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.
Scholarship into wisdom. That’s the promise.
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:
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.
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.
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:
No reason not to try, right?
Tell us a bit about what you want to do, and I'll see if we think we can help.
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My content on leadership, culture, and human systems change.
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A lot of people were upset with me for teasing the ‘neuroscience-based’ coaching programme ‘Positive Intelligence’, so I thought I’d do a little autopsy. This is part one, on the context that should make you pretty worried about it.
Director
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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.
Director
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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.
Director