BruceFlye Engagements

Engagements
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The ECU Division of Research and Graduate Studies scheduled a retreat so that its
units could establish coherence among its various plans and challenges. Bruce Flye
worked with a small design team from the division and mapped out a strategic
issues workshop. A notable variation in the approach came from the strong feeling
on the design team that the focus question for the day would be best created by
the attendees themselves in the course of the meeting. To fuel that process, Flye
created a large drawing of the Division's situation as told by the design team. In
the meeting, the Associate Vice-Chancellor used the image to tell his story of
where the Division is now, after which Flye led a focused conversation in which
the attendees actually walked up and added to the image. By the end of the day,
seven strategic directions for leading change had been agreed upon.

The undergraduate division of the ECU School of Nursing chose to undertake
strategic planning and asked Bruce Flye to help them with their process. The work
began with an initial meeting crafted as a "wine tasting" wherein Flye and the
steering committee developed a collective understanding of the unit's challenges
and aspirations that helped them agree on the subsequent steps. Two structured
workshops followed within the month, and by the end of the second one the group
had written and achieved consensus on draft statements of purpose, mission and
philosophy.

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) planned a day and a half event wherein
leaders who had experienced Hurricane Katrina would share their experiences in
the interest of uncovering lessons for leading in times of crisis. Among the ways
that CCL wanted to capture the event was through the use of a graphic recorder,
and Bruce Flye was asked to join the team.
Funding was provided by a private donor who asked that CCL consider something
"edgy," so the event design was a lesson unto itself. Ten leaders who had dealt
with the storm and its aftermath were joined by a "discussant" team of about
twenty made up of CCL faculty and representatives of various agencies. The
leaders were then led through a series of carefully designed reflective dialogues,
taking advantage of a wide array of CCL skills. During these activities, Flye was at
the back of the room covering the wall in images.
Near the end of the event, the ten leaders took a "gallery walk" to see the
drawings close up, pondering them at length and mostly in silence before actually
signing their names. One participant commented that "The technology certainly
captured the facts, but the drawings captured the emotions."

The National Association of College and University Food Service (NACUFS) sought
to re-design its capstone course, known as the Planning Institute. NACUFS
contacted the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) which in turn
recommended Bruce Flye to conduct the week-long workshop and help with its
design. After agreeing to use Russell Ackoff's process of Idealized Design as a
framework, a team from SCUP and NACUFS spent a day with Flye planning the
event. The substance and sequence of the entire week was mapped visually on the
wall, creating a shared direction from which individual team members could
separately generate content and materials.
Just like the planning, the workshop itself was an interactive experience for its
twenty participants. There were no lectures or slide presentations as participants
instead spent there time exploring the planning problem at hand as well as
different ways of working with each other to navigate change.

A large non-profit with an international presence sought to re-tool the manner in
which it researched, developed and offered programs. Optimal results would come
from new practices in strategic programming, and a major presentation to the
leadership was scheduled. To expedite a complex message of system-wide
change, Bruce Flye was asked to furnish a "graphic concept" as a handout for the
meeting. Over the course of just a few days, Flye worked with the strategy team
and produced the concept shown here. (Identifying graphics and phrases are
obscured to protect client confidentiality.)