Neuroscience of Change Makers, Serial Industry Disruptors, and Iconoclasts

Interview with Steven Feinberg, PhD, author of The Advantage-Makers: How Exceptional Leaders Win by Creating Opportunities Others Don't and the forthcoming book, The Sagacity Code: A Change-Makers Brain...Boldness, Ingenuity, Wisdom. Steven’s website is https://www.stevenfeinberg.com

He shares insights and patterns from 35 years of research and his work with more than 250 executives with Michael Jay Moon, CEO of GISTICS, an innovation think-tank and publisher of public advocacy proposals and events. Michael is the author of Firebrands: Building Brands in the Internet Age, and publisher of 40-plus executive white papers and 200-plus interviews with industry leaders, innovators, entrepreneurs, and experts.

Steven, tell me a bit about you?

I’m a Neurostrategist based in Silicon Valley. I work with senior leaders at top companies, amplifying their impact, power and influence.

I focus on unlocking the value creation abilities of elite executive performers, high-performing teams and winning cultures.

Generally, clients begin seeing results within days or a month. My work to date has created more than $150 million in reported business value.

What’s the big idea behind executive neurostrategy?

In our world, we move forward, maintain the status quo, or fall backwards. But there’s really only one value option: Advance.

And with today’s blitzkrieg of uncertainty and disruption, advancing forward throws our brains … our limbic systems … into survival mode.

Left on default, our brain’s sense-making guidance system sees any change as a threat.

In response, our brains tend to shutdown. It narrows its focus, biases to the familiar, and evades feedback perceived as criticism.

While you can argue that’s just a fact of life, few if any executives can afford their brains to shutdown, or their colleagues brains. It’s all brains on deck.

Executive neurostrategy enhances the brain’s sense-making guidance system and gives executives and elite performers tools for identifying and defeating their number one foe: The Shutdown Syndrome.

Often this means escaping the searing bite of the three-headed dragon of criticism, mediocrity, and the familiar, status quo; and replacing negative judgments with sagacity...what’s that? Boldness, ingenuity, and wisdom.

The Sagacity Code is the big idea behind executive neurostrategy. It’s the guidance system that game changers use to see what others don’t, do what others say can’t be done, and persuade others to do the unlikely.

Let’s back up and start with, What is neurostrategy?

It’s the application of neuroscience, structural game dynamics, and social influence to the real time issues and make-or-break decisions facing executives.

Neurostrategy deals with the hidden forces that drive human behavior. Neurostrategy navigates the threat management system in the brain. It helps you to defeat the triple-headed dragon of criticism, mediocrity and the familiar, status quo. Neurostrategy rewires leader to be industry and organizational game changers.

What do you mean by elite performers and game changers?

Elite performers operate under intense, unrelenting pressure. They consistently make the right decisions and produce results, even when the odds are stacked against them.

Game changers are the top of the top elite performers. Game changers are intrigued by barely solvable problems and ingenious solutions. They’re endlessly curious about the world, people and their inner game for achieving what others say can’t be done.

Game changers have what we call neuro-flexibility that gives a new dimension of insights. They’re not just handling stress. But advancing with robust ingenuity. For virtually every obstacle they encounter they believe, “there is a way” even when they can’t see it when they begin.

A game changer's power and skill is to believe “there is a way” and to find it.

With this orientation, they change the game board in an instant and win the unwinnable. But it’s not blind over-confidence.

They balance self-confidence with an unstoppable desire to level up their game. Think of Steph Curry or Tom Brady, both at the top of their games. However, as elite performers they share a conviction, I can improve. They engage in deliberate practice. In each practice session, they target one or two micro-improvements. And, they use and apply immediate feedback from a specialist coach. They also game-out or strategize new ways of seeing their game boards.

Game Changers practice the right things to get it right. This means you have more control than most others in your field of play, on your game board. Their clarity, decisiveness and confidence come through three things.

As pathfinders, they do what others say can’t be done and create futures.

As insight-finders they, they create options … shots of goal … that other don’t see. They appear to have special intel and make connections that others don’t have or make.

As pattern-finders, they persuade others to see and do what others think unlikely or unexpected. In the midst of disruption or unexpected change, they make sense of the uncertainty for us. They are the sense makers of things not yet understood.

Game changers attain great power when they discover new options on their game boards, codify new patterns, and persuade us to follow.

What new pressures must executives navigate today?

Everyone talks about how we live in an age of continuous disruption. For many, it’s the new normal. In spite of this, most share the imperative to advance.

But how? That’s the challenge that every executive faces … must figure out … must get right everyday.

Over the last 10 or 20 years, everyone, to one degree or another, has experienced increasing velocity, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity in everyday events. In parallel, technology has bestowed upon us great power and ability to operate with force multipliers on a global basis.

As an executive today, you must make sense of the technical, social, and geopolitical transformations around your business. Again, how?

No matter how talented you are, in this era of accelerated complexity, you cannot just react. You must proactively seek out the next level of play and take it on.

This means that you are already sensing the next threat and challenge: you know the game changed. While threat shuts down most people, game changers sense the threat and explore ways to solve the problems in pragmatic new ways. With that comes the demand to master a new game board.

In taking on a new game board, where are the sand traps and hazards?

More than any single trap for elite performers/game changers is getting beyond the reactive insistence and overconfidence that their beliefs are right. They must take deliberate steps to spot and deal with their false premises…biases in their decision-making…in spite of counter-factual evidence. All too often, our strengths become blind spots.

In my work with more than one thousand executives, I’ve found a few predictable patterns in faulty decision-making.

Being defensive or numb in the face of criticism and reactive or apathetic to feedback is common.

So is settling for mediocrity and playing small game.

And getting stuck with the familiar or sticking with the known solutions that maintain the status quo is also common.

When combined with the reluctance to search for viable alternatives, you get plain vanilla, least common denominator results, which run counter to how the brains of game changers work.

Is there more to the blind spot of overconfidence in our beliefs?

Overconfidence all starts with our inner guidance system. We each have a sense-making guidance system that operates at the intersection of prediction, novelty, and meaning.

Our sense-making guidance system plays out on a behavioral landscape or game board.

It’s important to start with the recognition that our neurocircuitry comes with a factory preset for predictability, novelty and meaning that’s set for us to survive and fit.

Prediction is about what is next, immediately and the future. Novelty is about obstacles and how our brains seek rewards for curiosity and new insights. Meaning guides towards what really matters and how to influence those around us.  The three serves as your threat management control.

Without this guidance system, you literally can’t take the next step. In fact, much pain of the pain our body is the consequence of threats, perceived and real, to the brain’s guidance systems.

Those who predict, make sense of uncertainty, and tell us what comes next, are the most influential people in the world.

Yet, I’ve found in my work that most people have their guidance systems set on default to maintain the status quo.

But it’s quite different for game changers. The have upgraded their guidance systems to proactively manage change instead of reacting, numbing out or blaming.

As a neurostrategist, this upgraded guidance systems demonstrates dynamic stability...or what Jeff Bezos of Amazon calls a sense of “day one” of the firm … always press ahead … no hurry, no pause.

What stops us from being game changers?

It’s about how we deal with threats, both real and imaginary.

On a daily basis, most executives deal with one of these threats:

1. Not moving fast enough;
2. Lack of clarity of our strategy; and
3. Too much conflict and just won’t get on the same page.

At a deeper level, let me summarize these perceived threats: We are not playing to win. We’ve been bitten and seared by the triple-headed dragon of criticism, mediocrity and the familiar … what I call The Shutdown Syndrome.

The Shutdown Syndrome is based on my research of game-changing leaders and what they identified as their number one foe: an unconscious bias that neutralizes our best efforts.

When this Shutdown Syndrome takes hold, it dulls your ingenuity to see new viable options. It crushes your nerve to do what others say can’t be done. And you fail to sway others to follow you.

The Shutdown Syndrome makes otherwise smart, effective leaders fixate on their known approaches and their status quo strategies, instead of inventing a never-been-done-before-way to change their game boards.

What are examples of the Shutdown Syndrome in action?

It seems that every day we hear about how ill-prepared someone was in the face complexity and change...or our new normal.

This past year we saw United Airlines drag a seated doctor off the plane because they had overbooked the flight. It was an utter lack of common sense and a reactive solution that made everything worse.

Or, we read about how Equifax dealt their massive security breach by making customers pay for fixing it.

Both examples demonstrate a shut down of good thinking under pressure, making the companies look stupid, lose customers, and hemorrhage profits.

The Shutdown Syndrome stops you with criticism, mediocrity and the familiar.

It buries you in the status quo of not seeing the big picture and playing safe and small on a narrow game board.

For example, I worked with VP Quality at a leading tech company here in Silicon Valley. She was hardworking, probably tops in the field, but her CEO rejected more than 60% of her recommended initiatives.

She felt stung by unfounded criticism, frustrated with a recurring pattern, and suffered a sense of failing.

She was using a common strategy of trying to influence by emphasizing the upside: what the company will get. But with her CEO, this gain-framing was inadequate. He rejected it out of hand. Her tried-and-true strategies pulled her into the Shutdown Syndrome.

Gain-framing versus Loss-framing

Together, we scenario-gamed a few situations. With how brain works in mind, I showed her how she might sway her boss by a using a different framing approach for her proposal.

Brain framing is one of dozens of neurostrategies that I use. She flipped the frame from gain to loss. She framed her proposals in terms of what her company would lose if they did not immediate proceed.

She applied loss-framing to a proposal the very next day. Boom! It worked.

This simple but effective neurostrategy took 15 or so minutes to craft and practice and she still uses it today.

The results were huge and long lasting. The CEO’s response to her proposals flipped from a consistent “no” 60 percent of the time to 80% “yes’s.”

We even heard the CEO say they she just got smarter. She also earned a seat at the executive table.

Escaping the grip of the Shutdown Syndrome raised her reputation and boosted her influence throughout the company.

What’s the neuroscience of the Shutdown Syndrome?

Your brain is both an energy hog and miser. It hogs 25 to 30 percent of your body’s entire energy output.

As an energy miser, it tries to economize everything. That why we have habits.

Being stingy with its energy is why we heavily rely on habits of mind, mental shortcuts or heuristics: Physical or mental habits that operate automatically with a minimum of thinking. It’s a neurocircuit reaction.

Our brains have an inner accountant, a miserly bean counter if you will, who constantly evaluates risks and rewards for decisions before taking any action.

If given a choice of cuing a habit or figuring something out for the first time, our brain’s inner accountant will insist taking the easy path of the familiar, the good enough.

As an executive neurostrategist, I deal with preempting the Shutdown Syndrome and help executives amplify their talents and rewire to change the game.

Aren’t most executives paid to work through their biases and blind spots?

In conversations with more than 1,000 senior executives, I’ve heard three things on a consistent basis.

One, there’s no time for this. We’ve got more urgent things to handle.

Two, this soft stuff doesn’t translate to the bottom line It’s charm school.

Three, we’ve already got resources to deal with this (communication training and a network of coaches and specialist consultants).

And, you know, this all sounds reasonable. But it misses a profound point and confuses incremental improvements on an existing game board in contrast to strategic high-value breakthroughs that can change the game board.

As a neurostrategist, I have found that persistence, not resistance, is the problem. Often I see this in the form of two conflicting moral imperatives.

First, I must persist in the face of obstacles … or be considered a quitter, a loser or weak.

And second, I must stop persisting in what’s not working … or be considered crazy, bull-headed, or just plain arrogant.

Everyone tells us to stop doing what isn’t working, to think outside the box. But how?

How can you escape this double bind? How can you level-up your performance and make the jump onto a new game board?

To answer that, let’s first talk about how most executives and organizations deal with this … and then contrast how brains of game changers use game boards to win big.

Dealing with the Shutdown Syndrome

The Shutdown Syndrome can undermine us in a number of ways.

It narrows our ability to see viable options.

We go with the uncontroversial and familiar. It substitutes hard work instead of doing the right thing.

We bury ourselves in low value-added work. It rewards us to settle for mediocre results.

We react to the game, to the circumstances as presented, instead of jumping to a new game and win big where others only saw risk and downside.

In a nutshell, you lose the power to influence.

As a neurostrategist I listen for something that I call dragon speak. By far the most common Shutdown pattern is “I don’t have unchallenged biases.” That’s dragon-speak whispering nonsense in your ear, weakening you.

It’s permission to play small and safe, cozying you up to mediocrity instead of playing to win.

Another Shutdown pattern is “I am pretty good at handling criticism, it’s just who and how it’s delivered.” That’s dragon-speak for how to avoid looking foolish.

The “factory settings” of your brain: an insistence on appearing right in front of others. This induces an immediate loss of the nerve to spot flawed premises, diminishes the effort to uncover new insights, and shackles your ability to take decisive and confident action.

And the most challenging Shutdown pattern is “Isn’t that just like (fill in the blank what we’ve done before)” That’s dragon-speak for preferring or making things appear familiar: the deep instinct for the status quo.

Our brains love predictive certainty so much; it will force us to fixate good ideas while preempting even better ideas.

Our brains love predictive certainty so much, that we don’t even consider changing the game to our advantage. The uncertainty and risk causes a strong sense of regret that we might make the wrong decision. So we stand pat.

In stark terms, we have the choice to change the game or be seduced by dragon speak: avoiding criticisms and feedback, settling for mediocrity, and sticking the familiar.

How do most executives level up their performance?

All executives want to get it right. It’s about judgment and influence.

Most companies have some form of leadership development, team building and performance management programs. Many have a pool of internal and external coaches.

Most coaches focus on communication, personality and charm. These will improve you to a degree.

And if you need a best practice solution to known, status-quo solvable problems, then this is the way to go.

Few if any executive coaches actually take on big-stakes problems of value creation, bet the company decisions in real time situation rooms, or vexing people problems and teams ensnared in political intrigues and playing small.

On the other hand, most executive mentors and board members have faced big-stakes problems and snagging a few big wins and suffering a few spectacular flops. They can provide great value as sounding boards and contrarians. They can help script a difficult conversation or structure a problem.

However, most industry executives do not have a coherent model of executive decision-making, behavioral landscapes of game boards, or the psychology of social influence.

For the most part, executives are on their own and few options for shaping the future trajectory of the company, scenario gaming the internal and external effects of a new business model, or leapfrogging the competition.

True game changers come with huge stakes, uncertainty and threats. A refined sense-making guidance system is required. Winning or losing will result from your ability to discern what you are really up against.

And, you’ll need to do all this under tremendous stress, crushing timelines and with vague or conflicting signals from your team and market.

You said, elite performers master their game boards to win big. What does that mean?

In some form, we’re all wired to seek insights for how to handle the unexpected. This all happens in a dynamic context, which I call a perceived field of play with real world consequences.

Neurostrategists call this a behavioral landscape. It comes with two contexts or two game boards: An actual game board and the other is the subjective.

In business, these two game boards are the context of power AND the context of influence, respectively.

The actual game board is how you win. It comprises the physical elements or content of your business environment:

• People, products, partners, frenemies, and competitors;
• Your business’s capabilities and process maturities; and
• Agreed upon rules of the game and how to win, how you earn money.

The actual game board is your context of power.

The subjective game board is the behavioral landscape with your perceptions of the players.

Games on subjective game boards are really about the psychology of relationships, interactions, and motivations.

That’s your perception of others on the game board and how they see you:

• Everyone’s interpretation of rules and how to win;
• How you earn trust and reputation; and
• Customers appreciation of value.

The subjective game board is your context of influence.

Game changers play out lots of win-scenarios on this subjective game board and identify the most elegant way to prevail, often with least amount of effort or blowback.

I like to say The road to hell, paved with mishandled interactions. And I’ve paved a lot of those roads.

People often claim their issues are all communication problems. Then they try basic communication skills to fix it. From a Neurostrategist point of view communication is relationship. The neurocircuitry for communication are the same neurocircuitry for relationship.

Communication problems often explode into something larger because we’re not mindful of what you are communicating about the relationship. It’s not the content. But the context of the content, the relationship.

That’s why elite performers use their second, subjective game board to earn trust, a great reputation, and sway or influence. Game boards answer: Who has real power, who has perceived power? Is this a fair game? How are decisions made? What is a risky move versus a safe move? And who are the insiders, outsiders, allies and adversaries?

When you don’t know how to play on the relationship game board, you lose and for reasons that will strike you as capricious, arbitrary or bad luck.

All game changers master their game boards. They rewire their brains for dealing with the unexpected with the nerve to seek out novel or disruptive options … months or years ahead of everyone else on the game board.

---

How do you jump to new game boards and master them?

The way forward, the way to advance and not just maintain the status quo, takes wisdom, boldness, and ingenuity. Psychologists and neuro-economists have studied this from many perspectives and theories. As a practical application, it’s a new category that I call The Sagacity Code.

Sagacity is a periscope to the future. It’s an added sense. Sagacity enables you to see things that are otherwise out of sight for others.

Sagacity upgrades your guidance system. It takes Sagacity to see how the current game board and the clues for jumping to your next game board and win.

Status Quo Game boards

For example, I was working with a new COO who presented to the Board her achievements for first three months. The Chairman and CEO said, “Yeah, but it’s not going fast enough.” A bit disheartened, but alright maybe she could move a bit faster. At the next Board meeting, she reported that her team had doubled their production at marginal costs to the firm. The Chairman came back with, “Ok, but not good enough”. This went on for more than a year. Each meeting, she reported producing more and the Chairman saying, “Yeah, but it’s not going fast enough or it’s not good enough”

Overdelivery and massive production, but same dismissive response. What would you do in this situation? Explode in a career-altering fit? Submit a letter of resignation laced with resentment? Put up with it until you vested and retire out?

She asked all the smart people she knew what to do. She got the advice to reason with him. Unfortunately that’s just not how brains change. It’s a logical an unproductive interaction game that at best will produce a stalemate, frustration and resentment.

Her status quo-reinforcing game board told her to work harder, wow him, and clarify expectations. Only this didn’t work.

We started with an exploration of her game board. She learned that most rules of the game are hidden. She got how most of the attempted solutions were useless. They just resulted in more of the same.

She needed to jump to a new game board, one that allowed her to play to her strengths and win.

I recommended a preemptive strike, an action taken at 180-degrees of her past failed attempts: She would continue deliver big results. And in her next quarterly board meetings, turn to the Chairman and after presenting another quarter of massive production declarelet me state for the record that in a few key areas, we’re not going fast enough. And a few other areas, we’re not good enough.” So what actually happened, how did the Chairman respond? The Chairman said, “Good” and nothing else. The meeting just moved on. The issue was resolved. She was delighted with the immediate impact and how easy it was.

I use this case in teaching postgraduate courses in organizational change and leadership and corporate programs. My students or clients will say, “Yeah, but did that action change the Founder’s biases? Did it resolve the inequity of men and women?

I tell them no. It solved the COO’s problem. It was about regaining her power in the situation in an authentic and human way, without the heavy hand aggression or coercion. The task according to her was not to solve the bias and injustice. She knew this. She wanted to not be at the effect and still move forward rapidly. She described it as a transformation.

Her initial game board told her to work long and hard, deliver plenty, and expect appreciation in return. With a simple adjustment, she jumped to a new game board. It started with the clue her attempts to take reasonable approaches nonetheless put her in a defensive, one-down position. She saw the potential advantage to take preemptive action. She took the bat out of the Chairman’s hand and won the day.

---

40 million-dollar Revenue Bump in Less Than Two Months

I worked with a multi-billion-dollar publicly held data storage firm.

After working with this EVP of Sales for few months, he said…”I’m getting a lot of value from our work. Would be open to you working with one of my direct report, our VP of Enterprise Sales. He needs charm school to get his seat at the table. He shoots himself in the foot with reactive outbursts."

Soon after starting work with this VP, let’s call him John, the CEO met with both John and his boss. The CEO told John, “We need you to carry a bigger quota this quarter” already 4 weeks in.

Needless to say, this was unsettling news. How could he make his number and earn his bonus? This initially triggered a major upset … with alarm signals of unfair and powerlessness. John saw the CEO as a villain and himself as a victim.

John’s brain was hijacked by his amygdala and its fight, flight, freeze or feign mode. John couldn’t think.

First John had to regain control over his brain reactivity. We started with deep breaths, focusing on the exhale. Next, we took on the sense of helplessness with specific instruction in how to to detach him from the notion that he was a victim and come up with new viable options.

John was a masterful sales exec most of the time. He did not need sales training. As for charm school, he needed to resolve the reactive traps his brain triggered in facing disturbances. But it is the same reactive traps any game changer must contend with to be a winner.

We began discussing his current game board.

• What had changed?
• How does each company (in the value chain) win?
• What are the rules of the game?

We began a game analysis, using a strategic math to model how different scenarios could play out. This included gaming how a particular scenario would affect the brains of all players: the CEO, customers, trade partners and so on. We scenario-gamed business objectives of his company and those of his customers.

It was then we uncovered John’s blind spot: He felt that the responsibility was all on him to deliver substantially beyond his original quota. He had shut down his ingenuity circuits.

In challenging that notion, we realized that the CEO had a big stake in achieving this quota, perhaps many times bigger than John’s stake. John could ask the CEO to use his social network to immediately arrange high-level meetings at major customers.

In the past John would have simply gone along with the hijacking of his brain by its amygdala. He would have made small attempts, familiar actions that would have resulted in a mediocre outcome.

Instead, he leveraged his CEO’s connections with customers and produced 300,000 units in new sales with special support agreements. He contribution enabled his company to hit its number.

He used a neurostrategy of framing the extra inventory as an actual advantage for his customer. He emphasized share growth and increased top line growth of customers. John offset their concerns about an inventory buildup with a commitment to a special demand-generation promotion that would burn off these larger customer inventories—which customers loved and produced good successes.

In the process, John developed his executive command presence and turned on the charm with his fellow execs. Behind the scenes in our one-on-one sessions, John and I worked on his strategies, neurostories, and interactions for influencing everyone on his game board. He accomplished the unexpected—what most would call a Hail Mary Pass—with $40 million in incremental revenue with only two months left in the quarter.

John’s boss thought I had a done a good job in charm school, polishing John to be ready to take his seat at the exec table. But John directly attributed working with the Sagacity Code tools to his breakthrough success.

Sagacity is penetrating insight and sound judgment to turn everything to your best possible advantage.

The Sagacity Code not only enables you to guard against the designs of others, it equips you to jump to a new game board and win.

How is jumping to new gameboard more than just a visualization skill?

When you have to get it right and get it done in compressed high-stakes situations, dragon-speak for status quo thinking is especially seductive.

We are not talking about dotting your i’s and crossing your t’s getting it right, that’s making it correct.

We are talking about doing the right thing, making the right choices as a leader with broad accountabilities and serious consequences if you get it right or not.

Your brain will adhere to the currency of the familiar. It wants to avoid risk and regret of taking a wrong turn or appearing foolish.

But what I’m talking about is something far deeper in the brain.

To understand how the brain jumps to a new game board and win, and beyond mere motivation or pop psychology, we take a powerful cue from what’s known as the General Theory of Change.

This was a radical breakthrough that shook up mathematics, sociology, psychology, and cultural anthropology.

Without geeking out here, this theory holds that there are two categories of change … first-order and second-order changes.

Most of executive coaching, training, and consulting deals with first-order changes of making temporary unstable situations more stable; fixing breakdowns without adding any new value.

For example, a flat tire won’t go away until you fix it. When you do, then it is back to normal: a first-order change. Managers focus on first-order changes. All good and needed. Delivering consistently on time makes a big difference. First-order changes keep the trains running on time.

Second-order changes take into consider the same situation, but with new, often radical or surprising perspective.

I wrote a book on this called The Advantage-Makers: How Exceptional Leaders Win by Creating Opportunities Others Don't.

Using our tire metaphor, an airless and unpuncturable tire would represent a second-order solution.

Second-order changes enable you see what’s hiding in plain sight, that everyone else misses.

For example, the ability to look at a competitive market, sales pipeline, or vexing people problems through the lens of game boards can set up your choice to change the entire game into your favor. The iconoclasts and serial disruptors (Jobs, Gates, Disney, Edison) mastered second-order changes, using the behavioral landscapes of innovation, entrepreneurship, and disruption.

There’s also a corollary to this theory of change.

If you use first-order strategies to solve second-order problems, you make things worse. Persisting in what you know will maintain the problem.

This will result in a blind spot resistance to changing the game, all without realizing it, while others zip by you in their driverless car.

With all that’s happening in the world, with all the change and sudden shifts on the game board, most execs will become blind-sighted from their winning move, how to jump to their next game board. Unfortunately their lens is too limited and will revert to what they know: working harder.

You need something comparable to night-vision goggles, to see what daytime vision can’t, or you’ll never see what you are up against. Without a bold, new lens to see your current game board and its clues about how to jump to a different game board, you will persist with what you know...all with the added risk of just making it worse with another first-order change.

What makes jumping to a new game board so difficult to accomplish?

The noise is deafening. At critical moments the ability to separate the noise from the signal becomes paramount.

Disruption by a blitzscaling upstart can change your game board in an instant.

While thrilling for game changers who engage, it is not easy. In fact it’s downright hard. And knowing how the best of the best made their jumps becomes essential in understanding your roadmap.

There are plenty of books and seminars on improving your decision-making, problem solving and influence skills.

Many try to help with emotional intelligence, with coaching, and communication protocols. And these are all necessary but insufficient for making deliberate and gamed-out second-order changes.

To really know how to change the game, to shift game board in your favor, requires learning from someone who can apply insight and patterns of neuroscience, structural game dynamics, and social influence to the real-time decisions on a particular executive’s behavioral landscape, game board.

Neurostrategy is based upon my 35 years of research into game changers, their sense-making guidance systems, how their brains make decisions, embolden action, and influence others. Very few practitioners today know how to find the signals or clues of second-order changes.

That’s my wheelhouse, defeating the noisy dragon of criticism, mediocrity and the familiar, and creating a clear signal for the new game and game board.

Brain Shift

As a practicing neurostrategist, I bring trained outside eyes and a way to reset your guidance system. We call this a brain shift.

In 1:1 and team sessions, we begin with whiteboard discussions and debates about the advancing and derailing actions of leadership and the company.

We model the velocity and magnitude of a range of options for the present, with the future in mind, challenging the biases of status quo and reactive tendencies as they might emerge.

As we commit to a winning course of action, we create persuasive, vivid neuro-stories.

Neuro-stories become your way to persuade others to see what others do not see and to do what others say can’t be done.

Neuro-stories talk to both the brain’s inner accountant and the six-year-old that plays big in your imagination.

What should interested execs know about you and your company?

I work with A-level players who also insist on getting the most out of everything that they have.

My aspiration, and what I’m the best at, is creating elegant game-changing tools. By elegant I mean insightful small-moves for big gains.

I love finding solutions to vexing people problems. I love helping people to be the best they can be and to produce huge wins in companies and individual careers.

My career as a neurostrategist started on what others have called the mean streets of the Lower East Side of NYC, the Bowery.

I had a bookie father and a daily diet of calculated, life-or-death bets.

He always taught me to do the right thing, which today informs my commitment to getting it right, every time, especially under tremendous stress with tons of distractions and uncertainty.

While getting it right is a core life lesson for me, I actually hate, just hate giving the wrong advice.

It’s deeply ingrained in me to protect those I care about, who can get hurt if I give them anything less than my best.

When it comes to elegant solutions I do not wobble. I am relentless in creating something small that produces multiplicative results.

For 35 years, my company, Steven Feinberg Inc., has provided game-changing leadership and team programs.

My clients range from the Fortune 1 to leading Silicon Valley firms and high growth-potential startups. A few of my high-profile clients include Google, Oracle, LinkedIn, and Visa with the rest I’m not at liberty to divulge.

I understand you work with astronauts. Any good anecdotes?

I’ve been speaking about elite executive performers under high-stakes pressures to get it right and get it done with how to deal with common blind spots.

Astronauts are paragons of this. We know that the original astronauts were referred to as having the Right Stuff.

That’s also the non-arguable prototype of game changers: Go where no one has gone before.

One of my clients is an astronaut. He piloted the Space Shuttle Endeavor twice. I discussed with him Apollo 13, the near disaster in space.

It was an amazing feat of nerve, ingenuity, the highest level of sense making by both the crew and mission control to bring the astronauts safely home.

The Commander of Apollo 13, Jim Lovell, was the backup to Neil Armstrong (who later took the first step on the moon). We remember Armstrong from his epic proclamation, “One small step for man, one giant step for mankind.”

At a small celebration of the space program’s monumental triumph, standing in his backyard, Lovell said something that reveals the heart of game changers. Gazing up at the brightly lit moon, he lifted his hand and held his thumb up to cover the moon from his eyes, thinking about Armstrong and the extraordinary feat by NASA.

Lovell said, “From now on we’ll live in the world when man has walked on the moon.” And then he uttered, the words of every game changer, “It’s not a miracle. We decided to go.”

So, just. Decide. To. Go. 

You see, that’s how real creation works.

Any last comments?

I don’t work with everyone. I am now at the point where I am really selective about what I work on and with whom I work.

I’ve been fortunate and had lot of big wins. So I’m careful with my best-kept secret reputation.

I work with leaders who put everything on the table, including themselves, who learn something everyday and from nearly everybody.

I work with leaders who are just flat-out curious about the world and how they shape it.

If anyone reading or listening to this realizes that you are in a fight with a triple-headed dragon of criticism, mediocrity and the familiar…that you’re not moving fast enough and sense there is better way…then it may be good to have a more in-depth confidential conversation.

Oh, I should mention that if wanted to know more about what you heard today, you might like my first book, The Advantage-Makers: How Exceptional Leaders Win by Creating Opportunities Others Don't