I’m Dr Dorian Minors, and Karstica is where I sell you on a slightly
different approach to leadership development, executive coaching, and
culture transformation.
Coaching, performance, and culture change built on data, not dogma.
My job is simple: help you and your team think, decide, and lead with more
intelligence and less noise. After a decade in research, six years in the
Infantry, and countless classrooms and boardrooms, I’ve learned that most
“secret formulas” are just re-packaged common sense. What isn’t common is
the ability to translate solid science into day-to-day habits that stick.
Dr Dorian Minors Director
Most leadership, culture-change, and coaching programmes lean heavily on one of
two things:
A bustle of optimistic phraseology and a logo cloud.
A charismatic “method” you’re asked to take on faith.
But lore isn’t leverage and buzzwords don’t make you better. If you want to
know which programmes work, ask the question “how do you measure impact?”
If they can’t answer, then they can’t deliver. I can.
Who am I?
I’m Dr Dorian Minors—a Cambridge-educated brain scientist with ten years of
clinical experience. I’m a former Infantry platoon commander, and a
permanent lecturer in leadership at Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. I’ve
taught psychology and science of mind at the Unversity of Cambridge and the
Judge Business School. So you can trust me when I say that human betterment and
interpersonal dymanics might be the best-studied phenomena in modern sciences
of mind.
You can also trust me when I say that using the language of science isn’t the
same as using the science.
What can I do for you?
For over a decade I’ve helped executives, founders, teams, and military leaders
avoid the kind of karstic, fluffy nonsense that populates this space, and
concentrate on real, measurable impact. I can help with:
One-to-one mentoring: For senior leaders who want a
sounding board with academic depth and operational grit.
Team or cohort accelerators: Short, high-intensity
sprints with learn-and-solve interventions and live problem-solving.
Cultural architecture: Clarify vision, align
incentives, and build rituals of thought and action that survive long
after the workshop glow fades.
Programme review: Already paying someone else? I’ll
audit their science and show you what’s solid and what’s smoke.
Speaking and teaching Keynotes, masterclasses, and guest
lectures—from 20-minute spark talks to multi-day intensives.
Impact-first, not fee-first: Early-stage, non-profit,
mission-driven, or cash-strapped? Ask. If you're doing genuinely
high-impact work, or have an interesting problem, I'll help if I have
capacity.
Tell us a bit about what you want to do, and I'll see if we think we can help.
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Other content
My content on leadership, culture, and human systems change.
I’ve been talking about we’re all quite scared of bias, but actually bias is
quite handy. It’s a preference for precision—you can ignore a noisy world
because you have some expectations about how things are going to play out.
But you don’t always know when to be biased, or when to open yourself up to
the noisy world. So, sometimes you’re biased when you shouldn’t be, and
sometimes you’re paralysed by indecision when you should have just gone from
the gut. This article explores the lever that sits under that
process—uncertainty.
The concept of cognitive dissonance gets flogged online. It’s always this
malevolent feature of our minds lurking back there making us do outrageous
stuff. But cognitive dissonance isn’t really this. It’s just another example
of <em>bias</em>—optimising us for certain features of a messy world so we can get
on with things. Of course this doesn’t always help. But actually <em>most</em> of
the time it does. And people don’t often talk about the fact that we don’t
<em>always</em> worry about conflicting cognitions. But we don’t—sometimes we’re
open to the noise too.
I’ve never written an article about the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance,
even though I’ve referenced it a lot. It’s so mainstream that I assume
everyone knows what it is. But, actually, people don’t. And even the guy who
came up with it was a little disappointed by where the literature around it
went. So I thought we’d revisit it, and keep it short and fun.
