Reflective Performance Co-Founders & Advisors, Stephanie M. Carlson, PhD, and Philip David Zelazo, PhD have spent their careers researching and applying Executive Function to developmental neuroscience, decision-making, and learning. Their positions as Professors at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development provided a platform for research and scientifically based publication of the results they obtained working with children and adults.
Together, they developed the Minnesota Executive Function Scale (MEFS) as a rapid, adaptive digital assessment method for measuring EF. The MEFS has been applied extensively in research and education settings, with well over 100,000 assessments. These efforts resulted in the development and proof of our software app for EF assessment, Reflect/EF, to enable valid and reliable measurement, standardized usage, and algorithmic scoring for workforce applications. With their expertise, science will continue to be the driving force behind our development of new forms of assessment and skills improvement methodologies.
Our Co-founder & CEO, John G. Carlson (no relation to Stephanie M. Carlson), has spent over 30 years in leadership positions as CEO, COO, CFO, and program manager of corporate turnarounds and industry-wide “system change” initiatives resulting in transformative operational and financial improvement. These roles and experiences were grounded in data-driven quality improvement methods applied early in his career.
He applied this acquired knowledge to combine system-wide process improvement with lifecycle asset management, developing “Small World” Systems Models to reduce complexity and fragmentation in business practice. This business methodology enables Executive Function technologies to be mapped and correlated with productivity improvement opportunities across a whole business. It is rooted in the same scientific, data-driven methods employed by scientists to study complex systems.
John’s breakthrough is in the prioritization of employees and people in general as critical assets that control the course of all performance improvement and sustainability. He determined that Executive Function measurement combined with Reflective Thinking aided by Systems Analysis provides the means to enable organizations to be more humane as well as more profitable.