ing content from process and allowing the focus on process to make content more malleable and accessible. A handful of graphic recorders and facilitators emerged, mostly in the San Francisco area. They were either influenced by David Sibbet’s large-paper approach and his proprietary formats, or Michael Doyle’s flip charts recording running dialogue, augmented with large info-graphic images.

Technology was shifting almost too quickly beneath corporate foundations in these years. During the 1980s, when the personal computer, networking, and the Internet expanded worldview, corporate innovation began to pivot on Silicon Valley. Interactive graphics to support

group process were being explored by Geoff

Ball (who coined the phrase “group graphics”) at Stanford, Joseph Brunon (a pioneer in family dynamic therapy) at UCLA, and David Sibbet at the Coro Foundation in San Francisco.

During this furor of rapid change and helter-skelter retrenching, management shifted in ways that conventional A = B logic did not govern. People realized that corporations were similar to human entities—subject to more complex motives, stressors, and failures. Business didn’t follow linear patterns.

As self-help books became a staple for publishing, management pundits had fully embarked upon explaining how American commerce ran,

July + August 2009

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