On April 6, 2001, after a meeting at David Bradford's to collect regional feedback on NTL's effort to implement 'Areas of Specialty', a group of us recognized that we enjoyed getting together. We also recognized that often our discussions fell into to 'family gossip' about NTL... what was wrong, what needed to be fixed, etc. In an effort build on what we like about being together we started a group process.
The initial purpose of our group was to meet regularly, topics would be determined according to those who had a passion to present, and we as members would bring both our personal and professional selves to this agenda. The first Bay Area meeting was held in Santa Cruz, May 30, 2001. Since then we have refined our norms, scheduling, and agenda setting process (see below). What has evolved is a core group of about 10 members, with 4 or 5 other members that join us as their schedule permits. At this time we are also going through another shift as new NTL members are also joining us.
At one point during our process we decided to look outside our group to see how else we might use our skills and energy. A natural choice was more involvement with the Stanford/NTL Facilitator Community. This community is an off-shoot of David Bradford's 30 year effort of running T-groups at Stanford Business School. This effort has included numerous NTL members as both instructors and 'guest' facilitators in the Stanford Program and as resources to the Facilitator Community. This Community is also producing the next generation of NTL members from the Bay Area with a rich background in T-group work and affiliation with Senior NTL Members.
Another indirect consequence of the our Bay Area Group meeting has been the design, development, and delivery of "Authentic Influencing". This is an attempt to make 'T-group' technology more timely and relevant to the demands of today's leaders. Over the next 18 months we have a collaborative contract with NTL to deliver 4 of these labs.
(Scott Bristol, Jun 10 2003)