We are three partners, Marshall, John and Alexandra, with different backgrounds. Our experience comes from dealing with complex problems over many years of running or consulting to global companies, governments, foundations and NGOs.
We know too well how difficult it is to address complex issues and how overwhelming and time consuming it can be. We also know that complexity is here to stay and there is an urgent need to boost people’s ability and confidence to deal with it.
Throughout our careers we grappled with complexity using the best available tools and techniques, but never found anything that met today’s needs. We were always seeking better solutions and decided to take matters into our own hands.
Nexial is the outcome of our effort to advance the state-of-the-art of process and tools for dealing with increasingly challenging interconnected, multi-stakeholder problems. Nexial brings our learnings into a combined consultancy and technology solution, to equip people to navigate complexity with confidence as they make decisions, engage teams and make change happen on the ground.
"Nexial" derives from “nexus”: a connection or series of connections linking two or more things.
At Nexial, building connections to bring knowledge and people together is at the heart of what we do: Collective Intelligence for Collective Action.
The word Nexial suggests a method of knowing that is integrative rather than analytic. It is about joining together all valid forms of knowing - scientific, experiential and creative - drawn from all relevant fields and disciplines, to create new insights and knowledge.
This method of knowing was described in Herman Hesse's novel "The Glass Bead Game.”(1940’s) and a similar notion, by science fiction writer A.E.Van Vogt, under the name of Nexialism: the holistic integration of the sciences.
We like to think of ourselves as Nexialists, skilled in the science of joining together the knowledge of one field of learning with that of other fields, from multiple perspectives and practices, to achieve a new and shared understanding of ourselves and our environment.