Jerry Abrams

Current Role

Jerry has served as an Envisioneer, Instructional Designer/Product Developer, Trainer, Team and Individual Coach, and Manager of the Collaborative Technology Initiative.

As an Envisioneer with CCL’s Innovation Lab, he explores the future of leadership development, conducting innovation projects that are future oriented and technically challenging.  Using human centered design principles, he creates and evaluates concepts and prototypes that push the boundaries of current leadership development approaches.

He scouts for potentially relevant innovations and evaluates them for their applicability to the Center’s purposes. He acts as an embedded Innovation Agent, participating in key projects and initiatives to enhance the innovation of the results. He also works to enhance the culture of innovation CCL, enabling staff throughout CCL to be more innovative in their roles.

In this role he uses the Center’s most recent research, converting this into concepts and prototypes of advanced leadership development processes and methods.  As a result, he was always working on the leading edge of the Center’s products and services.

With more than 14 years’ experience in developing strategic team task processes, he designs and leads strategic workshops and processes ranging from several days to weeks or months in duration, integrating virtual tools and processes as well as leadership development interventions into the activities.

Jerry has expertise using the 4MAT methodology for design of interventions that employ Multi-rater/360 personality and performance assessments, behavioral frameworks, experiential learning, and introspective reflections for the development and growth of individual leaders and high performance strategic leadership teams.

He is also a senior decision analyst and a senior group process facilitator with over 30 years of experience in the use of the “Socratic Method” for collaborative inquiry. In addition, he dedicates significant time to the Center’s Young Leaders initiatives and contributes to research efforts on leadership and group decision processes.

Since joining the Center in 2006, as a Senior Enterprise Associate He acted as an embedded Innovation Agent, participating in key projects and initiatives to enhance the innovation of the results. He also worked to enhance the culture of innovation CCL, enabling staff throughout CCL to be more innovative in their roles.

As an Instructional Designer/Product Developer, Jerry led and supported the development of numerous products including simulations, games, experiential activities, job aids, and tools for areas such as Action Learning/Action Development, Boundary Spanning Leadership, Coalition Coaching, Leadership Strategically, Leading or Organizational Impact, Leading Teams for Impact, and general Individual and Team Leadership Development.

As a trainer and coach, Jerry has supported a large number of CCL’s clients, for example, United Way Worldwide, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, American Express, American Express Foundation, Habitat for Humanity International, United States Departments of State and Defense, Federal Aviation Administration, and Syngenta. In addition, he provides internal training and coaching on brain-based instructional design, action learning, strategy, and team performance.

Jerry is an occasional speaker and writer on leadership, innovation, technology, and the future, making presentation and authoring blogs. He has also published journal articles on team decision processes.

Jerry also holds a position with Virginia Tech University, as an Adjunct Faculty in their Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability where he lectures on various leadership topics relevant to leadership in complex multi-stakeholder structures addressing large scale challenges with great degrees of uncertainty and global consequences.

Experience

Before joining the Center, Jerry worked as a management consultant focused on organization development and improvement, acting as group decision support analyst, business process improvement consultant, and senior facilitator with SAIC, a 6 billion dollar international Research & Development and Systems Engineering consulting firm providing solutions to large federal government agencies and international commercial concerns.

He has also worked as the director of information technology for large regional offices of Battelle, a 4 billion dollar research and development consulting firm, and as a systems analyst and software engineer for a mortgage banking consulting company.

Publications

• An Assessment Model for Rating High-Threat Crop Pathogens
• A Quantitative Algorithm for Prioritization of Naturally Occurring Infectious Disease Threats to the U.S. Military

Presentations

• Panarchy – A Model of Organizational Lifecycle