“The Secrets to Avoiding Disaster for Leaders: A Science-Based Guide to Successful Decision-Making”

• No one wants to see a disaster in their workplace, yet they happen all the time, from everyday disasters such as a new hire not working out to major crises that may lead to bankruptcy. The large majority of these disasters are preventable, and stem from one or usually a series of poor decisions. In hindsight, we can clearly see which decisions led to disaster: wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to predict these bad decisions in advance and avoid them? Fortunately, you can learn how to minimize everyday mishaps and major disasters through applying decision-making science. This presentation draws on research in decision-making and emotional and social intelligence as well as real-world case studies to help optimize the process of decision-making for leaders, teams, and organizations.
• Learning Objectives
  • Gain awareness of and escape the cycle of regrettable decisions, thus avoiding workplace disasters, big and small
  • Identify a series of problematic thinking and feeling patterns  – what scholars call cognitive biases – that cause us to make regrettable decisions
  • Use recent research in behavioral sciences to deal with cognitive biases in the workplace through easy-to-use strategies for effective decision-making
  • Combine intuitive and analytical thinking to help you make the best possible decisions in an environment of uncertainty
  • Help yourself and your team implement these strategies thoroughly for optimal decision-making processes
  • Exert influence effectively on team decision-making from any role in the team, while helping maintain trust, engagement, and commitment among team members
  • Identify the competing interests of multiple stakeholders, especially in a context of uncertainty and transition, and coordinate them to achieving the organization’s goals

“Don’t Go With Your Gut in Hiring and Assessment”

•  Making successful hires and assessments requires avoiding going with your gut, according to recent behavioral science research in decision-making and emotional and social intelligence. Studies find that going with one’s intuition often results in systemic errors that undermine diversity and inclusion, lead to poor workplace outcomes, and cause legal challenges. This presentation provides research-based strategies for making the most successful hiring and assessment decisions while avoiding lawsuits and facilitating diversity and inclusion, and provides audience members with free access to a web-based decision-making tool that encodes such strategies and maximizes transparency and fairness.

• Learning Objectives
  • Protect your organization from systematic thinking errors that lead to poor decision-making in hiring and assessments
  • Avoid lawsuits by following research-based best practices in hiring and assessments

  • Leverage behavioral science-based strategies to make most successful hires and assessments

  • Align hiring and assessments with the strategic goals of your organization

  • Learn to use a free web-based tool to guide hiring and assessments throughout your organization

“Cultivating Socially Intelligent Organizations”

• Most organizations act as though humans are fully rational creatures, driven by logical incentives. However, much recent research shows that most of our decision-making and behavior is driven by emotions. Failing to appeal to people’s emotions undercuts motivation and engagement, creates a toxic internal culture, and leads to turnover and internal discord. Applying the research on social intelligence helps organizations avoid these problems, make wise policies, and communicate effectively to internal and external stakeholders to achieve organizational goals.
• Learning Objectives
  • Assess how well your organization engages people emotionally
  • Discover the implications of recent social intelligence research on what actually drives people in your organization
  • Gain specific tools and tactics you can use to adapt this research to improve motivation and engagement, improve organizational culture, and decrease turnover and internal conflict
  • Learn how to train people in your organization on integrating social intelligence-based tactics into their everyday workplace interactions

“Helping Your Clients Succeed Through Emotional Intelligence”

• Isn’t it frustrating when you know what your client needs to do to succeed, but the client just won’t listen to you? Or perhaps your client does listen during your meeting, but then doesn’t do what you agreed on afterward? How do you address that problem? Too often, the problem stems from the client’s emotional landscape, which creates resistance obstructing the client’s success. This presentation uses recent research from psychology and cognitive neuroscience to help you convey your message effectively through emotionally intelligent communication to help your client both internalize and implement your suggestions successfully.

“Engaging Employees Through Creating a Meaningful Workplace”

• Your bottom line depends on your employees being as engaged and invested as possible. Research on companies with highly engaged employees shows the importance of creating a sense of a meaningful workplace to do so. This presentation shows the simple and cost-effective sense to creating a meaningful workplace to help maximize your bottom line.

“How To Reach Your Goals in the Workplace”

• Did you ever have the experience of knowing where you want to go, but not how to get there? Or how about trying to get to where you want to go, but missing your target, month after month? Recent research on goal achievement suggests some simple and effective strategies that you can take to reach your goals, as an individual or an organization.

“Cultivating Trust and Integrity Through Behavioral Science”

• Trust is the vital if invisible glue holding an organization together, and research shows that a lack of trust within an organization profoundly damages employee engagement, retention, and productivity. Trust is based on a foundation of integrity, and much recent behavioral science research highlights how to cultivate a culture of integrity to avoid the disasters resulting from insufficient trust within an organization. This presentation describes the benefits of trust, and suggests a series of easy-to-use, research-based strategies to strengthen integrity within your organization.”

“Leadership Success Through Research-Based Emotional Intelligence”

• While vital for leadership success, emotional intelligence has become a diluted and fuzzy concept. This presentation focuses on the actual research behind emotional intelligence and science-backed strategies for how leaders can use emotional management, empathy, and emotional contagion to achieve their workplace goals.

My primary vocation is helping people, organizations, and our society as a whole use science-based decision-making and emotional and social intelligence to AVOID DISASTER.

At their root, disasters stem from poor decisions, which in turn often stem from bad information. People make bad decisions in their everyday lives, which results in them losing money, time, relationships, health, and happiness. People make bad decisions in their workplace that results in their organizations losing money and time, as well as harming the organization’s reputation and employee morale. People make bad decisions in their political spheres, often due to deceptive information from politicians, leading to fundamental challenges and dangerous risks, including catastrophic and existential ones, for our society. The 2016 election cycle led me to make a major life decision to orient my civic engagement toward popularizing rational thinking in public life.

These bad decisions come from faulty wiring in our brains that causes flawed thinking, feeling, and behavior patterns – what the scientific literature calls cognitive biases. Much of our bad decision-making comes from failing to understand the role of emotions in making decisions, which is where research on emotional and social intelligence is invaluable to address the gap. Fortunately, recent scholarship shows we can address these problems by using strategiesdiscovered by scholars in psychology, behavioral economics, and cognitive neuroscience. Unfortunately, much of this research is trapped in dry academic papers in journals read only by other academics.

To me, this situation is intolerable. It is appalling to see these resources that can address the worst problems faced by individuals, organizations, and our whole society be accessible to so few. My knowledge of this situation comes from myself being a scholar specializing in decision-making science, emotional and social intelligence, and related topics. I published over 25 peer-reviewed articles in academic venues, as well as a couple of books. Currently, I serve as an Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University in the History of Behavioral Sciences and am a member of the Decision Sciences Collaborative there.

As such, I have the knowledge required to translate and popularize these research-based strategies to a broad audience. I have decided that this is the most worthwhile goal for my life. To do so, I have shifted away from writing books and articles oriented toward other academics, and have oriented toward spreading these ideas through a number of avenues, including consulting, coaching, speaking, and training for mid-size and large organizations, as well as public activism and social entrepreneurship.