Will Bachman 00:01
Hello, and welcome to Unleashed the show that explores how to thrive as an independent professional Unleashed is produced by Umbrex, which connects you with the world’s top independent management consultants. I’m your host Will Bachman. And I’m excited to be here today with Gleb superski. Who is the author of never go with your gut, and also the head of disaster avoidance experts, a consulting firm Gleb Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for inviting me. Well, it’s a pleasure to be on. So Gleb let’s start with how do you avoid disasters?

Gleb Tsipursky 00:36
Well, you avoid disasters by making the good decision. So if you look at the research on disaster avoidance, and that’s my area of expertise, the cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics of disaster avoidance, risk management, good decision making, you’ll see that disasters in business and in life as well, to be honest, come from either you making an active decision that leads to disaster. So that’s kind of one thing where you actually are the fault of the disaster directly your decision. That’s one, and the second cause of disasters is decisions that you failed to make. So failing to foresee upcoming problem. So something external to you, not internal to you, where you didn’t make the right decision about that problem. So those are the two major causes of disasters in professional life, business life, and personal life as well. So you make so you avoid disasters, by making sure that you make good decisions and avoiding the dangerous judgment errors, called cognitive biases that plague all of us as human beings, including independent consultants, like myself, and like the folks listening to this show, mostly, that is something that you really need to pay attention to.

Will Bachman 01:45
Yeah, now in your book, never go with your gut, you really walk through a whole series of cognitive biases and other sorts of just sort of glitches in our mental software that can cause us to make bad decisions. Talk to us about, you know, give us some examples of those cognitive biases that can lead us astray.

Gleb Tsipursky 02:06
Sure. So let’s give a very broad one big one that has been very bad recently with the COVID-19 Coronavirus pandemic. Probably the biggest problem here where a lot of people didn’t anticipate it, and didn’t prepare for yet very prominent entrepreneurs like Elon Musk saying that the coronavirus pandemic is dumb on the one hand, and for spreading these messages, and that’s new entrepreneurs, new money and so on, but also old money. So Goldman Sachs, for example, on February 24, predicted that the US second quarter GDP would be 2.7 growth of 2.7. Then on March 15, it predicted a 5% decline. And then on March 20, just five days later, it predicted 24% decline. So you can see how of old money was as well. And the cause. And of course, a lot of independent consultants and other business leaders follow these folks listen to them. And this, the decision making error here that we very much have difficulty with is called the normalcy bias. The normalcy bias causes us to assume and envision the future as being much like the past, the next couple of years will be much like the past couple of years, maybe people will be using their smartphones more maybe a little bit more digital technology. That’s the kind of way that we think that our gut reactions work, unfortunately. And this is something that we would really need to avoid to address. Because maybe the COVID-19 is just one example of major disruptors that really undermine our reality. I mean, look at the 2008 fiscal crisis, right? That was a major disrupter, very few people saw it coming. And people really couldn’t believe it, once it was there, they really didn’t change their plans nearly quickly enough. So there’s right now with the covid 19 pandemic is another example where people didn’t change their plans nearly quickly enough, there was extensive evidence that there will be a huge pandemic, it will be very impactful, you know, there is no nagomi going to be a vaccine available until early 2022 of the earliest. That’s the most optimistic timelines by the most prominent experts, but business leaders and independent consultants, professionals, people, I mean, you know, I know personally, I thinking about this appear in a couple of weeks, you know, by the summer by something like that won’t be there by the fall. And this is a result of their inability to envision the kind of disruption that our world has underwent as a result of this pandemic. So this is a huge one that really prevents people from accepting change in a fundamental way. And that’s one example that I want to give

Will Bachman 04:44
your book you talk about five questions to avoid decision disasters. So talk, talk us through some of those questions that if we’re about to make, and these I think are maybe a little bit more relevant to a proactive decision, as opposed To these decisions of things that we should be doing but failing to do sins of omission, but Sins of commission, when we’re deciding to take some action, what are some questions that we should ask to help get around these cognitive biases,

Gleb Tsipursky 05:14
there are two sets of approaches. One is for Super major decisions. That’s an eight step process that we can go through. These are really fundamental things that have a major impact on your bottom line, where you really want to take at least an hour to go through it, and examine the situation by yourself or with a team. If you’re doing it by yourself, I recommend getting an external perspective. So that’s kind of one. And the five questions that you refer to will are for everyday decisions, everyday decisions, you don’t want to screw up, take some a couple of minutes to go through each to go through these five questions. And it’s really very effective to go through them quickly. I’ll first I’ll talk through the questions and then give some examples. So let’s talk about the questions themselves. First, what important information to have and how yet fully considered? So imagine what my two information that would this confirm your belief that would go against your preferences that will go against your intuitions about this question, one of the biggest cognitive biases we suffer from is called the confirmation bias where we look for information that confirms our beliefs, ignore information that doesn’t, there’s a lot of other information related biases, this questions helps get that tried to prove that you’re wrong, try to prove that you’re mistaken. If you can’t prove you’re wrong, that’s great, you’re more likely to be right. And if you can prove you’re wrong, then you can make a better decision. I’ll give an example from the context of a consultant like myself. So if you are going to be writing an email to a client, and you want the client to do something that you suspect the client may not be so eager to do, that’s kind of one of those decision making good points, couple of decisions like that, that all consultants have to make every day, what are going to be doing this, or you’re just going to put in the email all the information that will try to convince the client to do what you want them to do, or will he try to also imagine why the client might not do what you want them to do. And dress these arguments in advance address these points of concern for the client in advance. So if you deal with the negative information, you’ve put it into the email, the email will be much more effective, and will be much more likely to get the client to do what you want them to do by addressing the arguments the problems in advance. So that’s one second, what dangerous judgment errors haven’t yet fully considered. So what cognitive biases are playing a role here, talked about the information, the confirmation bias, normalcy bias, there are many, many others my book, never go with your gut. How pioneering leaders make the best decisions and avoid business disasters, talks about the 30 most dangerous ones in professional settings, and how do you address them. And if you want to take a look at the Act, the whole list of cognitive biases, go to Wikipedia, there’s a list of them. There’s over 100, my book again talks about the 30 most dangerous ones how to address them. Next, what would a trusted objective advisor suggestion do? That’s the third question. So think about this external perspective? What would this person suggest you do? What would you tell a trusted friend in this situation? What you know, if you get about 50% of the benefit of this question, just by asking the question, and you get the other 50% of the benefit by calling this person or if you’re a millennial texting this person. Fourth, you know,

Will Bachman 08:21
I just want to react to that. Gleb I thought that that was such an interesting one. And it relates a little bit to something that I’ve seen Steven pressfield write about Steven pressfield. He’s the author of The Legend of Bagger Vance, but also force the War of Art, art and turning pro. And he talks about how there’s something magical for him, where he’s able to write the dialogue of characters that he says are like, smarter than he is or wiser than he is. And it’s it’s an interesting one where you think you just sort of thinking through the problem, and you’re getting your best thoughts. But you but by saying, Okay, if I were advising a client on this topic, what would I say to them, somehow putting yourself in that role of a third party gets you to have a different perspective on it. So I found that was a real clever, kind of insightful insight to one of these of just doing one was that role playing bit, so I interrupted you, but I just wanted to comment on that one that really sparked my thinking on that one.

Gleb Tsipursky 09:28
Excellent. That’s a really useful one. And it helps you get outside of yourself because there’s so the cognitive neuroscience on this topic talks about the inside view and the outside view. So when you’re inside a problem, it’s much harder to see the solutions to it than when you’re outside the problem. And when you think about another person who is doing this, a trusted objective friend, that client who you will be giving this advice to, you’re much more able capable of giving, unfiltered advice, accurate advice than you are when you Just thinking through the problem from inside your perspective. So yes, the third one is really big. The fourth one is also really big. How have you addressed all the ways this could fail? So imagine this decision, whatever you’re doing failing completely, utterly, you know, the client completely failed to do what you wanted them to do, why might that be the case? And then address these problems in advance by thinking through the solutions to these problems. So let’s say the client didn’t respond to the email in the way that you wanted them to. They didn’t do what you wanted them to. Why might this be the case? Well, one of the reasons it might be the case is that let’s say you were encouraging them to pursue a certain change initiative within the company. But there were internal background politics of which you weren’t aware, which are preventing the client from doing what you want them to do. And the client is a little bit reluctant to talk about these background politics. And that might be one reason. So what are the ways you can find out about these background politics to be in the know, because there’s, it’s very easy to say, Well, this is the rational thing to do for the company. But if there are background politics within the company, which prevent the rational, most profitable thing from being done, it will not be done. So that’s something that you, as a consultant, as a coach really need to think about as you’re approaching any change initiative. So that’s an example of how you can address that in the email question. Finally, the fifth question, what would cause you to change your mind, so what will cause you to revisit this decision with a client email, there’s, you can do something like, hey, if the client doesn’t respond in a week, then I’ll call the client. That’s a very specific clear revision point. Whereas Otherwise, you’ll be waiting for the client to respond, you know, day each day, you’ll be wondering what why the client isn’t responding what’s going on, and otherwise, but if you do set a decision point, you can just let it go and move on to your other tasks, I’m sure you’re a busy person, you have a lot of stuff to do. And you don’t need to have this thing keep ruminating at the back of your head. And if you just let it go by setting the decision point, and focusing on other things in the meantime, that’s a very helpful strategy. So those five questions are actually quite quick to do. I talk them through and maybe like three minutes or something like that. But when you actually make the decision, once you get into the habit of asking them only takes a couple of minutes to ask them. In fact, there was a strategy. So there was a study done on firefighters in the UK, firefighting leaders, they found that about 80% of firefighting errors came from human error. So people make bad mistakes in firefighting. That’s why the bad stuff happens. And they use an adapted version of these sorts of questions, to have firefighting leaders ask these questions of themselves, before they send their firefighters into the heat of the moment. Because you could imagine, you know, they’re, they’re really in the literally in the heat of the moment, they’re fighting a fire. The what they found was that once a couple of months, once people get used to asking these questions, they then take the people who are trained to ask such questions any more time to make their decisions than people who weren’t trained to ask such questions. But the people who were trained to ask such questions, made many fewer errors saved many more lives and property. So you can do the same thing. If they can make if they can ask these sorts of questions in the heat of the moment, you can do the same sort of thing in your daily professional life.

Will Bachman 13:25
Yeah. Now, the title of the book is never go with your gut. But you do say in there that, okay, there are times where you should go with your gut certain times that, you know, maybe are more closer to our evolutionary origins, such as should I trust this person or not? And I think that those of us who have been business for a while, will, you know, kind of have probably had multiple situations where you have a potential client or a potential partner, and you just get not getting a good vibe from the person. And maybe you decide, like, I don’t want to work with this person, and you don’t really know what the counterfactual would be. Or maybe you decide to go along with it. And then after the fact, you say, oh, man, I saw the warning signs I should have, I should have seen that. So you do acknowledge that there are times where you should trust your gut, what is your guidance on when to tell the difference? So what situations should you go with your gut? And when should you not,

Gleb Tsipursky 14:23
you should know when your gut is likely to lie to you. That is very important and very, in order to make good decisions, when it’s likely to lie to you about people relates to tribalism. So why does our gut lie to us? Well, our gut lies to us because it’s not adapted for the modern world. The modern world, the modern business environment has only been around really since World War Two. And of course, evolution has not caught up to that to us in the time frame we have. So our gut reactions are adapted for their evolved for these natural intuitions and instincts that evolved for the savanna environment when we lived in small tribes of 15 people, 250 people were hunters, gatherers, foragers and so on. So that’s what our goal is adapted for. And one of the fundamental things about our gut is tribalism. So we look for people who like us who think like us share our values. And we like them, we have a certain trust in them. And the contrast we don’t like people and don’t trust people who don’t look like us who don’t share values, who don’t seem like they have our priorities, and in the modern, complex, multicultural world, that can often lead us in the wrong direction. So for example, here I am in Columbus, Ohio, the home state of the the palm region of Ohio State Buckeyes, so you got bucks, right? That’s our big football team. Hopefully they play again someday. That is something that people are really passionate about here. So I was giving a conference presentation, the closing keynote, the closing workshop to a conference of diversity inclusion experts 100, over 100 diversity inclusion experts here in Columbus, Ohio. And our big football rival is, of course, the University of Michigan Wolverines. So I asked them, How many of you would hire a University of Michigan fan. And of the over 100 people, only three of them indicated that they was hiring this person, only three of them.

Will Bachman 16:16
And these Wait, these are diversity and inclusion expertise or

Gleb Tsipursky 16:19
diversity inclusion experts Diversity Inclusion Conference. Exactly. This is exactly right. You know, and they, they honestly said that they would feel a really real antipathy, they would feel real discomfort working with the University of Michigan fan. It’s funny, I have it on video, which is nice. I’m able, I showed in every keynote that I do related to this topic. So this is funny and amusing. But this is just how we function. So this is one of those areas. So if you find out that somebody has some tribal belonging, not completely irrelevant toward business, that is going against your tribal belonging, something that you care about, you will immediately distrust this person, you know, another example, obviously have an accent, right? This accent, it means I’m ain’t from around here. I’m not from the United States. I grew up actually, when I was a kid, my parents came when I was 10, from the Republic of Moldova, in the former Soviet territory, which fell apart fortunately, for me in 1991. So I was born in 81, my parents left in 1991, when I was 10. So I grew up in the States, but I still have the accent. Well, research shows that people with an accent are much less trusted by Americans than people who don’t have an accent that people have the mainstream American accent. And again, this is one of those things where is just showing that, you know, I’m not from around here. And so this are these indicators of tribalism, the negative ones are called horns effect, where when we see when we perceive a quality of someone that we don’t like, because because it shows that this person is not from our tribe, regardless of whether it’s business relevant or not, we’ll trust them less than it will be less likely to work with them. And when we see a quality of someone we do like so for example, you know, Buckeye fans and Buckeye fans, or somebody goes to the same college, or other sorts of things like this, where you have a shared affinity around something, then you’ll tend to trust this person too much, and tend to like them too much. So you will most often make errors that are going in either direction. And what you can do about that is you can compensate for that, by when you notice someone, let’s say I mean, you know, you’re a Duke fan, and the other person is a UNC Chapel Hill fan. So if you know that, and you feel some antipathy around that, that’s something you need to compensate for and say, Okay, I’m likely to distrust this person, more than trust this person less than they deserve to be trusted. So give them more credit than they than I feel intuitively that they deserve in order to make good decisions. Same thing about you know, if you’re a Duke fan, and they’re a Duke fan, then you should give them less credit. For the same reason, you don’t want to trust them too much. So you trust them more than they deserve to be trusted intuitively. So those are areas where you need to compensate. And in order in compensating, you can help you make really good decisions. I’ll give you another example. It came from my own experience. So I do, one of the areas I work with is coaching. And so I was doing coaching for a CEO of a small manufacturing company. Well, the 110 people. The reason he came to me was because in his company, he had a right hand person who belonged in his church, one to his church, he really trusted this person was part of his community. And then shortly because before he came to milk about six months before, he found out that this person was actually stealing from the company, and this person abruptly resigned, well, this person first this person who abruptly resigned left the company that lost And when the CEO was investigating what was happening, he found out that this person was stealing from the company. And then when he was thinking back, he realized that this person was passed over for promotion about a year and a half ago. So there was a new position of not the CEO, and this person was passed over, and they want for an outside guy. And as a result, this person got resentful, and started screwing with the company’s finances, not really taking care of business, like he should have the sale, this was the sales VP. So a lot of clients were much more were pissed at the company were upset with the company. And the sales VP then started another company’s taking some clients with him. So this wasn’t great. And the CEO realized that he saw a lot of signs that the sales VP, his right hand person was not happy with the situation. But he ignored them in a lot of it came because he trusted this person too much. This person who went to his church went to this kind of belong to the same community. And he thought that, hey, this is part of my tribe, the probably something’s going on in his personal life, I’m not going to bother addressing this issue, you know, just leave him alone to work things out. Well, he shouldn’t have. So this. So he decided that he needs an external perspective on these sorts of issues. That’s why he came to me. And these are the sorts of things where you need to not trust your gut, you need to trust but verify, let’s say that way, when somebody is in your tribe, but you feel some uncomfortable feelings around this person.

Will Bachman 21:30
Okay, helpful. Let’s talk a little bit about your consulting practice. So you mentioned that you do some coaching, I think you also do some consulting. Talk to me about a typical engagement of your firm, is it a client that just says, Hey, I want to avoid some disasters? And you know, help me figure it out? Or is it more specific? Is it from the board saying, Hey, we need to have a risk plan. Talk to me about some typical projects that your firm would do.

Gleb Tsipursky 21:57
So typical projects that come more from the CEO from the C suite would be strategic planning. So I do a lot of strategic planning and risk management, of course, in strategic planning, so doing a strategic planning analysis of then the company when they reach a decision point in the strategic plan. So often, they hire me for a two day workshop, where I go with the C suite team, and then go for the strategic plan for the next five years, where we look at what are the possible futures that the company is facing? What are the possible problems? What are the possible opportunities in each of these futures? What kind of resources would you need in each of these futures, to address the potential problems and seize the opportunities, and then what kind of information would indicate to you which of these features you’re actually facing, and of course, then addressing concern the cognitive biases that are common in such situations, for example, the planning fallacy causes us to assume that all of our plans will go according to plan. That because we’re confident about ourselves, we’re confident about our plans. Unfortunately, this is a common, this is really misleading, it causes us to have a lot of problems, because our plans rarely survive contact with the enemy, and leaders who make a plan. Now, there’s the common phrase that if failing to plan is planning to fail, it’s a really bad phrase, because people get too stuck to their plans, I tell people to think in terms of failing to plan for contingencies for risks for problems is failing to plan, you really need to plan for these sorts of risks and problems anticipated, some will come up. And then you can pivot much more quickly, and address them in advance and have resources to address them in advance. So anyway, so go through a strategic planning retreat. And as part of that, there is often major decision making points addressed uncovered. So sometimes we address them in the retreat itself. Sometimes the decision needs much more information needs a much more thorough process. So they hire me to keep going and looking at the decision. How do you take a decision? Let’s say, if they’re deciding, okay, now, we’re realizing that for this scenario, we need to launch a new product in two years. So that’s kind of a decision point that where they see okay, we really need to develop, launch a new product. And then what do you actually do? How do you do market research all of this stuff, also go into the decision making process on launching a new product, or implementing, let’s say in your database? Oh, geez, that’s so much work. Anyway, so a new database or something like that. And then, so you have to make a decision about the right product, the right database, and so on. And then you have to make a decision about how to implement this process, this project plan effectively. So I work on helping interest, the project plan, the process plan issues with that. So that’s kind of a typical sort of engagement. And it almost often comes from the C suite. Sometimes it comes from the board, something that more often comes from the board is a disaster preparedness plan. So that’s something that the C suite spends less time looking at it, but from my experience, and the board cares about that more That’s what I’ve seen. So the board would be bring me in to do disaster preparedness plan business, continue with your plan, address the risks, address concerns, manage issues. So those are those, that’s something that I frequently do as well. And that takes maybe about a day. So it’s low. It’s not as extensive as the strategic planning workshop, and follow up. So those are some like some typical engagements, I also do projects where there’s motivation issues, because a lot of the cognitive biases have to do with how people make mistakes and motivating others. For example, I worked on this the client, I, by the way, usually don’t make clients unless they wrote testimonial for me allowed me to talk about this, and this client testimonial allowed me to talk about this. So Edison welding Institute in Columbus, Ohio, it’s an engineering consulting firm of about 200 engineers who solve problems for manufacturing companies, who have their own small teams of engineers, but in larger manufacture, but in manufacturing, problem solved. So Edison welding Institute wanted their engineers to do more marketing, which meant going doing conferences, doing blogs, doing white papers, that’s what they wanted them to do. But the engineers weren’t really interested in doing that. They want to solve their technical engineering problems. That’s what they wanted to focus on. And so this was a conflict. So management, the HR office was giving them training, trying to give them inducements paying them for it. Engineers weren’t doing it. So they decided to bring me in, because they knew that that’s an area of expertise I have with solving motivation, engagement issues, and I’ll talk to the engineers. I did some interviews, examination of the situation. And they came back to mark Madsen, the HR VP who hired me and said, Hey, Mark, you know, you realize that the problem here is emotions, that the engineers are really not emotionally invested into doing this sort of marketing, they’re really emotionally invested into solving their technical problems, they need to address what they really care about much more. And Mark looked at me and he said, engineers have emotions. might seem funny to you. But over his, he, he wrote this manual saying that he is a very extroverted person, very emotionally expressive, whereas engineers tend to come off as cold as rational as logical kind of the spark to Captain Picard. So this is, this is how engineers come across, they don’t come across as emotional. And so this was a big issue for him, that he didn’t realize how emotionally motivated they are, of course, all of us are motivated by emotions. Research shows that we are motivated by emotions, but it is 90% of our behavior of our decision making is emotionally motivated when we just go ahead and do our thing, as we usually do go with our gut follow our intuitions. So what we needed to do there was figure out how to get to the engineers emotions about this, what is actually motivating them. And what we found was motivating them, after examining his situation was social status among peers, they got social status from their peers, for solving technical engineering problems, their peers did not give them recognition, praise, for doing marketing, and going to conferences, blog posts, and so on. So what we had to do was change this motivation, what their peers recognize them for. And there were a number of tools to do so. So for example, who’s highlighted in the company newsletter? Well, if we can, the management can change that to highlighting people who went to conferences, did workshops, and so on. How do people get recognized as the employee of the month, same thing you get, you can change the recognition, the public recognition given to them, and of course, the promotion structure, who was actually promoted and recognized in that way. And those are all tools that the company used to get engineers to be much more engaged with doing marketing, which of course, was really helpful. So that’s an example of a third type of engagement, which I do.

Will Bachman 29:01
Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about disaster preparedness plan. And, you know, for listener of this show, let’s say independent consultant serving a client, what questions should we ask our client about like, hey, do you have a disaster preparedness plan? And for serving as senior executive? What would some tips be that you have of how we could help our client create a disaster preparedness plan?

Gleb Tsipursky 29:30
So that’s the preparedness plan is meant to address disaster like a two week interruptions are meant to desert address a disaster like COVID-19. So just being very clear what a disaster preparedness is, and is not. So don’t go with, you know, addressing major major disruptors like COVID-19. It’s not an emergency. It’s a major disrupter. It’s a different sort of beast. disaster preparedness plan, also called business continuity, is meant to enable the business to continue during something like that. Too weak interruption that would shut things down make the situation difficult. So imagine, let’s say Houston getting flooded. You know, Houston had a major flood in 2019. So businesses, there was business interruption for about a week or two weeks, depending on where you were? And how would you advise a business to proceed for your client, if they had that situation. So that’s something I usually go to, my usual go to, is to look at a recent major disaster that caused a lot of problems for a business, or businesses in an area and ask my clients, Hey, are you prepared for something like that to happen? Because it paints a real visual picture and a very clear one of what might happen? And how do you address it? Or, you know, if you’re not by somewhere that’s likely to get flooded, you can talk about a snowstorm. So many areas, of course, have snow storms. So what if you have a snowstorm, and there are a number of those with a can interrupt business for a week or two weeks, especially those that bring down a lot of power lines? So that’s something that might happen? Or if you’re in an area that has wildfires, so what what would you do if there’s a wildfire that prevents you from occupying your place of business for the next two weeks? So those are the sorts of things that you want to ask your clients, and then go through each of the things that they would actually need to replace? So go through how would you deliver your services? The How would you still satisfy your clients? Whatever you’re doing? How would you address that? So if you’re doing products, if you’re doing services, whatever you’re doing, so how do you deliver your offerings? So how do you address that? Then, of course, how do you collaborate together? If you are having an in office team, then how do you have them work from home easily and effectively? For those two weeks at least? How do you address compliance and regulation issues? So for example, one of the projects I did was for a medical company services company, which had to address HIPAA regulations. So which is the Health Information Protection Act, it had to have government compliance in such a way that when people work from home, they weren’t revealing patient information or leaving in unsecured areas? So that was another sort of area that you want to look at? So all of these sorts of areas? Of course, fiscal, how does your money move? And how do you make payroll during that period? Because you know, people still want their money. So all of these sorts of issues, look at every area of business, you should ideally not ideal, you should definitely have the clear outline of the your business systems and processes separately from the business kind of the from the business continuity plan. So what are the systems and processes of your business of your clients business, you should know that, hopefully, they should have an outline of that, hopefully. And if they don’t, that’s something can help them with, to help them outline their systems and processes, and see how you are addressed each one during a two week interruption. Try to have the client and envision an interruption that’s typical for their sort of area, because the it’s more visceral for them. But you know, earthquake, whatever, something like that.

Will Bachman 33:10
Okay, that’s super helpful. You’ve had quite an extensive speaking career addition to writing and consulting and coaching. Tell us a little about how that got started. And, you know, sort of describe for us your your speaking career today. Or maybe at least as of January, it may be interrupted with with the with, with Kobo, how your speaking careers evolve, what sort of topics you give talks on and what sorts of groups ask you to talk.

Gleb Tsipursky 33:42
I actually got my start with speaking with Kaplan, which is a training company. So test trading company, that’s where I learned this specific skills of delivering presentation. While I was still also learning separately, the expertise, getting expertise in decision making, then the risk management separately in academia and so on, I could talk about that. So that was a natural combination. And I had the skills in test preparation from delivery from training from Kaplan. And then I was getting knowledge and expertise in disaster avoidance and risk management. And I started doing free speeches for Rotary Clubs, you know, local groups. So that helps bring build up my profile, help have my name known in the local area. So I was giving a lot of speeches locally, and helping give testimonials referrals to other places. And as that developed, I was able to start charging people because in a free group of free speeches are not that great for actually making money. And as I as my speaking career evolved, I started being known not only locally, but then regionally. I was able to charge more, and then nationally, then internationally. So I do I did. I did various types of speeches, lots of keynotes for associations, companies. And then trainings, mainly for companies, some for nonprofits. So I mentioned a couple of the types of trainings I did. There are a number of other trainings just on decision making principles in general, on cognitive biases in general to address them. So speeches, presentations, and those are, of course, the I, some of them, I charge more some that might charge less if it’s for audience of potential clients and consulting and coaching and training that they can bring into the company, I would charge less, I’d be willing to take less money and more for, for the actual company that would bring me in. So that’s kind of the model that I pursued for after January 2020, I have a whole lot of virtual presentations. And those pay quite a bit less, but they take quite a bit less time. So I have, let’s see, I have seven lined up in the next month and a half webinars. So that’s pretty reasonable. And, of course, it pays much less, but it’s still good exposure to clients, potential clients. And that’s something I’m excited about. I’m really transitioning a lot to virtual, because that’s kind of the next three, four years until COVID-19. Until a vaccine is found, mass produced, distributed, people are vaccinated, that’s probably what will be happening with speaking. So virtual. And now I’m now with these webinars, I’m able to have a virtual profile. So I have testimonials. I have video sample videos, which I can firstly get some free ones. And now I’m getting paid for my webinars, because I have examples of the quality that I present to well to companies that want to hire me, or associations that want to hire me. So that’s what I did after January 2020.

Will Bachman 36:53
Okay, and do you have a sort of a certain range of set topics that you’re prepared to give talks on the same

Gleb Tsipursky 37:01
topics that I consult on, on disaster avoidance and risk management, on strategic planning and decision making. So those are my bread and butter, because I want I mean, my topics of expertise are the ones that I do consulting on, I speak me on training on coaching on, they write my books on a number of other books besides never go with your gut. That is my expertise. And so I want to make sure to have everything consistent with my brand. So all of my speaking is around my areas of expertise. I mean, some of that is about motivation, engagement, which I mentioned before. So that was another area, which I also talked about,

Will Bachman 37:37
and how do you stay current in those fields? So do you continue to either do some research in that or you stay up with the academic literature? How do you stay up to date,

Gleb Tsipursky 37:48
I mainly stay up with the academic literature and reading books that are published by good authors, quality authors, folks I like to so that’s, that’s the main way that I stay updated. And in the know. And of course, they will also read business articles, see what’s out there in the world of business. So things like fortune, Forbes, Time Magazine, of an ink magazine, stuff like that. So I keep reading those to see how people translate this information into the into the business environment and I write for ink magazine, for I wrote for time, I write for entrepreneur.com first companies I write for these sorts of venues, translating academic literature, into business for business leaders. And of course it also helps getting clients

Will Bachman 38:37
antastic level this has been a great kind of capsule tour of what you do. I recommend listeners the book, never go with your gut. And we’ll include a link to that in the show notes. What other what other can people find you online but what what other URLs or? or Twitter or any other kind of links would you want to give?

Gleb Tsipursky 38:58
I would recommend that people check out my website disaster avoidance experts that comm has videos, blogs, podcasts, decision aids guides, manuals, information about virtual speaking, consulting and coaching, which is probably going to be the thing for the next several years. Then you want to especially check out disaster avoidance expert comm forward slash subscribe there’s a free assessment and dangerous judgment debtors in the workplace. They are which is the last chapter of the book talks about these the 30 most dangerous judgment debtors in the workplace, and how they address them. That assessment helps you see where they might be present in your workplace or in your clients workplace. So again, disaster avoidance experts.com forward slash subscribe, and I’m really active on LinkedIn. So that’s the best social media to find me. Dr. glubb supportive ski, GL Eb TSI PDU or sky.

Will Bachman 39:48
Great and we will include those links in the show notes Gleb thank you so much for being on the show today.

Gleb Tsipursky 39:55
Excellent. Thank you so much for having me on board.