Executive leadership development and team building. How Is Grid Learning Different?

We remove expert dependency from the learning we facilitate. Rather than listen and take notes from an expert's lectures, Grid activities are experiential and team-centered. Participants investigate problems and create their own solutions, demonstrating the value of teamwork in a "real time" setting. This self-convincing approach instills greater ownership for team effectiveness and deepens commitment to personal and organizational transformation. The self-convincing approach fosters enthusiasm and interest by considering behaviours as a valid force that can help or hinder results.

The Grid approach creates self-reliance and teamwork. With Grid, individuals look to their own ingenuity and that of their team to:

Define a course of action to identify and maximize available resources
Set goals, manage time, and practice critique as needed to complete activities
Score their own performance
Compare results with written rationales
Compare results with other teams completing the same activities
Define and test a course of change for improvement for succeeding seminar activities

So, how do you remove the expert and still deliver structured activities and measurable results?

Every seminar has a seminar manager, but the activities are instrument-driven, not expert-driven. The seminar manager's role is to facilitate and support the learning environment, and not to "teach" in the traditional sense. Teams take a defined activity, plot their own course, and measure results, using scores, written rationales, norms, and comparison with other teams to measure learning. The increased accountability motivates participants to investigate, critique, learn, solve problems, and create their own solutions rather than depending on a 'teacher' or 'expert' for answers. In addition, these team activities provide participants with immediate, real examples of effective or ineffective interactions that are then available for critique and learning.

Blake's and Mouton's unique leadership development scoring methodology takes objective scoring to a new, multi-perspective, level. For every scored activity, teams define, in objective terms:

How each person contributed to the team results
How effectively the team harnessed the results available from each member
How teams performed against other seminar teams, and seminar norms
Whether teams achieved synergy (team score greater than the highest individual score)

Production Effectiveness Scoring after selected activities helps teams to recognize improvement potential in the use of resources and team interactions for future seminar activities.

Powerful and measurable results

Human dynamics are the most powerful influence on leadership development and team effectiveness, yet they are consistently unseen and overlooked.

The Grid approach delivers a structured system for understanding and evaluating this intangible area of personal and team behaviour. Each Grid activity is measured so participants can objectively compare goals with results and make improvements.

Structured critique becomes the most valuable skill for assessing how effectively people work together. Participants experience the value of exploring differences of opinion to reach genuine consensus instead of merely seeking compromise. The learning is self-convincing and people leave Grid seminars with a newfound mastery of critique and communication, fostering clearer and more powerful decision-making, leadership, and confidence.

See what some past participants had to say.
Larger scale internal implementation.
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