Lenny Lind
Lenny Lind is founder and chairman of Covision and a senior consultant. Lind has been involved with organizational communications—media and processes—particularly in large meetings, since 1975. Then, he covered them as a freelance corporate photographer. In 1985, he cofounded Covision as a video production company, specializing in videos with organization development purposes and designed to make people think. These videos were often shown at large meetings.
In 1991, through a fortuitous video project, Lind discovered early attempts at software for facilitating better meetings. Soon after, Lind partnered with Jim Ewing of Executive Arts and began developing software that enabled real whole group dialogue and understanding in meetings. Within a year, Covision shifted out of video production altogether and into supporting interactive meetings.
During the period from 1992 to 1996, Lind coauthored with Sam Kaner, Cathy Toldi, Sarah Fisk, and Duane Berger, the best-selling Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making (Jossey-Bass, 2014).
Over two decades, Covision pioneered the use of interactive technology in increasingly larger meetings, especially ones that sought convergence and alignment. He and his team have since served over four thousand meetings of fifty to ten thousand participants each around the world, in a wide variety of senior leadership meetings and multi-stakeholder summits. In each, meeting owners determined it was important to think together.
Notable Covision projects include “Listening to the City,” two community summits in New York immediately after 9/11, the opening general session of the World Economic Forum in 2005, four annual meetings of the Clinton Global Initiative from 2005 to 2009, and the New York Forum–Africa, in Libreville, Gabon, in 2012.
In 2011, Lind passed the presidency of Covision to Josh Kaufman and has focused on client projects, promoting real participant engagement as a key to realizing the most effective outcomes in large organizational meetings.