TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwire) -- 07/05/11 -- "Over 1,500 CEOs have said that increasing complexity itself is their number one issue. But, less than half believe their organizations are ready and adaptable enough to deal with this exponentially more challenging global environment," said Don Jones, lead researcher and designer of the training program: Leading in an Age of Complexity - Contextual Intelligence.
Founder of Toronto-based experience it inc. Jones' research involved 70,000 managers observed in over 3,000 behavioral simulations. The sophisticated, simulated experiences lasted between three hours and five days in length. The resultant research showed that the largest single change that managers could make to improve their results was to increase contextual awareness; to significantly broaden their perspective to better sense, map and shape context. GE is implementing this leadership program globally and is teaching their executives that the greatest predictor of how high they will rise is how wide is their thinking.
Jones recently presented his research to 14 of the world's largest companies. "This program was the highest-rated program in our history," said Margie Rodgers, of the Finance Development and Training Institute. The FDTI is an influential financial think tank in the U.S comprised of industry-leading member companies, among them: American Express, The Coca-Cola Company, Daimler AG, General Mills, Intel, Kimberly-Clark, Microsoft (Jones' client), and Sprint. Its mission is to foster positive sustained change for large global enterprises.
Leadership in the Age of Complexity - Contextual Intelligence is a program Mr. Jones designed to address the growing need of individuals and businesses to manage within increasingly complicated and interconnected environments. Jones says, "A job that required ten interactions to get to completion only a decade ago necessitates 40 interactions today. We are in a world of exponentially increasing content, but the human bandwidth needed to make sense of it all has not significantly changed. We need a way to increase the ratios of signal to noise. Context now trumps content, but our ability to understand and leverage context is under-developed. That gap is a major problem, as the simple solutions to our complex problems have to be found outside the boundaries of the problem itself-within the context." Jones' Contextual Intelligence model looks at the increasing importance of contextual understanding, of creating internal simplicity and enabling higher orders of self-organization and adaptability throughout the enterprise.
exper!ence it inc. is a 25-year-old Toronto-based company that researches, designs and delivers leadership business training and immersive simulated environments to Fortune 500 companies in North America, United Kingdom, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Contacts:
experience it inc.
Stephanie Vincent
416-699-6107
stephanie@experienceit.com
experience it inc.
Tim Delroy
416-699-6107
tim@experienceit.com