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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CEO of Workcation
Other content
My content on leadership, culture, and human systems change.
Everyone’s convinced stress is this outdated evolutionary technology—poorly
calibrated to modern life, something to avoid at all costs. The story goes that
it evolved to help us run from tigers, but now it’s just triggered by email
notifications. This is nonsense. Stress is the only thing that gets us to
perform at all. It’s the most valuable biological technology we have. This
lecture walks through the Yerkes-Dodson Law—a simple, 100-year-old model that
explains how stress actually works, why we need it, and how to use it well.
One time I was out drinking with some Swedish folks and they told me
about the word <em>killgissa</em>. It means something like ‘man-guessing’,
referring to when you sound like you know what you’re talking about but
you’re actually just guessing. I reckon AI hallucination is just
man-guessing, but on your behalf. To explain, I first have to convince you
that human reason isn’t actually that reasonable. With any luck it’ll make
you better at managing your own processes of reason <em>and</em> your AIs. Let’s
see.
I needed to do a little refresher on motivation for another audience, so I’m
going to subject you to it as well. It’s a messy subject, but at a high
level, there are some interesting frameworks for understanding what makes
people do things. More importantly, what I’ll show you is that motivational
psychology is no different to <em>any</em> psychology. Anything that speaks to how
we think and behave speaks to our motivations. So rather than teach you
motivation theories, let me teach you a framework which will help you apply
whatever theories you prefer to the motivation of people.
