The Dolus Advisors Briefing
Dr. Alexander Stein
Founder, Dolus Advisors | Human Decision-Making + Behavior Expert | NIST Collaborator | Forbes Contributor | Speaker | Editor-in-Chief, The CAI Report
Insightful analysis and practical counsel to help leaders enhance critical decision-making
Welcome to the 2024 Year-End Round-Up
A recap of major publications, podcasts, speaking and media appearances, new projects, and professional collaborations and partnerships.
The spotlight here is on Fraud + Asset Recovery and Cybersecurity. But this has been an active year across all practice areas with engagements involving ?CEO + Executive Team Advisory Services, Succession + Transition, Board Effectiveness + Organizational Governance, Enterprise Culture, and Human-Centered Technologies.
Leveraging Psychodynamics in Fraud and Asset Recovery Operations
Follow The Money Season 1 ? Episode 3 — "Meet the Experts" Martin Kenney & Co (MKS), producer; Nick Ryan, host. 22 November 2024
Fraud pivots on deception, psychological manipulation, and abuses of trust and power. It is a crime of relationships. As such, the ferocious conflict with the other side is as much psychological as legal and procedural. In this podcast Dr Stein discusses his knowledge and experience in delivering psychological expertise in complex fraud cases.
David & Goliath Unbound: A new paradigm for holding banks accountable to victims for enabling fraud
41st Annual Cambridge International Symposium on Economic Crime, Jesus College Cambridge, 1-8 September 2024
An inter-disciplinary panel examining the legal and psychosocial dimensions of bank liability for negligence, dishonest assistance, and related theories of liability in English, Canadian, and US legal frameworks. Highlighting the differences in duty of care expectations between individuals and institutions, the experts probe the legal thresholds for liability which insulate banks from accountability to victims of frauds enabled by them and posit novel methods for achieving fairer outcomes.
A Brief Field Guide to Leveraging Human Factor Intelligence Analysis in Fraud and Asset Recovery Operations
2024 ICC FraudNet Global Annual Report — Fraud Frontiers: Emerging Threats and Innovative Solutions in Fraud & Asset Recovery. Dr Dominic Thomas-James, Editor
Fraud cases involve more than their commercial, transactional, and legal elements. They are centrally defined by the people whose decisions and actions influence everything that happens. Each matter is constituted of a thick stew of stakeholders’ motivations and desires, aims and concerns, and personal histories and circumstances. In this paper, a realistic but fictive case summary is advanced to illustrate these ideas in the context of a large-scale multi-national fraud. This forms the basis for a concise explanation of the advantages and practical utility of leveraging psychological expertise — specialist knowledge and tools in decoding the inscrutable complexities of human thought, behavior, and relationships — in asset recovery operations.
Cybersecurity is a Human Issue
ShortArm Solutions and Cyber Pro Podcast Episode 310. Rick Mischka, host. 8 May 2024
My favorite technology [:44]
Dr Stein emphasizes the importance of human decision-making in cybersecurity, stating that it's a human issue involving technology, not just a technical problem. He advocates for leadership understanding the human element's significance in cybersecurity strategy, including elevating introspection and self-awareness as essential "technologies" in cybersecurity.
The Psychology of Authoritarians & The People Who Submit to Them
A Conversation with Ruth Ben-Ghiat. 7 June 2024
From a Q&A with the Lucid community that touched on a cluster of issues, including: the psycho-social forces that enable and facilitate corrupt power-abusers; the importance of overcoming arcane prohibitions against publicly leveraging psychological expertise (such as the Goldwater Rule) in print and broadcast media to be able to accurately spotlight (not formally diagnose) autocrats’ and tyrants’ psychopathologies; and understanding the similarities between corrupt business leaders and authoritarians, including referencing established best practices in assessing leadership competencies and characteristics as a bulwark against elevating charismatic but dangerous extremists whose appealing promises of enrichment disguise a kleptocratic grift.
We welcome these new collaborative alliances and partnerships:
Specialist Collaborator. NIST Center for Human Centered Cybersecurity (CHCC) — Championing the human in cybersecurity by conducting interdisciplinary research to better understand and improve people’s interactions with cybersecurity systems, products, processes, and services.
Advisory Board. ?PsiAN is a leading mental health advocacy organization working toward greater awareness, better policies, and more access to depth/insight-oriented psychotherapies.
Collaborative engagement to perform a NIST CSF (Cybersecurity Framework) 2.0 cybersecurity maturity assessment for a major US organization and its affiliate businesses.
Committee on Public Information (CPI); Committee on Corporate and Organizational Consultants; Council on Artificial Intelligence (CAI). Founded in 1911, APsA is the oldest national psychoanalytic organization in the United States.
Dolus Advisors is a bespoke strategy consultancy advising CEOs, senior management teams, corporate directors, and founders in organizational issues involving complex psychological underpinnings. We deliver actionable insight, penetrating analysis, and practical counsel to help enhance critical decision-making, manage and mitigate risks, and resolve intricate human-factor problems. We help leaders understand and address organizational challenges beyond the capabilities of conventional business consulting by leveraging deep expertise in human decision-making, motivation, and behavior.
To learn more, visit www.dolusadvisors.com?
For more information or to discuss how we can be of help, please email [email protected]
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Follow Dr Stein’s writing in Forbes on the psychology of decision-making and unintended consequences in organizations and society