Visual Teams

Visualize team plans, processes, and results!

Visualization provides teams with a common language and serves as a powerful tool for improving processes and communicating big picture contexts. Building on the bestseller Visual Meetings, Visual Teams offers graphic tools and strategies for creating teams and sustaining results, whether you are co-located or spread around the world. This book highlights the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance Model®, a tool used throughout such companies as Nike, Genentech, and Becton, Dickinson and Company. The model is a "map" to creating and sustaining high performance in all kinds of teams.

Some of the most creative teams in business are found in the software, architecture, and information-design professions—and the "design approach" of these teams is the key to their creativity and productivity. Visual Teams presents a "design approach" for building and leading an innovative, high-performance team.

• Introduction
  Imagining Better Results for Teams

1. What Is a Visual Team?
   Using Graphics Across the Whole Workflow
   
1. Working Like Designers / Why Visual Teams Get Result
   
2. Why Be a Visual Team? / The Case for Collaboration
   
3. A Graphic User Interface for Teams / The Drexler/ Sibbet Team Performance Model
   
2. Leading Visual Teams
   Seeing the BIG Picture
   
4. So You've Just Been Promoted / Understanding Team Leadership
   
5. Managing Four Flows of Activity / Attention, Energy, Information, & Operations
   
6. Supporting Innovation / Providing Visual Tools
   
3. Visual Team Startup
   Creating Trust, Focus, & Commitment
   
7. Visualizing Purpose / Orienting to Your Mission
   
8. Seeing Yourself As a Team / Developing Trust
   
9. Clarifying Goals / Using the Graphic Gameplan
   
10. Consensus or Command? / Deciding Commitments
    
4. Sustaining Results
   Innovating for High Performance
   
11. Graphics & Project Management / Implementation You Can Literally See
    
12. Visualizing & Innovating / Understanding High Performance
    
13. Assessments, Dialogues, & Sharing Rallies / The Importance of Learning & Renewal
    
5. Growing a Visual Team Culture
   Thinking BIG About Opportunities
   
14. Introducing Visual Teams / Communicating Benefits
    
15. Developing Visual Team Skills / Learning Tips & Tools
    
16. Shared Visual Language / Toward an Operating System for Visual Teams
    
6. New Technology Tools
   A Revolution in Visual Collaboration
   
17. Visual Tools Come of Age / Experiencing High Performance at the Institute for the Future
    
18. Graphics for Distributed Teams / Web & Teleconferences
    
19. Team Rooms & the Net / Physical Places or Virtual Spaces?
    
20. Mobile Technology / Reshaping Tomorrow's Teams
    
7. Links, Tools, & Other Resources
   
21. Websites & Bibliography
    
• Appendix
• Jack R. Gibb's Original Research
• Summary of Arthur M. Young's Theory of Process

To be frank, I started reading this book with very low expectations, but was pleasantly surprised to find it both well written, practical and really about change management, more than visualization. And the more you read of it, the more you understand what a well of knowledge is behind it. I am pleasantly surprised. One recommendation though, it is one of these books that you get the most out of by reading it from the beginning and not skipping around too much. Trust me, the effort is well worth it!

Highly recommended!