Handling Disaster With Dr. Gleb Tsipursky | Ep 84 | David Hulman

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See terms people seem to forget. If you change today, today will change your life. Hello, welcome to the next episode of the Self Belief Chief podcast. You're here with life coach and author David Holman. And in this week's episode, I'm speaking to disaster avoidance expert Dr. Gleb Sipirsky about how to prepare for the worst but hope for the best, both in terms of a business point of view, but also from an individual's point of view as well. With all the stuff and all the uncertainty at the moment, we're talking about COVID 19amongst other things in life, which can cause a lot of uncertainty and how to be ready and how to be prepared for them. So if you're dealing with a lot of uncertainty at this present moment, this will be a great episode for you. Hello, Gleb, how are you doing?

I'm doing great. Thanks so much for inviting me on the podcast.

No, you're very, very welcome and thank you for reaching out as well. And so obviously came across your book never go with your gut. And very interesting read for people who in the context of business especially to understand actually ideas around decision making and instincts and actually how as a business, a business can function better than having worked in corporate settings myself, understanding that the speed of decision making, the speed of processes can sometimes compromise actually the quality of what a business might do. But first, before we get into it, Claire just said I just for people listening, just tell us a little bit more about yourself.

Happy to. I'm a disaster avoidance expert. So that's my title, that's how I'm known. And I run a company called Disaster Avoidance Experts of consulting, coaching and training of six people. Now what we do, what I focus on is helping folks make the right decisions in their business as well as in their career decision making. So business decision making, career decision making in order for them to avoid disasters. Because decisions overwhelmingly poor decisions are what lead to disasters. Whether it's an actively poor decision, where as a result of your decision, the business has serious trouble or your career has serious trouble, or failing to make the decision at the right time when you need to do it, that also leads to a lot of disasters. So my focus is on helping folks avoid those disasters and, and maximizing success. I've been doing this for over 20 years, ever since I realized as a kid that, you know, nobody sat me down and said, hey kiddo, here's how you make good decisions. Everyone, you know, just saying, you know, following your heart, trust your gut, go with your intuitions. And my parents were saying that, and I saw my parents making some pretty terrible decisions as a result of that. You know, there was a really bad one with my dad. So he was a real estate agent. He worked basic commission, so his salary was variable. Well, he, at one point he decided that he went with his gut and he hid some money from my mom, that he made quite a lot of money. And he told her he made very little money during a period of time. He bought an apartment on the side and then he leased it out to some folks. Well, in a couple of years when she found out, she was very pissed. She was very angry. She actually kicked him out of the house because she felt that it was really a betrayal. So he had to live in that house that he bought for those people. And I rarely saw my dad in that period until they reconciled eventually. But you know, it was pretty hard for me. It was, it was rough. And that really made me, pushed me to focus on, hey, why do adults make such bad decisions? Why is that happening to study this topic? So, and especially since I nobody taught me that, not simply when I was a kid, but also in high school, that, that's not something that was taught. Not in college, not in business school. It's not taught how to make good decisions. So I studied this topic and that's how I got into consulting, coaching and training. So on the one hand, and I realized that there's very little actually good quality advice on decision making available in the popular literature. So I went into academia, I became a professor, I studied this topic formally published a bunch of peer reviewed papers in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics. So that's my area of expertise as a professor. I spent 15 years in academia, including seven years a professor at Ohio State. And that has been all brought together. My 20 years of experience consulting, coaching and training and 15 years of research experience has been brought together in that book, Never go with your gut. How pioneering leaders make the best decisions and avoid business disasters.

And I'm sure in the current climate that's never been more relevant, to be honest. And you see so many businesses who are, you know, ones that react quickly and they're commended for their speed of action, but actually in the grand scheme of things, yes, we have to act quickly. But actually our business is making the right decisions. And so rather than talking about it in a kind of, with one paintbrush and talking about the, you know, what all businesses should do, I mean, at the moment, what is it that businesses can do? Not what they should do, what can businesses do to help themselves as a business, but really more importantly for the health and well being of their staff, of their customers, of their coworkers, all of that. What would you be advising businesses to do at the moment?

Well, right now I am spending a lot of time, I mean my, my inbox and phone is blowing up because of clients and other new people who know what I'm doing, who are, want to inquire with me. And what I'm seeing is very bad decisions by businesses. And we have to understand where these bad decisions come from. They come from our gut reactions. And our gut reactions are not adapted for the modern environment. They're not adapted for the modern business environment, the modern relationship environment. In all sorts of life areas, including business and careers. We don't make the right decisions because our gut reactions, our feelings, our intuitions are adapted for the savannah environment. When we were lived in small tribes of 15 people to 150 people, where hunters, gatherers and foragers. So our main threat response, you might have heard of this, is called the fight or flight response. That's how we respond to threats. So in the savannah environment, that was great. You know, we had to jump 100 shadows in order to get away from that one saber toothed tiger. That's why it's also called the saber toothed tiger response. In the modern environment, you might notice there are many less saber toothed tigers, but we still react to threats as though they're saber toothed tigers. People, business leaders, professionals of all sorts, individuals, political leaders, react to the COVID 19 pandemic as though it's a saber toothed tiger, as though it's a short term, immediate, intense emergency. That is how they overwhelmingly react. That's one. And second, they put into place plans that they had prepared previously, contingency emergency plans for the general pandemic problem, as opposed to focused, focusing on the specific issue. I mean, look at what happened with the UK government. It Had a plan for a pandemic that was very poorly fit to the COVID 19 pandemic. And it lost a lot of time and it caused a lot of lives to be lost because it put in place the wrong plan that was not adapted to the current situation. It was just reacting. It was reacting with that fight or flight response. You know, what can we do immediately in the moment to address the situation? Bad response. A lot of business leaders are doing the same thing. They're going to their existing emergency plans and they're saying, okay, this is the contingency plan, let's put it in. But the problem is your existing contingency plan. Same thing for professionals, whatever entrepreneurs, small businesses, large businesses. Their contingency plans are only for a short emergency. It's like a snow blizzard or a flood or something like that, or a major power outage. It's a two week plan. That is the major, major plan that businesses have. And that is a very big problem because they're functioning in emergency mode. Now. When you're functioning in emergency mode for a pandemic, that just doesn't work for a long term pandemic. COVID 19 is going to be around in the most optimistic scenario for the next two or three years. How is that? Well, we know that the only way to get rid of COVID 19 is to have a vaccine. It will keep popping up. We'll stay at home for a while. They then there will be some loosening of restrictions, but then it will come back up again. That's what happened in countries that had successful restrictions in whether in Japan, whether in Hong Kong. They had successful restrictions, then they loosened them. Then the disease sprung up with a second outbreak. So we can't just do restrictions and expect that that will take care of things. We need a vaccine. Vaccine. The most optimistic scenarios of vaccine. That means everything going perfectly. The first vaccine is completely correct. It's 100% effective. It will take 12 to 18 months. And then of course, it will take another 12 to 18 months to produce enough of it and distribute it to the whole population. Now if you are a business leader, if you're a professional, you should not plan for the most optimistic scenario. That's just silly. That's the most optimistic scenario. For more pessimistic scenarios, it might take up to five years, maybe seven years, up to 10 years, maybe never. We may never find effective vaccine. Just like we don't have an effective vaccine for the flu. We only have a 50% vaccine. It's only 50% effective. So that's the more optimistic, pessimistic scenario. But even the most optimistic scenario, your two week contingency plan will not work for a two to three year situation. So what you need to do, what I'm working on with a lot of folks is making a long term plan. Not a simply immediate in the moment plan, but making a long term plan, making a long term switch, realizing that we're not in an emergency. COVID 19 is not an emergency. It's the new normal. If you're functioning in this mode for the next two to three years, very optimistically, this is not an emergency. This is your reality. This is the reality in the foreseeable future. Because you shouldn't really make plans beyond two to three years, realistically speaking, because it's hard to foresee the future.

You're speaking from a business point of view. Is that opposed to an individual perspective?

It's not opposed to individual perspective. So when I'm talking to professionals, I'm talking to them about, hey, how can you change your professional career to go toward the long term perspective? When I'm talking to, I talk to professionals when I do coaching, I also do coaching in their personal life and the relationships I talk to them about, hey, you will not see a lot of your family members for two to three years if they're located not immediately near you. You might not have any flights, any transportation for the next two to three years. How will you manage your relationships? How will you manage your relationships with your people if you're staying at home? You know, a lot of people are not used to staying at home and they only spend, you know, maybe one or two hours a day together. Now you're spending with your whole family, with your whole household. You're spending 24, seven together. That leads to a lot of relationship tensions or a lot of relationship strains. In fact, my next book is called Blind Spots Between Us. How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships. So this is really important and people don't realize the kind of damage that their relationships are going to suffer and they're not making a plan for how to adapt their relationships to this new situation. So that's relationships and all other sorts of things that you have to change because you, you are not going in your normal everyday routines. And you have to realize that your routines are a thing of the past. And we can't realize it intuitively. We're not comfortable with it because of cognitive biases, these dangerous judgment errors. One of the biggest ones here is called the normalcy bias. Now the normalcy bias causes us to assume that the future will be similar to the past. At least the medium term future, short term future will be similar to the past. We can't process intuitively with our emotions that the major disruption has come and the future will be very different than the past. It's very hard for us to process this emotionally. So we have to logic into it, we have to reason into it. And businesses have to change their business model in very fundamental ways. Their internal organization and their external business service professionals have to change their career orientation, individuals have to change their, their relationship plans and a lot of other things have to change in order to adapt to this new normal.

Okay, very, very interesting. So just you alluded to what you might be helping people do in the suggestions and. Absolutely. With people I've spoken with is, you know, the relationships that you already have in the household. There's the distant relationships, there's the effect of people's careers both in terms of actually way of working or whether there's a job there for them at all. With all of that stuff. Give us a few specifics, a few tangibles in terms of what you might be, what suggestions you might have for people listening in who might have the same concerns. What should they do? Aside from say, things like working from home and things like that?

Yeah, I mean the working from home. The problem is you're already working from home so you need to prepare for what the situation would be like. So let's talk about individuals first and then get to businesses. Sure. So for individuals you need to make long term changes to, let's even say your basic supplies. Right now, official government guidelines in the uk, in the US and all over say you need to have two weeks of supplies in your house. That's bad advice because COVID 19, if you get a serious case of COVID 19, you are going to be out of commission for about eight weeks. That's the more serious case of COVID 19. So you should have supplies for at least eight weeks, for at least two months, just in case you get COVID 19. We know that people spread COVID 19 very quickly, very easily, and a lot of people about half or more who have COVID 19 don't know they have it. Therefore it's very easy to get ill from somebody who doesn't know they have it. So you want to be prepared just in case to be ill and to not go out of the house and to be really sick for two for eight weeks. That means you need to have supplies of all sorts of for eight Weeks. So that's just kind of one of the basic housekeeping. Yeah. Then you want to make sure that you have a specific plan for your relationships with people. I already mentioned that have a plan for relationships with people inside your household. Now you are going to. If you're not used to spending time with each other in the household, especially if you have kids, you know, a lot of young adults have moved into the household. They, they have a lot of trouble just staying inside and dealing with things. So you need to figure out how you'll manage that relationship for a long time, especially if they've just moved in. If kids are not going to school and staying inside the house, how will you manage that? Right now a lot of people are functioning in emergency mode and they're tolerating these discomforts. Now. That emergency mode will not last for two to three years. In a couple of weeks, you'll be driving each other crazy and you need to prepare for that. You need to have a conversation with family members about specifically that, hey, this is going to be at least a two year thing, two, three year thing. Then if that's the case, how do we manage, how do we make sure that we don't get into each other's spaces, don't get into each other's faces, how's that going to be addressed? What about your loved ones, your romantic partners? If you're used to spending an hour together, two hours together, and now you're spending 12 to 14 hours together, you're probably crimping each other's style in many ways. So you need to work out these issues, work out these challenges, work out these problems right now and think about that. So that's kind of in your immediate household. Outside of it, how are you going to deal with the lack of social contact? Again, a lot of people are already stray. It's already a strain for them to have the lack of social contact, but they're still thinking it's just going to be maybe another couple of weeks, another month and it's going to be over. It's not, it's really not going to be over. It's going to continue for a very long time. And it's, you know, maybe in a couple of months restrictions will be loosened, but then they'll go back up again. So you need to figure out how you will cope in the next two to three years without this lack of social contact. Immediate in the social contact. You know, figure out how to use various software, maybe consider using virtual reality, other things, other ways of addressing this problem. Also think about your hobbies. You probably have a lot of hobbies that might rely on face to face. You know, I like, for example, to play tennis with people. Well, I'm not going to be doing that for a long time. You know, that's not going to be a possibility. Especially if you like to, you know, do something like playing football. That's not going to be something that's you're going to be able to do. So how will you place that for yourself? Both the physical aspects of it and of course the social companionship aspects of it and other hobbies. Whatever you're doing, whatever you're used to, you need to figure out hobbies that don't rely on face to face activities. So those will be very important for you to cope mentally. So think about your mental well being, your psychological well being in this period. So that's for individuals. And I'll stop here if you have anyone to have any questions.

Yeah, I was going to ask you specifically. So what are you doing to overcome your lack of.

Oh, so what I'm doing with luck of tennis I am doing, first of all, I'm focusing much more of my energy on gardening here in the summer. So that's going to be replacing physical activities and then to replace the interactions, the game like interactions, competitive interactions. I'm finding various apps that allow me to play with people who I play tennis and then what I do with them is I play tennis, I chat, I go out, I hang out and we have conversations while we play tennis. So it's a nice thing to do to be able to have these conversations. So I'm finding apps like, let's say Scrabble, chess and so on that I can use to play with them in such a way that it still allows interaction. So while we're playing Scrabble, we kind of chat about other things, other life things. So that is a way I'm compensating for the companionship and for the physical activity.

And are you winning most of the games or how, how competitive are you?

I'm really competitive. Yes. So I'm not, I'm winning most of the games and when I'm not winning, I'm upset. Okay.

Yeah, yeah. That's the thing I worry about is when someone goes from like playing something they're not as good at in their own home and being competitive and they start losing all the time, what that will do. But anyway, it's a good.

Well, if you're starting to lose, play tic tac toe. You can always get it into a draw at least.

Yeah, fair enough. Yeah, good point. Fair enough. So talk to, talk to us from a business point of view.

Yes. So companies also need to make big changes in the way they do business. Fundamental underlying transformations in their business model. So first of all, think about their internal business model. How do your employees collaborate together? Now, of course, they're overwhelmingly working from home, unless they're essential personnel, but overwhelmingly they're going to be working from home. Now think about that. When they're working from home. Right now, they're still in emergency mode, they're still collaborative, they're still pulling together. You know, hey, everyone against the pandemic, it will not last for that long. You know, a couple of weeks, maybe a month, people will, they can't function on adrenaline for that long, so they will be coming down from the adrenaline. And you need to figure out how to replace the things that they get naturally and intuitively from being in the office. One of the most important things is motivation. People are motivated by coming together with others like them and working collaboratively together on a shared project. It's a natural motivating thing. Now, when they're surrounded by nobody, when their co workers are their pets, they will not get that sort of motivation. So you need to figure out how to motivate people for who work, who work from home, who are not used to working from home, who are forced to work from home. So there's a lot of people, especially extroverts, who will have a lot of trouble with this. So the motivating aspects of this are going to be really important. That's one another aspect, and this will build up over time, is how do you solve problems that were previously solved by just people meeting in the office or popping into each other's office and addressing things? They nipped problems in the bud, they saw problems, they nipped them on the bud, they addressed them and these problems went away. Now they will not be able to address them that easily. They will not be able to nip them on the bud. They won't even realize that they are not able to notice these problems. Because of course, if you don't notice them, you don't realize you're not noticing. So this is a lack of awareness and conflict solving skills. When you have conflict solving skills that are not face to face, it's much more difficult to solve conflicts. You know, I've, you know, before the pandemic, I've been. One of the areas that I help clients deal with is how do you resolve conflicts with people who are not face to face. So, for example, there was a central headquarters in the local offices, and central headquarters is responsible for various organizational policies. Local offices are responsible for customer service. That creates a lot of intentions and conflicts where, I mean, I was working on the conflict where they started sending emails to each other about a conflictual issue. And then they started not agreeing, started using all caps, yelling at each other, started CCing the CEO to such an extent that the CEO told me in a private conversation that people were behaving like psychopaths on email. Now that's not great when your CEO thinks that. Yeah.

Not ideal.

No. Right. And I can guarantee to you that there will be many more psychopaths on email as a result. That's just the reality of how we communicate by email. It's dehumanizing, inherently dehumanizing. So you need to figure out the conflict solving issues. How do you resolve those? You need to figure out, of course, how to hold people accountable. Previously, as supervisors, you can hold people accountable just by walking around the office, doing a walkabout, checking in, having your meetings, brief meetings, whatever. You can hold people accountable much more easily when they're in the office, but of course, when they're working at home, how do you hold them accountable? You need to figure out that problem. And there are of course ways of doing that, but that is a big issue that you need to deal with. Fourth, and probably most importantly, I want to very much highlight this is building up trust. Now, teams have inherent trust from meeting each other in the office, having just chats around the water cooler about their kids, their life, that they build up those relationships that rely on knowing about each other and trusting each other. Those webs of trust will fray as people are not working in the office and they are not aware of each other as a human being. And that needs to be really cared about. That is so important and so little attention is given to this issue. So this is one of the big, big areas that a lot of companies are not paying attention to right now that really needs to be paid attention to. So these are the areas that you want to focus on inside the organization as you change your business model, systems and processes. And you might want to think about reorganizing in terms of reporting structures in such a way as to compensate for the virtual teams, because there's different reporting structures that work more effectively for virtual teams rather than for in person teams. That's internal. Externally, you want to be thinking about changing your business model. Right now, a lot of business models rely on Face to face interactions, face to face collaboration. So for example, I'm working with a legal company that's trying to figure out how to switch company of lawyers, couple of hundred lawyers that are trying to switch to, from a face to face interaction to virtual interaction. Now there's a lot of things they can do online relatively easily. Sending documents, sending emails, whatever, that's not hard, that's not a problem. But the biggest problem is that they know they're facing, and we've talked about that, is how to build up trust with clients. Now service professionals in all sorts of areas, whether it's legal, whether it's accountant, whether it's management consultants like me. The biggest issue that the biggest value, the biggest source of credibility we have is trust with the client. So we need to build up that trust. And that trust of course is built up through that face to face connection where you see the other person, you can trust them. You know, you have that handshake, you know, pat each other on the shoulder. You have that collaboration, you have that face to face collaboration. That's not happening right now, that's not going to happen. You know, you're not going to be meeting with clients. So you need to figure out how are you going to maintain that trust with clients, whether it's because you're a service professional or whether it's a client to whom you're selling your products and you don't have that, you know, previously you were meeting with them for lunch once a week or once a month in order to cultivate that relationship and you're not doing that anymore. Well, how are you going to cultivate that trust relationship? So that's a really important issue. And of course there's going to be another of other important issues around how do you collaborate with your suppliers, how do you collaborate with your vendor, vendors of various sorts, with your investors? If you, a lot of enterprises of course have lots of investors that they need to collaborate with and they need to convince that they're doing the right thing. And that relies a lot in face to face contact, which is not going to be available anymore. So you need to figure out how to replace the building of trust. That's that face to face contact enabled how to address, so that's one. And then how to address communication. In online communication, especially tech, especially email, it's so easy to make misunderstand, to have misunderstandings, miscommunication, ones that are much easier to fix when you're in the moment, when you're in the room, because you can read people Much easier. You can see signs of hesitation, body gestures, body movements, face, being concerned. That's very hard to do over email.

Yeah.

And it's, it depends on having as many senses as possible and being in the room and having that person to person connection. Even on video, it's pretty hard to do. You need to learn differently. So you need to have professional development in how to read people over video and how to communicate over video. And of course, a lot of people don't know how to do video very well. I mean, a lot of people are running into a lot of serious issues with using Zoom, using Skype and so on. So that is just some of the issues, some of the major issues. But there are other issues involved that need to be addressed. And of course you need to think about what happens if some of your people get sick. With COVID 19, you need to have more robust key employee replacement plans. So that is another issue that you want to be thinking about. But that's just some of the stuff that companies need to be thinking about. And as part of it, they need to be really seriously thinking about their long term plans. This is a long term shift. So how are you going to function in the long term changing your strategic plan to accommodate the new reality? You need to throw away your old strategic plan pretty much, or revise it very seriously and address the reality that you'll be functioning within the situation for at least two to three years, as well as addressing the uncertainty that it might be much longer than two to three years, might be forever, or it might be five years, or it might be seven years. So how do you function within that uncertainty? And there's of course ways of making business plans that accommodate for such major uncertainty. But you need to revise your business plan to make sure that you accommodate for this uncertainty.

Okay. And one of the things you mentioned specifically which, which interests me and it sort of, it pops up in a few of the different points that you made around the idea of the motivation. Motivation in terms of your day to day, but the motivation in terms of planning medium and term, because that requires its own driving motivation. Because people don't want to perhaps face what looks very, what would seem scary. If I'm planning long term, then I'm creating that acceptance that actually this is, this is a big problem. And so, but once we sort of, I guess as you're suggesting we provide like a worst case scenario sort of experience for ourselves and actually how do we handle that, then we can start to enjoy our day to day life more. So as A result of, amongst the uncertainty. So the question I want to ask you was when you have, when you're explaining to businesses and maybe this will reflect onto individuals speaking to businesses about long term plan. But you're mentioning that of course the motivation part is very hard. Presumably you're having to advise them on the motivation aspect. And it can't be, it can't just be sort of, you know, rewards or incentives or whatever necessarily. Maybe there are the types, certain types of incentives that are applicable. So what motivations are you suggesting? If they're saying, well, actually we don't know how to motivate our employees in such a situation? What would you say could be ways to motivate people so they need to.

Understand what previously motivated employees. And that is really important. And one of the things that motivates employees is having an effective connection with your fellow colleagues and having a sense of emotional connection. Now I talk a lot about emotions and you might be surprised given that I talk about never go there. But what the research on this topic shows is that about 80 to 90% of what we do is motivated by our emotions, by what we feel, not by what we think, but by what we feel. So never going with a gut, it doesn't mean ignoring your emotions, not caring about your emotions. It means being very much in touch with your emotions, understanding what your emotions are, seeing where they're driving you in the wrong direction, and then addressing those problematic drivers in order to shift your emotions, to manage your emotions in order to get them driving you in the right direction. Yeah, yeah, that is, that is emotional intelligence. And that is very important to understand. So that is one aspect of what you need to do. And the other aspect of what you need to do in terms of motivation is social intelligence, which means understanding other people's emotions and, and what drives them and being able to influence them, their emotions effectively. So just that basis, that framework needs to be understood. So you need to go to their, toward their emotions, toward the emotions of your employees and see what motivates them. So what motivates them. You need to figure out what are effective stories. Stories are incredibly motivating. And it again might be surprising for people who think that, you know, I'm illogical, whatever, but stories are just inherently motivating and that they, because they appeal to our emotions, that's what we resonate with. So previously you were telling your employees stories. The business was telling its employees stories about the business, about what it was doing that were inspiring, positive, motivating, engaging for these employees and money Just to be very clear, you talked about money and rewards. Money is a very poor motivator beyond a certain minimum. So there's extensive research showing that once there's a sufficient amount of money, whatever it is, depending on the region where you live, but something like, you know, maybe 50,000.

That's what I read.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, £50,000 or something like that. You know, however many. $60,000 depending on where you live, that would be sufficiently enough. And after that, any additional money would be, you know, just points. It just doesn't, doesn't matter that much. It's just a matter of measuring status. So it's really not nearly that important to have that difference. So what you want to be focusing on is what kind of stories are you telling your employees? Think about what stories were effective earlier and how you can tell them in a virtual environment now. Because previously, of course, you were telling them through face to face. You had that engagement where you as a leader, as a supervisor were telling their stories, were engaging with people in that face to face interaction, and you were able to convey charismatically those stories to them. That's one of the functions of a leader, is to inspire people to get them all moving in the same direction. Well, now you can't do the natural intuitive storytelling that you used to do. So you have to go from that natural, primitive, savage storytelling to the artificial civilized self where you, where you convey your stories through other medium, through. You have to figure out how to gather stories, convey them through text, convey them for video, convey them through audio. One of the things that I strongly encourage my clients to do is to create a podcast and videocast, official podcast and videocast, internal one for the company. And of course it can be externally broadcast as well if you want that, depending on the content, but that one of the more powerful things that you can do right now is created specifically internally for the company, where instead of, you know, morning meeting, report whatever, you know, memo, you create a video version of that where you videotape yourself or somebody else who is in a leadership position having, speaking about stories and inspiring ones about the company, about what's going on, having clear transparency about how things are shifting and giving examples of success as well as some failures. And you need to be honest and transparent about that, about what's going on in the company and what the company is doing to make sure that it's successful for the next three to five years or longer with while this thing is going to be around. So individual stories of individual people framed within the broader context of the company that delivered in video and audio form as well as text form. You know, it's easy, very easy to just take the transcript of that and deliver it in text form. So you can deliver it in all of these forms to your employees. You can have that, you know, a podcast that goes out three times a week, for example. So that's something that is an effective strategy that you can use to help motivate your employees, that you need to be sure to convey to them that you're working right now on revising your strategic plan to, to have them be confident in their future. A lot of people are very scared, not simply about COVID 19, but about the economic impact of COVID 19. So you want to convey to them and assure them that, hey, you have, you have your stuff together and you're making a plan for the long term future. So that's some of the things I would talk about in terms of how to motivate people effectively. Okay.

So, yeah, and I mean, obviously every industry and business are going to be affected in different ways. So I imagine that, you know, all of the stuff you said, it's all kind of, of course, very individualistic as well, and things work better for different people. So the next step for these businesses, and this is something I think a lot of people listening, one, being very intrigued by what you're saying. But two, the bit people really want to hear, which is, you know, you're mentioning these kind of long term, how long term this all might be actually preparing almost, you know, hope for the best, prepare for the wor and all of that. So when we start talking about loosening restrictions now, this is the danger where obviously, which for a lot of people, you know, so you're based in Ohio, I'm based in the uk. So, you know, slightly different points in terms of our journey with all of this, but from a UK perspective, yes, I think as you said, maybe we're a bit slow and reacted to certain things. We've now got a lockdown and people are finding, you know, that they're understanding that everyone's got that balance between appreciating the safety they have, but also feeling begrudged that they've actually lost their autonomy and their freedom. So everyone's waiting for that day to turn around where actually everything's going to be loosened. And the fear, I think for a lot of people, as you alluded to earlier, is the fear that as soon as it's loosened, the chaos that might happen. And obviously you just have the second, second wind of all of this stuff is going to be a problem now. This is a problem that all businesses and all countries are going to have to. Or some of which have already tried to contend with and some of which are going to have to contend with in the future. I think we've got a, you know, in the UK we've told to expect sort of restrictions for, you know, really tight restrictions, possibly for six months and then, and then an attempt to try and loosen. When you talk to businesses and you create this long term plan. Presumably part of the long term plan is how one might be able to loosen the restrictions without letting the door, you know, opening the door completely wide open. How can we go about loosening restrictions whilst being cautious, whilst managing the sort of how the obvious things, managing how quickly we allow people to continue their everyday lives. In what ways might we be able to expect restrictions to be loosened in the future? Just something that we can look, I guess I say look forward to, but a day where actually, yes, restriction be loosened. It doesn't mean you can do whatever you want, but here's the reality of what you might be able to do. Have you got any thoughts or ideas around that?

Yes. So there's two separate issues there. One is what will be happening for society as a whole and one is what will be happening for individual businesses. So let's take those in turn. For society as a whole, what will happen when there's a loosening of restrictions will be something like opening up of ability for people to gather in groups of more than in groups of 10, but not more than that, for example, and maybe take public walks and be able to have those interactions. But with social distancing, maybe you can play tennis but you can't play football because you have that social distance. I'll be glad that you can play tennis. Yeah. But you know, most of the people in the UK who like football more will be, will not be glad. Yeah.

So they're still disappointed.

Yeah, that's. That's right. So there will be some, there will be those loosening eventually, depending on how that goes. There are. Pubs might start to open, which I know is very important in that it might, they might open but with much less room. So you might have to book your room in a pub if you want to go there and you have to sit, you know, 10ft apart from somebody else. So that might be, you know, 2 meters, 3 meters apart from somebody else. That, that might be the kind of thing that you would be doing, which of course is much less fun in a pub when you're sitting three meters from your body, it's like cheers from yeah, yeah. So it, it will be less fun and less engaging, but that is what will happen. And then the government will see how, what's happening in terms of the problems of increasing infections, because that's the issue. Right. So the hospitals in the UK are going to be somewhat overwhelmed in some areas and you need to bring that way down before you have loosening restrictions. And then you need to see whether the increased openness results in many more infections, which then of course would require clamping down. And so that, that will be a guide based on what's going on. But we know that in some countries, like Hong Kong, like Japan, where restrictions were loosened, then it's pretty quickly got to be. Got to a much more serious problem than it was before. So this will be a guide for government figures as well as what's happening In China, for example, there's loosening of restrictions as right now as well. So those will be models. So that's for society as a whole. Now, for businesses, I mean, I can't influence what, you know, Boris Johnson does or Donald Trump does, but I can influence what businesses do. So with businesses, what I'm talking to them about is when society has loosening of restrictions, don't simply go for the maximum right away. Yeah, don't do whatever is advised. Look at what's happening, look at whether other businesses, that certainly some will just be going for the maximum, see how that works out for them. See if they have people getting sick and, you know, getting ill, don't go, don't rush forward, don't be the first to go to the maximum. That's one second. What they want to do is make sure to have serious contingency plans for key employees getting sick. So that means what you, what they want to do. So what I'm advising businesses that have the capacity to do that is to keep at least half of their staff at home and make sure that these staff are cross trained to replace the staff who are going to the office being more exposed. So there's cross training and ability to replace them with staff who are working at home. And then of course you can switch around the situ, you can switch that around over time. But what you want to do is make sure that any staff who are out and about and who are doing things that are putting them at more risk, that they are much more replaceable. Not of course, you don't want to replace them, but they are cross trained so that their functions, you can replace their functions pretty easily by someone who is home and safe. And that is something that I advise them to do. I also advise them in this case, it would be helpful to make sure that people who are going out and about are motivated in a variety of ways. And that might be a combination of money, combination of promotions, so incentivizing that hazard pay, so to speak. And people feel good about getting hazard pay. So it's about making them feel good. It's not simply about motivating them with money. It's just that they want to be rewarded for a more dangerous activity. And it's natural and it's understandable and they should be okay.

Well, good. I mean it's. That is a fine balance and I think it's a difficult one, especially here when we, you know, and being in the UK as we've seen it sort of spread through Europe first, especially places like Italy where we just. I think people do have an appreciation that actually, you know, we have to take this very seriously, but all on the edge of our seats in terms of what we can expect. And there's just very little clarity in terms of what we can expect. Surprisingly or unsurprisingly, I'm not sure.

So.

Okay. And now one of the things that I think would be relevant for lots of people now, but I was very surprised to read in your book is in never go with your gut, you had a section where you started talking about meditation. And I don't know whether I thought I should be surprised by that or not. And I thought most of the book is very logical and practical. And then you talked about the meditative aspect, which when I come across a lot of people talking about business, either avoid or whatever word you want to use, don't talk about those particular aspects. And I'd be, you know, especially in the current climate for many, the majority of people who. And businesses who don't take up some sort of meditative practice, whether it's a full meditation or whatever, just some form of it. And I my mornings start with a, you know, a short version of a form of meditation. What is it that is so important? Can you talk to. Talk to people listening about why that is so important for people to embrace, especially at this particular point and actually the benefits that's going to have on there, both in terms of their well being but their productivity as well.

Sure, happy to. And I also start my mornings with meditation. Now the reason I put meditation in the book is because the book is going by what's science driven, not simply what's Popular fetish or not fetish. It's just talking about, here's the science, here's the cognitive neuroscience, here's the behavioral economics, here's what we know. You know, I'm not talking about what we don't know. We have extensive evidence that meditation is very helpful for a number of things, including for fighting with cognitive biases, for debiasing. That's the practice of fighting cognitive biases. Debiasing and meditation is very helpful for a number of areas specifically within cognitive biases. It's helpful for focus, for building up your focus, your ability to be attentive, pay attention, be aware, be in the moment. And of course, the problem with our decision making, the intuitive decision making, the gut reactions, is that we're not aware of them. We just feel comfortable with something and we go forward with it because it feels like the right thing to do. Now, sometimes what feels like the right thing to do is exactly the wrong thing to do. I mean, think about, let's say, eating a dozen donuts, right? So you have a box of dozen donuts in front of you. It feels very tempting to eat the whole box of dozen donuts. Especially when you start with one donut or, you know, two donuts. Maybe two donuts is okay, but then it's very hard to not eat the rest of the donuts when they're right in front of you. Now why is that? Well, in the savannah environment, it was very important for us to eat as much sugar as possible. When we came across that sugar, we came across some honey, some apples, some bananas. We had to eat all of it as much as possible, at least in order to survive. We are the descendants of those who successfully survived because they ate a lot of sugar and because they had a very strong fight or flight response, all the rest died. So we are the descendants of those who survived. So right now it feels very right, it feels very tempting, very intuitive, very comfortable to. To eat the whole box of dozen donuts. Unfortunately, that's exactly the wrong thing to do in the modern environment for your physical fitness. And it's just as wrong for your mental fitness to go with your gut and follow your natural, primitive, savage intuitions in business environment. And that's a mental fitness issue where you want to make sure to make the right mental decisions. And in order to notice when you're falling into going with your gut, following your intuition, and instead change your behavior to be more intentional, to actually go to what you want to do with your business, with your career, with your relationships, I mean, how hard Is it when somebody in a relationship with you says something nasty, to not say something nasty back? Right. It's very easy. It's very tempting. It's very intuitive. It's very wrong. It's the wrong thing to do. You want to be the emotional adult in the room and address the underlying emotions of the person who said the nasty thing rather than, you know, get into a nasty argument. That's not the right thing to do. So this is the same thing. You want to be attentive and focused, and meditation helps you build up that attention and that focus and that attention that focus has, besides the making bad. Making better decisions, much better decisions. It helps you in other ways, as well. As you rightly point out, David, it's helps you in being more productive because if you're more focused, you can keep your focus on the productivity rather than, you know, every five minutes, take out your phone and see what's going on in your Candy crush game. So, you know, or what somebody else said on Facebook in response to your post, whether they clicked like or not, I want those likes. So that is something that is very helpful if you're focusing on the right things. So meditation helps build up that focus, and it helps you a number of ways because it helps you build up that focus. Okay, good.

Yeah. No, and I very much adhere to all the qualities of meditation. And I always say to people that a lot of science proves that what we do in the first 20 minutes of our day affects the tone of our day. And so what you do in those 20 minutes is. It's vitally important. So. No, but I'm glad to hear your take on it as well. One of the other things I liked in your book, never go with your gut was you mentioned there's a lot of stuff on decision making, but then there was a lot, quite a bit in terms of actually understanding other people's point of view and being able to step into their shoes and beyond. So that's beyond empathy. That's being able to, you know, it's a pure understanding of actually, well, how am I going to be able to interact and make clear decisions but be persuasive and all of that stuff by actually not understanding what affects me, and therefore that's probably what affects someone else, but actually understanding, as we've spoken about, really what motivates them, what drives them when it comes to stepping into someone else's shoes. And you meant, you know, we could have talked about this from a business context in your book. You do. But again, as with everything going on. And you, you've spoken about the people you're going to spend spending a lot of time with and beyond potential conflict and all of that stuff, ideas around being able to really get into someone else's shoes so that you can better understand them. And you know, I always say to people, especially in sales, people don't buy what you understand. They buy when they feel understood. And I think that is so true. And so just in terms of anything you can share for people to really be able to understand what it's like in someone else's shoes, to make conversations, to make decision making easier and to reduce conflict.

Yeah. I want to share a specific method I describe in the book called Egrip, which helps people. You convince somebody who is in front of you and who obviously is having some irrational beliefs that are at odds with reality, how do you convince them to believe the truth, to believe the facts, to orient toward the facts? And this is one specific method. There are many other things about stepping into each other's shoes, but I want to make sure that you have this one specific technique because it's incredibly helpful. So first with it's Egrip, when you have somebody in front of you who is obviously rational, it's very tempting to argue, it's very tempting to present facts and say, here are the facts, believe the facts. Well, that person, if they were willing to see reality clearly, that they'd already believe the facts. Giving them more information in that moment in that mode will not have help them. It will cause them to have a defensive response or an aggressive response, a fight or flight response, because they're threatened by the information. And again, emotions determine 80 to 90% of our decisions, including whether we believe in reality or not. So if we feel threatened by information, if someone feels threatened by you presenting this information to them, they will not believe this information. They will instead have a defensive response or an aggressive response. Neither of those is good. So instead of conveying to them this, this threatening information, what you want to start with is understanding their emotions. Figure out what emotions are they feeling. And that's not too hard to do. Figure out, try to see what is causing them to believe in the underlying idea. So let's say, you know, they don't believe in global warming or something like that. Ask them that, hey, how do you feel about this issue? Please help me understand. I'd like to know more about your feelings about this. And then they will likely talk about their feelings because you asked them. And it's not a threat to them to, to Talk about their feelings. You know, a lot of people like to talk about their opinions, right? Yeah. So, you know, people like to talk about their opinions, especially about something they have irrational beliefs about. So ask them about their opinions and based on their opinions, you'll see what kind of emotions they have. And they likely have some negative emotions about this, otherwise they wouldn't be believing this irrational thing. Negative emotions can be fear, they can be anxiety, they can be anger, they can be grief, any of these emotions. And there's, for example, with climate change, there's a lot of anxiety about, well, if I believe climate change, that human caused climate change is real, therefore I will have to accept that government should make policies that limit the kind of economic productivity that companies have. But I'm very worried about my job and that that will hurt my job. Therefore I will choose not to believe the evidence on climate change in order to address my fears of economic productivity and job loss. That's a very, very common thought pattern, very common, very common story that people have in their heads. So that's might be an emotion. You can see that they have fear and anxiety about this. Okay, great. So then now you understand that. Now the next step is you want to understand their goals and what are their goals around this issue. What do they want to achieve? And that requires a little bit more curiosity, questions that are not simply about their opinions, but about their goals, their aspirations, what they want to see happen. So for example, with climate change, when you feel economic anxiety, that's a concern for them. You can talk to them about their economic, what are their job aspirations, what are their goals, what do they want to see happen? So let's say, you know, that they want to be involved, they want to make sure that they have a good job that's a good fit for the next 20 years in this context of long term disruption. Right. So this is something that's a common thing that people express. Great, so then you understand their goals. Their goal is to have this economic security and it can be anything with any issue. But just taking this example, so you understand their goals and this is the second step of egrip. So again, EGRIP goal is an acronym for five steps, Emotions, goals, rapport, information and positive reinforcement. So we went for emotions, you went for goals. Then you go for rapport. You talk about how you care about their goals and how you share their goals. So something like, hey, totally understand you. I mean, I'd love for you to have economic security over the next 20 years. That's something I'm really aspired to myself. I want to make sure that my job, whatever I do, is going to be secure and it's not going to be out of date in the next three years in this context of great economic disruption and all these problems. Right? So you share that, you show how you are. Essentially what you're doing here is you're showing them that you're part of their tribe. Remember, one of the most important things about us as human beings is that we're tribal. In the savannah environment, as I mentioned before, we functioned in tribes of 15 people to 150 people. We had to be very tribal. We had to be very oriented toward people who look like us, think like us, share our values. Because if we weren't sufficiently tribal, we'd be kicked out of our tribe and we die. So we're the descendants of all of those people who weren't kicked out of their tribes, who didn't die. So you are and they are. So you show them that you're part of their tribe, that you're on their side. Great. So now you have that rapport. You built up that rapport. They feel that you are on their side, you share their feelings and then you move into the next step, which is information. Here's where you actually give the facts that challenge their worldview. You can say things like, well, hey, did you know that the environmental green jobs are growing at a much faster rate than not green jobs and black jobs that. Jobs that don't require going against environmental concerns. So there's much more growth in this area and there's much more potential for growth if, though, given the consideration that there's more climate change, there's more jobs involved in climate mitigation, climate change mitigation issues. So not simply energy production, but addressing the negative problems of climate change. And so there's much more potential in this area than in many other areas for the long term because, you know, climate change is going to continue. So this is something that we have to think about for the, the long term. There's a lot of areas that you can improve your financial situation if you shift your attention to working in green jobs, working in climate mitigation issues. And that will likely help them understand that, hey, you know, this is not something I was thinking about. There's green jobs, there's climate mitigation, job change mitigation jobs. Great. Maybe that's something for me to think about as a career path that will be secure for the next 20 years, which is pretty, pretty actually accurate, that that is a career Path that will be pretty good for you if you get into that right now, which is not quite on the ground floor, but it's relatively close to it. And then the last step, don't forget this, this is really important. After they shift their opinion somewhat, you want to give them positive reinforcement. That's the P of Egrip. So positive reinforcement for changing their minds. A lot of people forget this step, but if you forget it, you will have to have this conversation with them many, many times over. Around there are a bunch of issues, but if you give them positive reinforcement for changing their mind, saying hey, takes a lot of guts to change your mind. It's not easy. You know, I know that it's very hard for me to change my mind and it's very noble and great and courageous of you that you can shift your perspective on this issue rather than saying haha, I win, you lose. That's not going to help. You know, you want to get them to have positive emotions. The underlying point here is you want to get them to have positive emotions about changing their minds and believing the facts, even if the facts make them uncomfortable. So that's the kind of story you want them to develop in their heads that hey, changing my mind is a good thing. Even though the facts might make me uncomfortable, it's still overall a good thing and it will help my goals and will help me in the long run. So that's the story you want to leave them with. Not simply the object level issue, which is the underlying, what the let's say climate change, but the meta level issue, the more complex issue, the broad framework of believing the truth. So that's the five step model, eGrip, emotions, goals, rapport, information, positive reinforcement that can help you use the technique of stepping into other people's shoes in a very specific targeted way to make sure that you can convince people who have irrational beliefs to change their minds toward the facts.

Very interesting, very interesting. I yeah. And there's, especially when it comes to things like sales where you see kind of similar sorts of, you realize the importance of things like positive reinforcement and but actually what you've just said there, it's often in being persuasive, in being, you know, being able to really build a connection with someone, the order is so important. I think actually the order of which you just framed all of that, people might know some of those things just do it in completely the wrong order. And people aren't people sort of, they've got to kind of move down the ladder and they're not Ready to move down the ladder until you've actually crossed certain points. That's really, really interesting.

Yeah, this is really important. So I was giving the example with the climate change because you talked about personal life. This. I teach that in my clients all the time. Whether it's for sales, of course, it's very useful. But especially in internal company deliberations, I find it so useful for folks to use the EGRIP method. So there is an interesting study done by Leadership IQ of 1087 board members. They fired their CEOs, the chief executive officers, 286 companies. It found that one of the top five reasons that the CEOs were fired, 23% of the CEOs were fired for denialism, meaning denying negative facts about reality. And you might see that with a number of CEOs who denied negative facts about COVID 19. Right. And political leaders. That's a very common classical thing where you can deny negative things about reality. And when you're dealing with a CEO who you see clearly falling into denialism, and you're not a board member who can fire that person, then you probably want to not tell your boss that, hey, you're absolutely wrong on this and you're dumb. That's not the message that you, you want to convey. You want to use Egrip, you want to see what emotions. So, for example, if a CEO doesn't want to change their the plan for a product, that's clearly way too ambitious, you can see that, hey, maybe the CEO has fears about being seen as inconsistent and a weak leader. If they change their plans. And this, you go for the Egrip and you go through it in a process where you show them that you get to the facts and you show them that it takes a lot of strength and a lot of courage for a leader to change their minds. And you show them how very prominent leaders have succeeded by changing their minds, pivoting their companies. And they have been much better than those who didn't. And so you're gonna give, give the example of 737 Max by Boeing as some company that really launched its product way too early while it still had a lot of technical glitches. And look what happened to them. So those are the things you can help them realize. And you can be soft and emotionally engaging, take their perspective and get them to the right answer. And they'll appreciate you much more. Your leader will appreciate you much more if you're able to do that. And they will value you as a trusted advisor. And as, I mean I have to tell you, for myself, as a management consultant, that's my role as a trusted advisor. And I often use this method as a service professional to get the client to change their mind from something they're really dumb about to making the right decisions.

I'm always very interested in decision making because I always think that most people's model is kind of spend 90% of the time trying to make a decision and 10% trying to make it the right one, when really in the reality is that it's been 10% of the time deciding what the right decision is. But also you can spend, you know, most of your time, or 90%, I'm trying to make it the right decision. Now, what I wanted to, because that's sort of the model. I often see things. And percentages doesn't mean time. Percentages just means your, you know, the level of dedication and effort. Where is that going into it? So where I kind of wanted to leave this conversation and sort of an end to this conversation really, is in your book, you talk about delaying decision making and, you know, in lots of different contexts. Yes. For example, at the moment, people have to act quickly and people have to move quickly, but being conscious of the decisions they're making. But also, I wanted to finish up this conversation on whether people can make. Call it in very vague, bold terms, but there's a whole gradient to this. The wrong decisions make them the right ones. And what I mean by that is that on paper, you know, A or B, you don't know which is the right decision. But at some point, if you really don't know, just to use a story. So the story of General Schwarzkopf. Who Famous military leader before he was a general, he was part of a team trying to make a decision, and they had an option between A, B, and C. They spent about 18 months, still couldn't make a decision. And Schwarzkopf's sort of manager, or should I say manager, his general at the time, came into a meeting to help, and within five minutes of hearing the options for the first time, he said, option B. They all looked a bit stunned. And so Schwarzkopf went to go see him and he said, you know, this is the first time you've heard of these decisions. You know, how can you just say option B when you don't, you know, we've been. We've been discussing this for 18 months. You know, how have you done that? And he spoke about the fact that you're spending too much time deciding. I wanted to ask. You might not frame it as making the wrong decision, the right one as such. But actually speak to the effort and where the dedication is in terms of once you've made a decision. Because yes, you're helping companies make better decisions. We've also got to help them actually follow through with decisions that they make. And so that's a sort of different end of the scale. So where I want to leave this conversation is at that end of the scale is once they've made better decisions or created better long term plans, how can people make sure that they're the right ones?

So I wanted to make sure to address the general Schwarzkopf's decision making. There's one of the cognitive biases that we suffer from is called information bias, where we tend to look for too much information in order to make a decision and wait too long to make a decision. You want to make sure to decide how much information you want and how much time you want on a decision before you launch into the process of making the decision. Because if you don't make that commitment in advance, you might spend too much time or too little time the decision process. So it's much. Because when you're involved in the process itself, it's very tempting to either end it too quickly or to extend it too long, depending on your personality. Some people have a more pessimistic personality and some people have a more optimistic personality. Optimists tend to make too quick of a decision. They tend to be too confident about the quality of their positive decision making skills. Pessimists tend to be too confident about the negative consequences of a decision and so they wait too long because they want to avoid these negative consequences.

Sorry to interrupt. In essence, from the statistical point of view, presumably the pessimist is more often right than the optimist is.

The pessimists are often more right than optimists are, but they tend to suffer the problem of not deciding in a timely manner. So that is a problem. Sometimes by not deciding in a timely manner, they make the wrong decision. So that's a failure as well. So that's the first part that you want to make sure to spend the right time and get the right information. Right amount of information, right amount of time on decision, that's proportional to the importance of the decision. So that is part of the decision making process. Now that's one. The implementation. There's. I definitely talk a lot about implementing decision, you know, if you can make the right decision, but if you screw up the implementation, you're still going to be overall in the Wrong that you don't want to be in that situation. So when you make a decision, you, what you want to focus on is how to avoid failure and how to maximize success. And there's a very specific process that I have my clients go through called failure proofing. So failure proofing involves maximizing, involves addressing these issues. So the first thing that I have people do, I have them gather in the room, the important stakeholders, six to eight people, depending if it can be one person, if I'm doing a coaching session and then I guide them through it. But usually if it's a group decision, it's six to eight people. And then I have them imagine that whatever decision they made, so they already made a decision, whatever the decision made, they made absolutely failed, completely failed, utterly failed. And then I asked them to anonymously, anonymously, this is very important, anonymously, write out all the reasons why it failed. So all the reasons why it failed, you know, it failed. Now why did it fail? Anonymously, super important. And people often push back on this because they want to just know who said what. And I tell them that, hey, if you want to get the real reasons for why the decision failed, if you want to get the politically uncomfortable reasons, you know the decision failed because the CEO is an incompoop and too arrogant about the decision, about his ability to get money for this project from outside investors, you want to hear that even though it's uncomfortable, right? So that you can address that in advance. So all of these things are something you want to have the anonymous decision making, write them out, then talk about what people wrote out. And you can do that, whether with an outside facilitator who guides this, or, or if you have an insight facilitator, you want to have some way to maximize the anonymity of the decision. So for example, you can have people type into a Google form there. What I do is I have people type into a Google form their answers. So it's anonymized that way. So then you'll have a discussion about all of these reasons and how you can address them in advance. You know, for example, if you have a CEO who's too arrogant about his ability to raise money, maybe you can have other people on the board of directors help in the process of raising money or something like that. So then you address all the problems. Maybe there's not enough market research on launching a new product, so you do a little bit more market research and so on. So you talk about how to address these problems in the implementation plan and then you go to the next step, which is maximizing success. So you imagine this decision succeeded perfectly, that it's just the most wonderful decision, the best possible outcome that happened, and you imagine why did it succeed. You have everyone write out again anonymously all the reasons for success of this decision and you then brainstorm ways that the reasons can be brought about. So what are the ways of revising the implementation plan to bring about these reasons? And then next you want to have metrics. So the final step is to evaluate metrics for success and failure and make sure to integrate metrics into the plan so that you can pivot when you need to pivot on the various issues in the decision implementation and then you just go forward so that way you maximize, you minimize risks, maximize rewards, and have specific evaluation metrics to see whether you need to pivot to address various problems in the implementation plan.

Really good stuff. I love decision making. So I very much enjoyed your thoughts around that particular aspect of it. And I have to say thank you, Gleb, for a very, very interesting conversation and especially in the current climate, being able to talk a lot around that and actually give your thoughts and be able to provide a kind of a blueprint of what might be to come because I think that's sort of what people are, are looking for and actually what they can do to manage themselves today and tomorrow. So I really appreciate your time and your thoughts around that. And if people are interested in knowing more Gleb, around your book, never go with your gut. Where can they, where would they be.

Able to find that? Oh, it's available on bookstores everywhere if they were open. It's published by a great traditional publisher called Career Press, but since they're closed mostly around where you are, I presume you can check it out on Amazon, on Barnes and Noble and any other bookstores, books, a million, any other venues. It's available in audio form, in physical form and digital form. So whatever you want. My own resources are disasteravoidanceexperts.com again disasteravoidanceexperts.com there's videos, blogs, online classes, coaching, consulting, virtual and so on. And of course you can check me out on LinkedIn. I'm very active there, so connect with me on LinkedIn. Dr. Gleb Zeporski G L E B T S I P U R S K Y well, thank you again for.

Your time and yeah, for anyone who's interested, having having gone through it myself, a really, really fascinating read for people who are particularly interested in sort of well researched science based suggestions and opinions and advice and a very, very good read. And especially at the moment, really good for anyone who's, you know, whatever size business you might be running, actually how you might be able to navigate the current climate, then it's a really, really helpful resource. So, again, thank you very much for your time, Gleb, and I hope to speak to you again soon.

Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you.