Speaking Topics - Professional Education

This page is for organizations sponsoring events that grant professional and continuing educational credit for licensing, certification or professional designation purposes.  The topics below are frequently used in the fields of auditing, accounting, HR, banking, insurance, investigations, law enforcement, intelligence, medical, and HR.  Fully customized topics are available and topics are frequently combined to merge learning points pertinent to the audience. 

To inquire about booking or to request a full program description for any of the topics please email kate@tobygroves.com 

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Hot Topics

Metathinking: Cracking the Code of Critical Thinking & Problem Solving

Are you ready to make radical leaps in your critical thinking abilities?  In a world of rapid change and unreliable information, we need the ability to separate fact from fiction, recognize flawed assumptions, and have clarity under pressure.  This course will teach thinkers of any skill level how to audit their thinking and build effective reasoning strategies for all types of situations.  You will achieve dramatic improvements in judgement, problem solving, memory, and learning.  This course will make you more flexible, adaptable, creative and resilient, and provide a cognitive toolkit you can carry for life.

Major Subjects:

  • Dynamic thinking
  • Neuroscience of problem-solving
  • Belief updating
  • Skepticism and belief
  • Systems and design thinking
  • Memory enhancement

Learning objectives: 

  • Identify three thinking approaches to improve critical thinking
  • Define “First Principles Thinking”
  • Identify three decision-making biases

Designed for:  Analysts and investigators, auditors, accountants, attorneys, law enforcement, governance and compliance professionals, or those working in the IT, HR, legal, or medical profession as well as executives, policymakers, and other decision-makers interested in improving critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

© Toby Groves, Ph.D.

Metathinking: Cracking the Code of Critical Thinking & Problem Solving

The Edge of Ethics: Exploring the Limits of Ethical Behavior

“The Edge of Ethics” explores the psychology of bounded ethicality and the invisible borders that exist within the capabilities of our ethical judgment.  It will be entertaining, and probably a little frustrating at times.  We will seek to unveil hidden judgment errors we make when we face ethical dilemmas and search for the reasons behind them.  We will explore areas of ethical decision-making where people consistently predict they will do the right thing but rarely do so.  We will find out why people repeat stubborn errors of ethical judgment, and review steps which behavioral researchers have identified that can help us stop making these errors once and for all. We will identify ways to recognize our own errors and steps we can take to improve our ethical thinking.

Major Subjects:

  • Internal transparency
  • Implicit association
  • Concrete versus abstract processing
  • Temporal bias
  • Ethical fading

Learning objectives: 

  • Define attribution error
  • Identify 3 common ethical judgment errors
  • Identify 3 methods to reduce errors in ethical decision-making

Designed for:  Analysts and investigators, auditors, accountants, governance and compliance professionals, and those working in the IT, HR, legal, medical professions as well as executives, policymakers, and other decision-makers interested in developing a deeper understanding of their own ethical reasoning processes.

The Edge of Ethics: Exploring the Limits of Ethical Behavior

Learn how to employ systems thinking to disentangle complexities, recognize and interpret patterns, and diagnose problems.  Understand concepts such as interconnectedness, synthesis, and emergence and use this understanding to foresee risks and build collaborative teams.  Learn systems mapping, causality and feedback loops to be able to more accurately assess culture, support good group decision-making, and bolster professional skepticism.  Systems thinking will help you have deeper insights into complex problems and understand how changes in policies, procedures and controls affect behavior.

 

Major Subjects:

  • Pattern recognition and interconnectedness
  • Foresight
  • Emergence
  • Complexity
  • System mapping

Thinking and Decision-Making

Ready to make radical leaps in your critical thinking?  In a world of rapid change and unreliable information, we need the ability to separate fact from fiction, recognize flawed assumptions, and have clarity under pressure.  This course will teach you how to audit your thinking and build effective reasoning strategies for all types of situations.  You will achieve dramatic improvements in judgement, problem solving, memory, and learning.  This course will make you more flexible, adaptable, creative and resilient, and provide a cognitive toolkit you can carry for life.

Major Subjects:

  • Cognitive bias
  • Conducting a “thinking audit”
  • Metathinking
  • Professional skepticism
  • Decision mapping
  • Habit replacement
  • Emotional intelligence
  • Memory enhancement

Learn how to employ systems thinking to disentangle complexities, recognize and interpret patterns, and diagnose problems.  Understand concepts such as interconnectedness, synthesis, and emergence and use this understanding to foresee risks and build collaborative teams.  Learn systems mapping, causality and feedback loops to be able to more accurately assess culture, support good group decision-making, and bolster professional skepticism.  Systems thinking will help you have deeper insights into complex problems and understand how changes in policies, procedures and controls affect behavior.

 

Major Subjects:

  • Pattern recognition and interconnectedness
  • Foresight
  • Emergence
  • Complexity
  • System mapping

You will walk away from this session with powerful, practical thinking strategies that will immediately improve the way you think and do your work. Learn thinking habits to gain deeper insights to problem solving and better decision making, and advanced strategies for conducting interviews and performing investigations.

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.

Major Subjects:

  • Moving from “perceiving” to “meaning”

  • A new approach to professional skepticism

  • How to develop situational awareness

  • Why you should know the limitations of your data

  • The cognitive science of emotional intelligence

  • New brainstorming techniques

  • Data screening methods

  • Handling abstract, unstructured and extreme data

Unconscious associations are automatically and involuntarily spurred by people, situations and places around us. These associations profoundly influence our beliefs and attitudes and shape our actions and behaviors. Implicit associations ultimately affect how we interact with others, interpret evidence and make high stakes decisions. This fascinating session uses the latest cognitive and behavioral research and utilizes live implicit association experiments with the audience to help attendees unveil hidden influences that impact their decisions and teaches them how to use these new insights to improve their thinking.

Major Subjects:

  • The link between involuntary associations and decision-making

  • Unconscious bias at the individual and group levels

  • How cognitive diversity benefits group decision making

  • How stereotypes develop

  • Ethics and implicit associations

  • Using the mind-lens model to uncover hidden biases

Fraud and Investigations

This session features the latest behavioral science, interactive audience experiments, and compelling real-life stories to disrupt everything you thought you knew about fraud.  It will spur you to challenge “sacred cows” of the industry and help you develop better thinking approaches to detect, deter, or investigate fraud, waste and abuse.  Learn why many of our basic assumptions about fraud are flawed, why some widely accepted investigative practices are more harmful than helpful, and how auditors and investigators sometimes unwittingly assist fraud schemes. 

 

Major Subjects:

 

  • How we unwittingly assist in the production of misleading information
  • The neuroscience of psychopathy
  • Behavioral profiling
  • The new psychology of skepticism
  • Cognitive errors including attribution and overgeneralization
  • How experience, intuition and assumptions can cause cognitive errors

The complexity of our environment has outgrown old and superficial approaches to professional skepticism.  In this session, we'll explore a deeper understanding of skeptical judgment.  Attendees will experience fascinating demonstrations and learn about the hidden influences that impact skepticism. 

 

Major Subjects:

 

  • Dimensions of skeptical reasoning
  • The “mind-lens” approach to challenging faulty assumptions
  • Adjusting your “signal to noise” ratio
  • The role of situational awareness in skepticism
  • How to determine the reliability and validity of evidence
  • How to match skeptical reasoning to the environment
  • Learn how to uncover hidden biases that damage skepticism

The greatest cybersecurity risks your organization faces are breaches due to accidental, negligent or malicious activities of an organizational insider.  Together these represent the largest risk of financial loss and reputational damage to any organization.  In this crucial session attendees (IT and non-IT experts) will learn how to develop an organizational approach to insider threats and how to implement proactive approaches to recognize evolving risks and weaknesses.  Attendees will learn the important assets they can use to detect and thwart security risks.  They will understand breach tactics, behavioral and data patterns that indicate risks, and the most effective weapons against insider threats in the ongoing cyberwar.

 

Major Subjects:

  • Breach Tactics
    • Exploiting control gaps and control weaknesses
    • A review of tactics by type of attack
    • Psychological tactics used in attacks
  • Closing the gaps
    • A review of robust controls
    • Data access observables, changes in network patterns
    • A review of the audit, HR, IT and management relationships
    • Proactive approaches to recognize evolving risks and avoid breaches
  • Developing an effective insider threat program
    • Program transparency
    • Useful assets to recognize and thwart risks
    • Intra-organizational support and coordination

Ethics

Ethical intelligence is the level of one’s ability to understand, develop and regulate their own ethical reasoning.  It includes ability to recognize and interpret ethical elements of a situation, determine best actions, and follow-through on ethical commitments.  While emotional intelligence involves the ability to connect with feelings, ethical intelligence focuses on how you interpret your feelings and make decisions from an ethical perspective.  The session tackles difficult questions beginning with whether it’s even possible to teach ethics in the first place.

Major Subjects:

  • How culture affects ethical judgment
  • The surprising relationship between empathy and ethics
  • Mindfulness and resilience
  • Ethical transparency
  • Ethical fading and bounded ethicality
  • The neuroscience of ethical information-processing
  • The psychology behind empathy, transparency and trust

This fascinating and entertaining session explores the invisible borders that exist in our ethical judgment. We will unveil the hidden judgment errors we make when we face ethical dilemmas and reveal why we make them. We will identify ways to recognize our own errors and steps we can take to improve our ethical thinking.

An innovative and interactive session that taps the areas of neuroscience, psychology and biology to understand how science, emotion, and ethical decision-making interact.  Instead of critiquing how our minds are supposed to work, this session delves into the fascinating world of how our minds actually work when we face difficult problems where a ‘best choice” doesn’t seem to exist.  The talk will also explore why ethical codes have too often failed and how to improve individual and organizational ethical reasoning.

 

Major Subjects:

 

  • Using the Mind-lens model to understand ethical reasoning
  • Why model codes of ethics fail
  • The science behind organizations “Ethical DNA”
  • Understanding the psychology behind “Tone at the Top”
  • The interaction between critical thinking and ethics
  • Breaking myths about motivation related to decision making
  • Ethical decision-making under pressure
  • Are ethics and morals “fixed” or can we learn to improve

This session delves into the fascinating neuroscience behind how our minds work when we face decisions with conflicting motivations or difficult dilemmas for which the best answer is not clear.  Attendees will explore real-life dilemmas and learn effective cognitive processes to deal with those dilemmas as revealed by the latest research in neuroscience.  The session draws on organizational psychology, cognitive science, psychobiology and even sports psychology to create an immersive experience and unveil the hidden ways our minds perceive and interpret problems.

Major Subjects:

 

  • Learn how to resolve competing motivations
  • Recognize ethically relevant behavioral cues at the individual, team, and organizational levels
  • Learn the cognitive tools to combat bias and situation blindness
  • Hear the methods that help teams debate problems effectively
  • Understand the science behind cultural norms

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

This fascinating and entertaining session explores the invisible borders that exist in our ethical judgment. We will unveil the hidden judgment errors we make when we face ethical dilemmas and reveal why we make them. We will identify ways to recognize our own errors and steps we can take to improve our ethical thinking.

Culture and Communications

Learn informational interviewing skills that will enhance your ability to glean important information from client interview sessions.  Interviewing uses a multi-faceted interpersonal skillset including the ability to ask great questions, form compelling arguments, build trust, present ideas persuasively, inspire others to action, adapt to changing circumstances, and see issues from competing perspectives. These skills elevate confidence and cultivate empathy during the interview interaction.

 

Major Subjects:

 

  • Communicating in different cultures
  • Asking powerful questions
  • Improvisation techniques useful in interviewing sessions
  • Metacommunication, para-linguistics and body language
  • Feedback and active listening

Equity and diversity in social networks stimulate deep learning, flexible thinking, and long-term health and wellness throughout the organization.  Diverse teams experience higher levels of satisfaction, more effective deliberation processes, improved decision-making, and heightened performance.  Learn the science behind social networks and how to “inoculate” your culture with social standards and norms that strengthen equity and diversity.  Learn how to build and organizational culture that inspires individual ownership in developing group norms and attitudes that are crucial for embracing diversity. 

 

Major Subjects:

 

  • Social equity – The social science of fairness, justice and equality
  • Informed inclusion
  • Development of cultural characteristics that support diversity
  • Neurodiversity
  • Gender and racial dynamics in different task groups
  • Improving intergroup attitudes
  • Unconscious bias and implicit association
  • Social framing dynamics

Public speaking blends a diverse group of thinking and communication skills that will enhance your professional and personal life even if you’re not a public speaker.  These skills include the ability to form compelling arguments, build trust, present ideas persuasively, inspire others to action, adapt to changing circumstances, and see issues from competing perspectives. These skills elevate confidence and cultivate empathy. They support great leadership and enhance cooperative reasoning and problem-solving abilities.

 

Major Subjects:

 

  • The art and science of storytelling
  • Message-crafting and speechwriting
  • Communicating in different cultures
  • Improvisation
  • Metacommunication, para-linguistics and body language
  • High stakes situations, difficult conversations and presenting complex data
  • Persuasion and negotiation
  • Feedback and active listening

The ability to illuminate truths and inspire action is an invaluable asset. It means painting a picture with information and articulating complex concepts with meaning, even to non-experts. This ability indicates that you not only have a deep understanding of your data, but a rich understanding of how people will interact with it in the real world. This skill requires the communicator to understand different perspectives, to “walk a mile” in the shoes of their audience. This interactive session takes a deep dive into the thinking perspectives and cognitive skills that help experts gain clarity in their messaging; gaining a more thorough understanding of their content and how others will perceive their message.

Major Subjects:

  • The cognitive science of persuasion, trust and belief

  • Design theory for data presentations

  • Communicating with audiences of varying technical knowledge

  • Detecting behavioral cues (when you can’t see or hear your audience)

  • Predicting the interpretational style of your audience

 

Learn communication skills that will enhance your professional and personal life.  Speak confidently and persuasively one-on-one, in the boardroom or to larger audiences.  These skills include the ability to form compelling arguments, build trust, present ideas persuasively, inspire others to action and see issues from competing perspectives. These skills elevate confidence and cultivate empathy. They support great leadership skills and enhance cooperative reasoning and problem-solving abilities. 

 

Major Subjects:

 

  • The art and science of storytelling
  • Message-crafting and speechwriting
  • Communicating in different cultures
  • How to ask great questions
  • Improvisation
  • Metacommunication, para-linguistics and body language
  • High stakes situations, difficult conversations and presenting complex data
  • Persuasion and negotiation
  • Feedback and active listening

Data and Technology

This talk is an interactive and unintimidating exploration of the key points audiences need to learn about AI and data science.  We’ll take a practical, step by step walk through procedures that can be used to explore data, identify opportunities to use AI, and best methods of building predictive algorithms.  We will specifically identify analytical tools and statistical methods that are appropriate for a variety of needs and take a tour of a statistical program, see how analytical procedures are conducted and how the output is analyzed.  We will review machine learning, data mining, natural language processing, and brain computer interfacing.  This is a perfect session for those wanting to learn practical ways to apply data science and cognitive technologies in their work.

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.

 

 

Major Subjects:

 

  • New research in leadership neuroscience
  • Assessing culture and tone at the top
  • Implementing an adaptive culture
  • The psychological science of resilience
  • How to inoculate organizational DNA with ideas that spread
  • The science behind why some groups “click” and others don’t
  • What causes organizational attitudes to shift and behavioral patterns to emerge

Leadership and Change Management

Session led by change management expert, Tammy Daugherty

It’s no surprise that leading change ranks as one of the top three leadership skills of the future. In this session you will learn how to become a clear and purposeful sponsor of change, how to build alignment across teams, and how to influence, motivate and model behaviors that support change.

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.

 

 

Major Subjects:

 

  • New research in leadership neuroscience
  • Assessing culture and tone at the top
  • Implementing an adaptive culture
  • The psychological science of resilience
  • How to inoculate organizational DNA with ideas that spread
  • The science behind why some groups “click” and others don’t
  • What causes organizational attitudes to shift and behavioral patterns to emerge

Session led by change management expert, Tammy Daugherty

High performing people are attracted to companies with a reputation for talent development.  There are simple ways to improve your talent development strategy that have a big impact on your ability to attract top talent regardless of organizational size. Learn powerful recruiting and retention tricks that turn your organization into a magnet for top talent.

In this session…

 Major Subjects

  • What motivates talent and draws them to organizations today
  • Ways to leverage your company’s mission, values and purpose and why these matter
  • How a company’s investment in personal development attracts talent and ways to improve your learning and development strategy
  • What an employee ambassador is and how to use them effectively
  • Elements of culture that draw A+ talent
  • How to tell a candidate’s quality of work standards and how to communicate your team’s standards

Session led by change management expert, Tammy Daugherty

If you take care of your people, they will take care of your customers.  It’s as simple as that. Who is YOUR internal customer? As organizations hyper-focus on customer-centric transformation, the needs of your employees and managers will shift too.  Create a differentiated customer experience for your people. Learn how to identify and visualize their pain points and opportunities.  Optimize their employee experience using key consulting skills and journey maps that deliver actionable insights. This will have a direct impact on your external customer’s experience!

Major Subjects

  • Steps to move to/improve the internal focus to employees first, customers second and its value proposition in driving better external customer service
  • The psychology and importance of language in communicating employee value
  • Create a journey map of your internal customers to identify all your team’s touchpoints within your organization, their motivation and pain points, and their current and desired journey
  • The role of your team’s mission, vision and strategy when working with internal customers
  • The role of stakeholders and how to use journey maps to identify and manage them
  • How to maximize the team’s touchpoints with your internal customers
  • What consulting skills your team needs to provide excellence internal customer service
  • How to pivot to building trust with your internal customers digitally

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