Consulting, Strategy and Workshops
I design custom training and consulting programs to help you achieve your innovation and inclusion goals. (2022 clients included AT&T, Chevron, Pfizer, Walmart, and Lexus.) I will listen to how you want your organization to change, provide a fresh perspective on your data, suggest policies, procedures and programs that might help and suggest meaningful assessment measures to keep you on track. I will also be your stealth advocate: everything is focused on meeting your goals. I offer practical courses, training and consulting in four areas, all connected through applications of cognitive psychology and behavioral science.
1. Innovation and Culture
Innovation requires risk and is intertwined with culture and strategy. I teach innovative processes (like design thinking) and policies (like a permission slip for failure) but innovation also requires a culture that has a high tolerance for ambiguity and supports your most divergent thinkers.
2. Inclusion, Bias & Performance Management
An “inclusion audit” of your data and culture can help determine your next best step. My bias training is unique in that I focus on the cognitive shortcuts that all humans take and how this leads to so many poor decisions (in business but also in how we motivate and evaluate people and personnel). The business case is central and the context is broad, which removes much of the usual reticence to teaching implicit bias.
3. Trust, Social Capital and Motivating Teams
The human ability to share knowledge and cooperate is unique. We are motivated by purpose but are also susceptible to groupthink. Leadership is largely about connecting what people do daily in their jobs with the big vision of where the organization is going. Trust is the accelerator for everything from teamwork to managing the conflict that is central to innovation.
4. Strategy, Behavior and Change Management
Strategy is the art of sacrifice, but it starts by understanding the key choices you need to make. Strategy sits at the intersection of your aspirations and capabilities, so it starts with understanding both your current market position and your culture (often the key capability for innovation and change). Equally, strategy ultimately depends on your ability to align behavior and the decisions that others will make.
Most Popular Workshops
Inclusive Leadership & Cultural Excellence
All management is change management. Human beings were designed for collaboration, but also stability and conformity. Change is hard, in part because humans think collectively. Diverse groups take longer and this produces better work, but also requires different and more inclusive leadership skills. Your ability to lead innovation and change in the modern workplace require a higher aspiration to cultural excellence. These sessions will challenge how you think about the relationships among culture, inclusion, conflict and innovation and provide you with new ways to leverage your own personal and cultural strengths to increase the tolerance for ambiguity in your team and set you up as an inclusive leader of change.
In these interactive sessions we will
- Build self-awareness about bias and behavior.
- Consider your thought accent and its implications for trust, engagement and belonging.
- Create an aspiration for cultural excellence and not just cultural competency.
- Understand the benefits of healthy and early task conflict
- Practice techniques that support meaningful conversations and meetings of healthy conflict and change
- Commit to inclusive leadership behaviors, processes and techniques that will support belonging and innovation inn your organization.
Inclusion & Innovation
(More emphasis on innovation and less on leadership)
This workshop marries innovation techniques (like design thinking) with those that support innovation. Both innovation and inclusion begin when there is enough trust to voice and explore new and diverse ideas and indeed almost all of the techniques presented (engaging in meaningful conversations, inviting participation, embracing a wider variety of voices, creating divergent processes, and supporting healthy conflict) are about creating a culture that fosters trust, openness and ambiguity. Diverse groups do more creative, innovative and profitable work because they also take longer, question more assumptions, stimulate more honest dialogue and stir more conflict.
In these interactive sessions we will
- Build self-awareness about bias and behavior and its implications innovation and inclusion.
- Explore the value and mechanism for going beyond diversity to creating a culture of inclusion and innovation.
- Practice a design thinking project.
- Understand the benefits of healthy and early task conflict
- Practice techniques that support meaningful conversations and meetings of healthy conflict and change
- Understand your current culture and how to effect change.
D&I Programs That Work: Why Outcomes Matter
(For senior leadership)
Diversity and inclusion are hard and are not improved with one-off training or media statements. The work begins with transparency, threshold numbers, inclusive leadership and attention to culture supported by data, but success requires a relentless focus on outcomes over intentions. It is policy and practice that drive improvement and this session will demonstrate the types of assessment and data required and provide opportunities to apply these findings to your organization.
In this interactive session we will
- Investigate how biology and culture create bias and lead us to resist change.
- Evaluate how businesses have created and leveraged a culture of inclusion and how you can too.
- Understand groupthink and how to create a culture of increased tolerance for ambiguity and divergence.
- Explore the benefits of measuring outcomes over intentions.
- Design processes for better and more inclusive decisions.
More Interactive Sessions & Workshops
Practical Innovation
We will survey and practice tools (like design thinking) that support innovation and policies that won’t only reward compliance. We will look at processes and barriers from a wide range of previous innovations and focus on how to build a culture of innovation. This course for managers and team leaders demonstrates how to build local support of innovation even within a global company with its own culture.
The Human Guidance System and Cognitive Countermeasures
Designed for engineers at a Fortune 100 company, this 4-hour course begins with the brain operating specifications that interfere with our desire to be rational. Understanding why and how humans take cognitive shortcuts leads to practice designing countermeasures to encourage better decisions, but also opens a different door to the discussion of how easily we misread other people and their motivations. We can learn to ask better questions about data and people and design systems to anticipate bias.
Teamwork and Trust
The human ability to share knowledge and cooperate is unique. We are motivated by purpose and we will practice articulating the motivating vision of your team. Leadership is largely about connecting what people do daily in their jobs with the big vision of where the organization is going. We will look at a variety of models for teaming, but trust is the foundation and the accelerator for all of them.
Nudges, Behavior and Change Management
All management is change management and strategy only succeeds when there is behavioral alignment. Nudges (like choice architecture and peer pressure) are an application of cognitive science that are often no cost ways to encourage new behavior. If culture eats strategy for lunch, here is a mechanism to change your culture.
Networks, Social Capital and Understanding Groups
The human ability to share knowledge and cooperate is unique, but equally means that we are susceptible to groupthink. A highly connected organization may be efficient and fun but can also create social pressure to conform (which decreases innovation). Balancing the tradeoffs should be a part of your organizational strategy.
Strategy as Alignment: You are What You Do
Strategy begins with data, hard choices, and differentiation in the market (or lower cost) but it is only as good as the hundreds of strategic decisions everyone in your organization makes every day. Strategy sits at the intersection of your aspirations and capabilities, so both your current market position and your culture matter. Collective motivation and cultural alignment (and not implementation) are the key capabilities for innovation and change.
Leadership and the New Learning Organization
New technology has created a learning economy that rewards the nimble. Leading these new learning organizations (and indeed working with next generation employees) requires increasing engagement, agency and risk tolerance at every level with more attention to process, motivation and meaning. Creating engagement, motivation and learning everywhere will build innovation, reduce turnover and support change.
Making Risk Happen: Leading a Strategic Culture
The best coach is not the one who can do the best push-ups: it is the person who gets others to do more push-ups. Leaders are emotional and cognitive coaches. Creating an innovative culture that will attract the best, new, and sometimes disruptive and ideas and people, begins with your own comfort with ambiguity.