many years.