Ep. 53: Contextual Intelligence: Leveraging the Synergy of Other People to Get More Done | with Matt Kutz

Today our expert guest is Matt Kutz, PhD, a Fulbright Scholar, award‐winning professor, award‐winning author, entrepreneur, and TEDx speaker. Matt is passionate about helping others achieve high‐level leadership and outstanding organizational performance, and his desire is to equip people to lead well in whatever context they are called.

Before we get into Matt’s work, I want to reflect on an important experience in his past.

As a child, in a moment of frustration, Matt said something disrespectful to his mother… but unbeknownst to Matt, his father was home and that moment of frustration swiftly became a moment of discipline.

Matt’s dad grabbed him in a Vulcan death grip and told him, “Don’t you ever talk to my wife like that again.”

Not “your mom” but “my wife.” That’s when Matt realized that his mom wasn’t just his mom – she was also a wife, daughter, sister, cousin, and friend.

It was the genesis of Contextual Intelligence. “If you can understand the context that people bring to the environment where you’re interacting with them, and how that influences who they are and what they are, you can actually act intelligently with them, and probably get done way more than you ever imagined you could get done.”

In practice, Contextual Intelligence is about doing more than you could ever do alone, and it is the basis of how Matt helps others reach the highest levels of organizational performance and facilitate all facets of leadership and change initiatives.

“We can do way more than we think we can do – our problem is we think we can do it on our own. If we begin to leverage the synergy of other people through Contextual Intelligence, I think we can change not only our own lives and our own situations but the whole world, our communities, and our organizations.”

Learning how to practice Contextual Intelligence is pretty easy, too!

If you pick up the book, of course titled Contextual Intelligence, Matt offers a structured framework for critical thinking and decision making that shows how to use hindsight, insight, and foresight – or 3D Thinking – to navigate through complexity.

Matt is also hosting the Contextual Intelligence Leadership Conference! Matt has been doing Contextual Intelligence workshops and seminars for a few years, but this is the first time the training is available to anyone!

• What: Contextual Intelligence Leadership Conference
• When: Friday, June 08, 2018
• Where: Cherry Street’s Life Revitalization Center, 1501 Monroe Street, Toledo, OH, 43604
• How: matthewkutz.com/registration

The Biggest Helping: Today’s Most Important Takeaway

“Don’t compartmentalize your life. Navigating complexity successfully requires reframing our identity to include what you love. So often, we create identities for ourselves that exclude what we love… So if you want to be successful, if you want to go where you’ve never gone before and accomplish things you’ve never accomplished before, don’t compartmentalize your life – it’s too hard… What you love to do can be incorporated into your work, into your family, etc.”

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Thank you for joining us on The Daily Helping with Dr. Shuster. Subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play to download more food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, and tools to win at life.

Resources:

• Register for the Contextual Intelligence Leadership Conference: matthewkutz.com/registration
• Connect with Matt: Facebook | Twitter
• Contextual Intelligence by Matt Kutz
• Watch Matt: matthewkutz.com/videos

The Daily Helping is produced by Podcast Masters