'leadership, decision making and the art of taking calculated risks'

Innovating & Communicating

Watch video clip - Poker in Business and Life

Watch video clip - Calculated Risks

Interactive workshops

A central theme for Caspar is to give people a better understanding of how risk and uncertainty works, using poker as a metaphor, in order to empower them to take more risks in their professional and personal lives.

Aligned to this are Caspars insights about decision making, innovating and communicating which illustrate his belief that organizations get the most from their people when they are allowed to experiment, take risks and explore the world.

In tandem with this is a key message that stresses the advantage of understanding, harnessing and guiding the subconscious mind in a structured down to earth way for maximum results in all these areas.

 

RISK TAKING

Its no good telling people “to take more risks” without understanding the forces that stop them from doing so. So how does risk work and what are the causes of risk aversion in human beings?

Armed with this self knowledge, participants are challenged to make powerful changes in the decisions they take everyday and to break out of their current way of thinking and behaving.

Caspar starts all his sessions with a humorous look at his life story – including his early relationship with Ant & Dec and the wacky world of professional poker in which thousands are won and lost on the turn of a car. All the session have a funny, humorous edge to them making the learning all the more memorable.

Participants learn -

  • The difference between a gamble and a calculated risk
  • How to make money on the toss of a coin or the roll of a dice
  • Why people in business are mistakenly looking for the ideas that are most likely to succeed instead of the ideas which maximise profits
  • Short term failure in poker, business and life is critical to long term success
  • The risk embracing behaviour of the people who have shaped our world: people like Soichiro Honda, Thomas Edison and Michael Jordan
  • Why most human beings are naturally risk averse
  • How to break through this risk aversion, not by overcoming our fear of failure, but by using its power as a positive force in our lives

Benefits -

  • Participants feel more comfortable talking about an uncertain future, how to work with uncertainty and not just bemoan it.
  • Participants have a detailed understanding of the component parts of the decision-making process and how to apply this – in the way that a poker player does
  • Participants gain a simplified understanding of the concept of expectation – using percentages not odds – in order to use in proposals and conversations back at work
  • Participants become excited about the possibility of being more proactive and adopting a more positive can-do mindset and a desire to push through their fear of failure

Innovating

Once participants accept the inherent benefits of doing new things and taking risks, many of them develop a hunger for more practical tools which enable them to apply these concepts. While there are many applications of risk taking in the activities of an organization, one of the most obvious is to find new ways of doing things or “innovating”

This module builds on the key premise of the calculated risk: if only one of our ideas is great, it is worth the 99 “failures” in pursuit of it. Short term failure is intergral to long term success. With this in mind, Innovation sessions begin by breaking down participants natural logical thought processes and starts to create an environment in which lateral thought flourishes.

As a Mind Gym Coach, Caspar is one the highest rated deliverers of creativity modules to the most demanding clients.

Participants learn

  • Various dimensions of creativity – both subconscious and conscious
  • The difference between creativity and innovation in the workplace.
  • A large number of examples of the application of innovation throughout history.
  • The five stages of the innovation process including the critical difference between idea generation and idea evalutation
  • The seven tools of idea generation and how to apply them in different situations
  • The five tools of idea evaluation
  • How to sell their idea at the end of the day

Decision Making

Whils the basic principles of decision making are delivered in the core module Risk Taking, this session takes them much further. It has been created for the benefit of teams who take a lot of important decisions without necessarily giving much thought to the processes they use to do so.

As a poker player, where critical decisions have to be made every two minutes, Caspar became fascinated with his decision-making processes and started to learn how and why humans do what they do. This session is all about spending time throwing light on how the mind works and how we can use it much more effectively in the future.

Participants learn:

  • How Human Beings take decisions, the subconscious calculations that they make and how to change them.
  • The ten decision making traps into which we fall and how to avoid them in the future.
  • The effect of stress on decision making and how to eradicate it.
  • The magical role of intuition on how to enhance it
  • The potential problems of collaboration and compromise
  • The potential strength of teamwork and how to realize it.

Communicating

Mehrabian’s Oft-quoted conclusion that only 65% of communication is non-verbal only tells half the story. The reality is that most of our communication is actually unintentional let alone non-verbal. We are still the same animal that roamed the plains 500,000 years ago, genetically programmed to sense danger, threat, affection and friendship and to respond accordingly often unwittingly or subconsciously.

After an introduction to the basic fundamentals of body language, this session focuses less on “what someone does when they are lying” and more on how to “tune in” to this previously invisible conversation. Invaluable in interview and negotiation situations, Caspars skill as a poker player can change the way you view communication forever.

Participants learn –

  • The basic body language “tells” of everyday conversation
  • How to tell when someone is lying
  • That for every 16 sensory inputs the human mind processes consciously, it processes 11 million subconsciously.
  • How to access that information and amplify our powerful intuitive thoughts.
  • The power of first impressions and reading someone in an instant
  • The art of matching for rapport and contrasting for attention