Lorne speaking at SHRM Inclusion 21 in Austin
THE NEUROSCIENCE OF DECISION-MAKING
90-180 minutes
In today’s VUCA business environment, decision-making is a critical leadership differentiator. NeuroDecide is a neuroscience-grounded assessment that reveals how teams make decisions under uncertainty and where cognitive strengths or vulnerabilities affect performance.
Drawing on peer-reviewed research, it measures four traits that shape group judgment: ambiguity tolerance, cognitive flexibility, impulse control, and risk appetite. Rather than labeling individuals, NeuroDecide highlights team-level patterns and actionable insights. Participants learn how stress, bias, and neurological shortcuts influence decisions and apply practical, evidence-based strategies to improve alignment, reduce bias, and make faster, more strategic choices in complex, high-stakes environments.
UNCOVERING UNCONSCIOUS BIAS
90-120 minutes
Participants learn and experience the source of their unconscious bias, how it affects their relationships, and ways to mitigate bias and improve their decision-making. This experiential workshop gives participants greater flexibility to make better business choices, see beyond their perceptions, and explore and implement alternatives.
Participants will:
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Discover how priming bias works.
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Conduct a personal social network analysis.
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Develop new skills to minimize bias in business decisions.
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Learn how unconscious bias affects diversity and business strategy.
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Use double-loop learning and deductive reasoning to mitigate bias.
CREATING
PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY
90-120 minutes
In this session, participants build a clear understanding of psychological safety and its impact on team performance. Grounded in research, the session explores what psychological safety is, why it matters, and how leaders can actively create it within their teams.
Through practical exercises and guided discussion, participants learn how to foster an environment where individuals feel safe to speak up, share ideas, and challenge thinking without fear.
Participants will:
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Understand what psychological safety looks like in high-performing teams.
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Develop the language and awareness to recognize and strengthen it.
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Learn practical strategies to build trust and openness with colleagues.
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Practice real-world techniques in small group exercises.
COLLABORATIVE COMMUNICATION
90-120 minutes
Participants explore how human beings can improve their performance, reinforce positive behaviors and improve negative ones. Participants learn language tools so that when they speak up and have questions, suggestions, or concerns, they are better able to communicate clearly and to hear others.
Participants learn the four steps of Collaborative Communication:
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Observing without judging.
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Expressing feelings.
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Clarifying one's needs.
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Making specific requests.
REDUCING BIAS IN RECRUITING
As a former recruiter, Lorne can help your teams recruit and hire the strongest candidates. To reduce bias in your recruiting strategy, he recommends you update your job descriptions and train your teams on how to interview. Using scorecards and experiential interviewing your teams will be able to evaluate candidates based on observed and measured skills.
BUILDING SCORECARDS
3-5 hours
Scorecards reduce bias in the interviewing process. Participants create an interview scorecard that will make interviewing people more productive and consistent. Scorecards reduce bias by ensuring interviewers use the same predetermined metrics for evaluating candidates. Participants use these scorecards as a road map and framework to build the candidate interview process and align teams behind standard criteria for assessing candidates. They are also used to develop job descriptions and postings.
Participants:
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Identify the job goals and derive the job description and advertisement.
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Ask questions that elicit the required information to assess a person’s ability.
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Create blind scores that offer consistent metrics for an organization's strategy.
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Create a feedback mechanism to determine the validity of questions and answers based on employee performance over time.
EXPERIENTIAL INTERVIEWING
3-5 hours
Experiential Interviewing reduces bias in workshops. Participants develop exercises to determine a person’s ability to succeed in the position based on a demonstration of actions representing the work they would be doing. Participants learn how to create an interview process that allows candidates to be evaluated based on their performance of tasks relevant to the job. Interviewers reduce bias by witnessing candidates in action instead of only assessing candidates based on what they say.
Participants learn the science that drives experiential interviewing.
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Develop and practice methods to create experiential interviewing scenarios.
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Gain skills for creating your own experiential interviewing process.
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Develop and test one or more processes you can use in your workplace.
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Leave the workshop having created experiential interviewing for an actual position in your organization.
REMOVING BIAS from JOB DESCRIPTIONS
90-120 minutes
Participants learn to create job descriptions that reflect the position's needs and mitigate bias that might unnecessarily restrict diverse candidates from applying.
Participants:
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Review and highlight bias in job descriptions.
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Create critical questions to uncover the goals the position seeks to attain.
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Learn what words, phrases, and themes contain biases to understand which to embrace and which to avoid.
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Focus company job descriptions so that they will be seen and read by more people.
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Make distinctions between company values and culture to mitigate bias.
CONSCIOUSLY MANAGING COMPLEXITY
90 to 120 minutes
Consciously Managing Complexity is an experiential, hands-on workshop that equips business leaders with practical tools to navigate complex systems using adaptive, creative, and strategic approaches. Participants learn four core tactics: recognizing system types, adopting a manage not solve mindset, practicing try learn adapt strategies, and developing a conscious complexity mindset.
Through simulations, role-playing, checklists, and collaborative problem-solving, leaders practice identifying simple, complicated, and complex challenges and applying the right response to each. The workshop builds critical thinking, adaptability, and decision agility, enabling participants to manage uncertainty, reduce overwhelm, and respond effectively in fast-changing, information-rich environments.