Project Management
Learn the science and psychology that drive effective project leadership—engaging higher-order thinking, adaptive judgment, and innovative approaches to managing complexity, alignment, and execution.
You’ll also strengthen essential skills in strategic communication, stakeholder navigation, ethical reasoning, decision-making under uncertainty, and systems thinking—all tailored specifically for professionals in project management, leadership, and cross-functional execution.
Project Lab is Here!
Booking now for fall 2025 and spring 2026
Step into Project Lab—an immersive, science-driven experience that transforms how project leaders think, decide, and lead. This isn’t your typical workshop. It’s hands-on, high-impact, and built to sharpen the skills that drive real-world execution.
Untapped: Unlocking Better Thinking for Project Managers
Booking now for fall 2025 and spring 2026
This highly acclaimed session, tailored specifically for project managers and led by Dr. Toby Groves, takes participants on a compelling journey into the psychological science behind effective project leadership. It serves as both a practical training and an inspirational call to action—equipping project professionals with powerful tools to elevate their thinking when it matters most.
The session introduces new ways of thinking, daily habits, and advanced cognitive strategies that significantly improve judgment, adaptability, and decision-making. Participants will learn to cultivate the core mental skills that drive successful project execution—enabling them to recognize insights and patterns that others overlook.
"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."
AI Think, Therefore I Am
Merging Human Ingenuity with Artificial Intelligence
Booking now for fall 2025 and spring 2026
In today’s evolving tech landscape, combining human critical thinking with AI isn’t optional—it’s essential. AI can boost IT audit efficiency, uncover insights, and enhance risk detection, but its true power emerges when paired with human judgment.
This session explores how IT auditors can integrate cognitive science with AI—learning to evaluate AI outputs, spot biases, and craft smarter prompts. By fusing intuition with machine intelligence, you’ll elevate precision, creativity, and insight in auditing and decision-making.
Enhancing Audit Decisions with AI and EI
Booking now for fall 2025 and spring 2026
AI brings speed, scale, and pattern recognition to auditing—but it lacks context, empathy, and ethical discernment. That’s where emotional intelligence (EI) becomes essential. This session explores how combining AI’s analytical power with EI’s human insight leads to smarter, more balanced decisions in complex environments.
You’ll learn how to leverage AI for anomaly detection, risk analysis, and workflow automation—while using EI to interpret nuance, build trust, and manage uncertainty. We’ll explore where AI falls short, how to prompt it more intelligently, and why emotionally aware auditors are essential for navigating ethical dilemmas, interpersonal dynamics, and high-stakes communication. Together, AI and EI create a decision-making model that’s both data-smart and deeply human.
The New Psychology of Professional Skepticism
Booking now for fall 2025 and spring 2026
The world has changed—and so must our approach to professional skepticism. This transformative session introduces a dynamic new model of skeptical reasoning designed to meet the demands of today’s complex environments. Moving beyond outdated, mechanical checklists and superficial doubt, this program reveals the hidden psychological and contextual forces that influence judgment and decision-making.
Participants will explore the three dimensions of skepticism and how to tune their thinking to better match the reliability of evidence, situational cues, and organizational culture. Through powerful demonstrations and interactive exercises, attendees will discover how to adapt their approach, surface hidden assumptions, and improve the accuracy of skeptical judgments in real-world settings.
Whether you’re an auditor, analyst, executive, or policy advisor, this session will help you reframe what it means to think critically and skeptically—and elevate your professional impact.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it"
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How These Sessions Are Different
My sessions are dynamic, interactive journeys designed to challenge and expand the way project leaders think and work. With a foundation in psychology (PhD) and deep experience collaborating with project teams across industries, my expertise bridges cognitive science, organizational behavior, and strategic execution—delivering content that truly resonates with today’s project professionals.
Research-Backed, Results-Driven Presentations
At the core of my sessions is a pioneering body of research on how project managers think under pressure, navigate uncertainty, and make complex decisions. This work has evolved into a dynamic repository of real-world thinking patterns and leadership behaviors observed across diverse project environments. It fuels every Project Lab session—making the experience not only captivating, but also deeply educational and transformative for today’s project professionals.
Beyond Technical Knowledge: A Focus on Cognitive Excellence
My philosophy centers on a simple yet powerful truth: the value of a project manager’s tools and methodologies depends on their ability to think critically, adapt strategically, and lead with clarity. My sessions are designed to strengthen these core capabilities—helping project managers become more insightful, resilient, and effective in the face of real-world complexity.
Topics Tailored Especially for Project Managers
From the psychology of strategic thinking and decision-making to risk management, stakeholder alignment, communication, ethics, and adaptive leadership, my presentations cover a wide spectrum of topics essential for today’s project professionals. Each session is customized to address the most pressing challenges and emerging trends in project execution—ensuring your team is equipped to lead with clarity, resilience, and impact in an increasingly complex world.
We have more data than ever, but what is it really telling us? New technologies and analytical methods detect myriad patterns in our data, but what do they really mean and what decisions can they help us make? Is the underlying data reliable? Is it valid for the purpose you are using it? Cognitive technologies distance us from the context of our data, shrouding the meaning behind the patterns and how to apply the information for effective decision-making. New thinking approaches are required to move beyond simple recognition of correlations to insight into why relationships exist. This session will teach methods that give us the ability to discern the inner character of problems, to recognize why interactions occur, and what decisions can be made with the information.
When the Facts Aren’t Enough: The Art of Communicating Complex Information
Mastering the art of translating complex information into influential insights is a skill that transcends mere data analysis—it’s about crafting narratives that resonate and motivate. Our session, ‘When the Facts Aren’t Enough,’ focuses on the nuanced art of making intricate data accessible and compelling, even to those unfamiliar with the subject matter. This expertise signifies not just an in-depth comprehension of the data but a profound insight into its real-world implications and how it’s perceived by diverse audiences. By adopting the perspectives of your listeners and embodying their experiences, this interactive workshop delves into the cognitive strategies and thinking paradigms essential for clear, impactful communication. Participants will emerge with enhanced abilities to convey their knowledge persuasively, ensuring their messages are not just heard but felt and acted upon
The Science of Great Leadership
Leadership skills have never been more important, in all industries and at all levels, whether executive or front-line employees. Organizations succeed in meaningful ways when their individual members have the ability to inspire action, build trust, solve complex problems, coordinate effective teams, and resolve contentious conflicts without damaging important relationships. This requires a deep understanding of human motivation, emotional intelligence, and nuances of cultural psychology. This session teaches a powerful model that allows attendees to build their own core leadership skills as well as the psychology of performance and motivation and the social psychology of organizational behavior.
The Science of Organizational Culture and Decision-Making
Equity and diversity across neurodiversity, racial and ethnic backgrounds, cultures, and ages enrich social networks, fostering deep learning, flexible thinking, and long-term organizational health and wellness. Diverse teams, embracing a spectrum of perspectives, achieve higher satisfaction, superior decision-making, and elevated performance. Discover the science that enhances social networks and learn to embed social standards and norms promoting equity and inclusivity. Master strategies for building a culture that encourages personal responsibility in shaping group norms and attitudes essential for embracing a broad spectrum of diversity, driving collective success.