Speaker

For a deep thinker Bryan is one funny guy. His informal style and quick wit form his trademark.

Obsessed with complexity he has always wanted to understand cause and effect. His obsession has led him on a path like no other in pursuit of excellence around the leadership table.

As author of three books on decision making and writing his fourth Team Think – How teams make great decisions, you can tell he has delved deeply into the human psyche to understand leaders and team performance. His mantra is that strategic leaders do the “hard-smart work” their competitors can’t or won’t do.  Doing the hard-smart work makes them a cut above the competition.

He is the type of speaker that engages his audience by the way he makes them think.  He draws on his over 25 years of interactions with executives and boards and their teams to open minds about the ways they work and drives home the opportunities of hard-smart work in this complex world.


Topics

RISK TAKER OR RISK MAKER

Every leader needs to take risk.

Not all leaders realise they are being a risk maker rather than a risk taker.

Risk makers are those that see only the path ahead. Risk takers see the big picture. They see a complex organisation that can’t be controlled operating in a complex environment with even less ability to establish a semblance of control.

Based on his book Risky Business: How Successful Organisations Embrace Uncertainty, Bryan takes his audience on a journey of discovery of the future of organisational design. He unveils the agents of complexity and draws a picture of an organisation where performance and risk are two sides of the same coin.

From reading the signals of change to the alignment of strategy to goals over horizons of time, Bryan maps out the future for organsiations for those willing to take the risk.

CONVINCE THE INCONVINCIBLE

Some people just don’t get it.

You and I both know we are good decision makers. Whereas everyone else has a problem. Right?

Therein lies the greatest impediment to convincing the inconvincible, they KNOW they are right, and you are wrong. They are intransigents. They are so frustrating. Infuriating even.

The art of convincing is the art of influencing. And influencing is an art because to be a science, you would need an infinite number of approaches to convince the inconvincible. You see, everyone puts up barriers to bad advice. And each person’s barriers are different. So that is over 7 billion unique barriers you need to account for. Worse still, each of us changes our barriers throughout the day based on our energy levels and whether the boss just gave you a pay rise or gave you a warning notice. An infinite number of variations of barriers.

Built around Bryan’s Pathfinder Model, this session will give your audience a deep understanding of the challenge of influencing and how to navigate a path through the most resolute set of barriers.

RETHINKING THINKING

We think we know.

We think we know the answer to so many questions. Yet studies have shown that our success rate is only about 85% for a complex situation and about 50% when it comes to setting the organisation’s strategy.

For decades we have known the impact of our personal biases on our performance. We easily fool ourselves, everyday. Yet we do so little to address it.

Bryan helps the audience to rethink how they think. And that means rethinking who they think with, when they think and with what they think. Even more importantly, he makes sure they are clear on why they are thinking at all!

See Bryan in action, launching his book, DECIDE: How to Manage the Risk in Your Decision Making.