Pontifex Consulting is a meshworks of partners (individuals and organizations) that have helped private, public and non-profit organizations build their capacity to think and act systemically.
Organizations
isee systems, inc.
isee systems (formerly High Performance Systems) is in business to improve the way the world works, by creating Systems Thinking-based products that enable people to increase their capacity to think, learn, communicate, and act more systemically.
isee systems is the world leader in Systems Thinking software. Founded in 1985 by Barry Richmond, then a Professor at Dartmouth College the company has grown into a thriving, privately-held corporation with substantial global reach in business, education, and government markets.
Background
In 1987, the Company was awarded the Jay Forrester prize when it was the first to introduce an icon-based model building and simulation tool, STELLA. STELLA brought computer simulation-based model-building to the mass market. In 1990, the company introduced iThink for business simulation. isee systems also created the first Management Flight Simulator in 1991, pioneered introduction of the first Learning Environment in 1995, introduced the first Learning Lab and the first conversational systems thinking workshop in 1999. Each of these new product lines significantly advanced the state of the art in systems thinking.
Recognizing the Company's solid reputation and commitment to quality, Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation chose to partner with isee systems in creating a new line of interactive Learning Environments focused on key strategic business issues. These products are now in use in many of the Fortune 500 companies, as well as in business schools around the world.
Customers
isee systems has brought Systems Thinking to thousands of individuals and organizations in over 80 countries across the world. Our customer list includes: General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, McKinsey & Co., Prudential, McMillan-Bloedel, A.T. Kearney, Ford, Smith Kline Beecham, Dow-Corning, Intel, W.W. Grainger, and a variety of government agencies and schools.
Lexidyne
Lexidyne specializes in framing, quantifying, and answering specific business questions using the principles of Dynamic Modeling and systems analysis. Our customized models
offer a unique way for our clients to integrate data and institutional knowledge, analyze marketplace dynamics, and quantify the expected impact of strategic decisions.
Lexidyne works extensively in the the pharmaceutical industry, specializing in models of patient flow dynamics, physician adoption/prescribing behavior, and portfolio planning. Other areas of focus include supply chain dynamics as well as training in specific system dynamics simulation tools.
Sustainability Institute
We focus on understanding the root causes of unsustainable behavior in complex systems to help restructure systems and shift mindsets that will help move human society toward sustainability. Our staff includes biologists, writers, social scientists, system dynamics modelers, and facilitators bringing a wide variety of experiences and skills to our work.
Donella (Dana) Meadows, founder of the Sustainability Institute and lead author of Limits to Growth and Beyond the Limits, was a pioneer in the application of system dynamics to critical issues of human survival - poverty, growth in population and consumption, ecological degradation.
Climate Interactive
Our vision is that interactive, accessible computer simulations help spark action that stabilizes the climate. And we've got simulation tools and resources for communicators and analysts to help make that vision happen. We are modelers and scientists dev
eloping climate simulations, writers and designers using them to create powerful media, "open architecture" community creators helping the work spread virally, and corporations and foundations who want to see results.
We have big plans for the Climate Interactive community to adapt, extend, share, and use similar simulations at other scales, from company to city to country to the Earth.
President
Chris Soderquist is the founder and President of Pontifex Consulting, an organization committed to helping individuals, teams, and organizations in building their capacity to develop strategic solutions to complex issues. Chris uses his extensive experience in Systems Thinking/System Dynamics, group facilitation, communication skill development, and statistical/process analysis, integrating the hard stuff and the soft stuff, to facilitate the development of solutions that are effective and actionable. For over 15 years, he has worked with Fortune 100 companies, international development organizations, national and state government organizations, and communities to help them better achieve the future they desire.
Chris is a guest le
cturer at the Darden School of Business (University of Virginia) in their Executive Education Program, and on the Boeing Engineering Leadership Program development team. He is a contributing author to The Change Handbook (Berrett-Koehler, 1999) and has published several features in The Systems Thinker. Chris has facilitated several webinar series for isee systems (developers of the system dynamics software iThink and STELLA) to help their clients build more effective systems models for organizational improvement.
Chris has contributed to several multimedia training products teaching environmental and system dynamics. Systems Thinking: Taking the Next Step is an interactive tool for teaching the principles of systems thinking. He also contributed to other products in the isee systems catalogue, including: Balancing the Corporate Scorecard, Food Chain, Fly a Cell, and The Service Profit Chain. Most recently, he was the lead developer on the UVa Bay Game, a multiplayer simulation of the Chesapeake Bay for the University of Virginia.
Partners
Ron Benton brings practical expertise to accelerate the critical conversations, decisions, and processes essential to creating strategic business value. Ron has guided high technology businesses and sales organizations in identifying and aligning to achieve billions of dollars in revenue opportunities and over $1B in cost reductions.
Ron is President of Ron Benton & Associates, Inc., and has two decades of experience consulting to leaders of global businesses and their functional leaders. He and his network of experienced industry consultants deliver a broad spectrum of services, including strategy development, business performance measurement, strategic decision acceleration, organizational alignment and governance, business transformation, and customer experience strategy consulting.
Most recently, Ron led Hewlett-Packard's business strategy and organizational acceleration internal consulting practices. He personally led engagements with many enterprise and consumer product groups and divisions from $50M to over $5B in revenue, as well as with emerging country and regional leadership teams.
Ron is an innovator who shares a patent pending for a framework that assesses an organization's capability in delivering customer value. During the HP-Compaq merger, he co-designed the new company’s Quality / Total Customer Experience management system and strategy. Earlier, he led the team that created and implemented HP's global competitive customer measurement system. Ron holds a Masters in Management from the J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University and a Bachelor's Degree from Pacific Lutheran University.
His career and consulting practice benefit from significant executive development experiences from the Institute for Management Development In Lausanne, Switzerland; Conversant in Boulder, Colorado; Strategic Decisions Group in Menlo Park, California; the National Technological University in Fort Collins, Colorado; and HP's Advanced Development Program for executives in both Asia and North America.
John G. Singer is founder and principal of Blue Spoon. Blue Spoon is a leading strategy and marketing innovation consultancy serving the global pharmaceutical, health products, and information technology industries. Blue Spoon was the first to publish a new commercial model for drug marketing, the first to design a new architecture for grand strategy in the pharmaceutical industry, and has pioneered a framework to improve business performance at a system level, an approach that enables an evolutionary leap in solutions for growth and competitive advantage. The firm marks a major creative advance in the field of strategy consulting.
John's breakthrough approach to strategy design is centered on systems theory, transcending time, environment, political and social conditions, and technology. It is a path to new growth and sources of value that rests upon nearly a decade of thought leadership, and is stimulated by 20 years of knowledge and diverse strategic experience as senior consultant with IMS Health, and as a marketing practitioner in New York with the world's leading advertising networks (Omnicom and Interpublic Group). His clients have included Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Schering-Plough, Roche Diagnostics, GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol-Myers Squibb, 3M, Perkin-Elmer, Hewlett-Packard, and C.R. Bard, among many others.
John's thinking and ideas on strategy and innovation have been published in Sloan Management Review, The Wall Street Journal, Business Strategy Series, Journal of Business Strategy, Journal of Consumer Behaviour, the CMO Council, the American Marketing Association, Advertising Age, Innovations in Pharmaceutical Technology, and Pharmaceutical Executive, among many others. He is also a successful restaurateur and active surfer.
Craig Weber is the founder of The Weber Consulting Group, a consulting alliance that helps people, teams, and organizations develop actionable competencies for leadership, teamw
ork, and change. His distinctive work focuses on improving the caliber of collaboration as people engage difficult, complex, adaptive challenges. His formal education in organizational development (Brigham Young University-Hawaii) and organizational psychology (Columbia University), combined with his extensive consulting experience with a broad range of clients and contexts, results in a unique and powerful approach to helping people pull together in circumstances where they're inclined to pull apart.
Kristina Wile is a facilitator, educator and consultant in the areas of systems thinking, system dynamics, and systems change. She has fifteen years experience working with clients in public and private sectors to develop and use models to m
otivate and inform strategic planning and implementation. Kris received her master’s degree in system dynamics and operations at the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1994. While there, her research focused on the dynamics of organizational change and business ethics. She also has a B.S. in Electronics and Computer Engineering, and seven years experience as a systems engineer and project manager.
David Wong 
has 23 years of experience at Hewlett-Packard in a variety of positions, including manufacturing/production, product assurance, R&D and quality, and internal consulting where he worked across many functions including sales, marketing, IT, supply chain, and finance. For the last 12 years at HP, Dave was an internal business consultant for HP, where he worked on multi-billion dollar consulting engagements, resulting in millions of dollar savings for HP. His consulting expertise is focused in the areas of defining the total customer experience (TCE) and the associated value delivery system (VDS) to support it, leading large-scale process improvement and re-engineering initiatives, and solutions lifecycle development and implementation. For the past 4 years at Strategic Crossroads and Integrated Execution, Dave has continued to extend his experience in leading worldwide sales compensation programs for a Fortune 50 company, and managing process improvements at several other Fortune 500 companies. He is a master at integrating systems and quality methodologies to support improvement initiatives through expert application of quality function deployment (QFD), failure mode effect analysis (FMEA), statistical design of experiments and other standard quality process improvement methodologies. He has extensive experience in applying systems thinking tools to understand and reduce complexity in business systems. Dave has a BS Chemical Engineering degree from the University of Illinois.
