Caspar Berry

Risk and Decision Making is the first speech I wrote, it looks at what a decision actually is, how decision making happens and asks how well we make them, or whether we could make them better.

While the subject of decision making is unimaginably vast and profound, it is important that each speech has a kind of key message and the principal tenet of this one is that all decisions are essentially investment decisions and that all of us as decision makers are essentially investors every moment of every day.

Naturally most of our investments are not financial but take many different forms; money is just one of many limited resources that we are always allocating in a world of uncertainty, the most profound, of course, being our precious time.

Essentially then, I’m trying to show people how the process of decision making is essentially the process of trying to maximise the returns they make on their investments. In life these might be better relationships and quality of life. In business it is all about efficiency, productivity, doing more with less and, in a literal sense,return on investment.

This sounds complicated but it’s not – after all we all do it hundreds of times every single day!

In order to be great decision makers – or investors – we need to understand the brilliance, but also the limitations and flaws, of our innate judgement and decision making mechanism. Most notable among these is our emotional fear of failure. It is this which very often stops us from taking opportunities with high overall returns and which must therefore be conquered.

The speech identifies and defines the origins of fear of failure and concludes by identifying how we embrace this fear in order to motivate us to make more courageous and more effective decisions. It uses poker as a metaphor for decision making in order to demonstrate how to manage risk, stay safe and do more with few resources in everything we do.

Suitable For: People in any organisation who have to make any meaningful decision; who have to lead and take responsibility and motivate others. People involved in finance will understand the basic learning but even then this is the first time for many that they have applied such decision making theory to all aspects of their professional and personal lives.

Great at the beginning, after lunch or end of a day. Works in 30/45/60/90 minute and workshop/seminar form.

My speech on luck asks what exactly is luck and is this coming year going to be a lucky or unlucky year for you and your organisation? As a professional poker player, you need to understand what luck is otherwise you’ll go insane. But there cannot be many things in our life that we understand less! Which is crazy when you think about it, especially when luck is going to dictate a greater part of the quality of our lives in the short term.

Anyone reading that and dismissing it needs to give careful thought to how easily they could have been born into a part of the world where the vast majority of the population can only dream of our freedoms, our comforts and our academic and professional opportunities.

Some people say “you make your own luck” but by this reasoning has the disabled child made their “bad luck”? How about the war widow or the cancer patient who never smoked or drank a drop?

Actually understanding what luck is and how it works creates a powerful and effective message with profound implications for how we approach life and how lucky we feel in our lives. This is why I wrote my speech on luck.

Referencing a very broad range of subject areas – from the lottery to the holocaust – this speech on luck motivates people to change the focus of their thinking away from that which is disempowering towards that which is positive, proactive and powerful. Why? Because luck – when you think about it – is simply that which you cannot control.

The weather on your wedding day; the turn of a card; the price of oil; overall GDP and consumer demand. These are things we can’t do much about so there’s no point moaning about them!

Effective people – as Dr Covey tells us in his incredible “The Seven Habits of highly Effective People” – begins with the habit of being proactive: that is focussing on what we can control. This is really what people mean by “making their own luck”. You can’t really make your luck when luck itself is that which you cannot control, but you can choose your response to luck and give the illusion of being lucky simply by being resolute, disciplined and creative.

This speech on luck is suitable For: Large teams of people of any level in any organisation who need rousing and lifting in difficult times. Works in 30/45/60 minute and longer seminar format.

Despite not having a background in product development, the inherent nature of my material makes me one of a growing number of innovation speakers working all over the world today.

In a world of ever-accelerating change, innovation and adaptation are becoming increasingly important to every business on the planet. Gone are the days where you found a winning formula and then repeated it for as long as possible. Why? Because now the forces of change will sweep you away before you’ve really capitalised fully on your idea.

Look at the Silicon Valley culture where great ideas are broken and reformed almost as soon as they have achieved any kind of permanence and investment is constantly being made for the long term. Because innovation IS now risk management. It’s the way in which you insulate your organisation against the forces of extinction and create resilience.

All innovation speakers propagate the same basic message: you have to learn how to change, and fast. But only a few innovation speakers have a unique and compelling metaphor to drive it home. Because what does it take to innovate successfully? Literally hundreds of failures along the way…

Like a poker player, you need to be prepared to lose in the short term in order to succeed in the final analysis, when it counts the most. Thus, using the metaphors of poker and Darwinian evolution, I show that most brilliant systems of innovation and adaptation are prepared to fail millions of times in order to survive – literally. Mutations are nothing more than errors and mistakes in the system, which ultimately unwittingly establish competitive advantage through the law of large numbers.

A poker player works hard at his or her play and trusts that in the long run their edge will make good. In order to do that though, they almost have to create a mental culture which is internally aligned with itself. One which accepts that the process is not going to be easy day-to-day. Good innovation speakers emphasise the need for this pain because, in a world of continual change, the companies who embrace this philosophy and create similar internal alignment will be best placed to come through the uncertainty ahead.

Suitable For: Small or large teams in organisations who are new to innovation or used to innovating as part of what they do but want new and challenging perspectives on it to galvanise and motivate. Works in 30/45/60/90 minute and seminar form.

The world is awash with leadership training. Everyone has their own 3/7/64 habits and qualities of great leaders… it’s difficult to know whom to subscribe to!

I think the fact is that no subject as individual as leadership can be reduced to any number of finite habits, no matter how big or small. It’s always going to be a personal thing. Some of the greatest leaders led with an iron hand, others with the velvet glove. Increasingly it’s also a fluid concept with traits that may have been advantageous in the 1940s looking increasingly anachronistic now.

Ultimately then, all that any leadership training can do is to view such a complex subject through its own unique lens and try and draw out that which will make the delegate or listener better by their own criteria. Indeed all that any training of any kind can ultimately do is try and make someone better at whatever it is that they’re training in.

As I define it then, great leadership is about courage. Great leaders are brave in the decisions that they make. They take a lead; they make a stand and are even prepared to sacrifice themselves for the good of the group and what is right.

This speech looks at what courage and bravery are and uses material like the 7/7 testimonies (that is the extraordinary selflessness of a few random, normal people caught up in a disaster) to ask whether we all have courage within us and whether leadership is the product of circumstance or birth.It draws on cutting-edge research in psychology and neurology and asks to what extent we’re prisoners of our own genetics and chemistry and to what extent we shape our own destiny. Like all of my speeches and training sessions, my approach to leadership training is that it should focus on success in the long term and give practical methods for balancing this with short term demands.

Like all the best group work, the best leadership training should act in an emotional and rational way on the audience, giving them both the tools for success but also the desire to use them. Even senior people need emotional and energy boosts, especially if the rest of your agenda is process- and technically-minded.

Suitable For: Groups of leaders who want to be challenged, stimulated and moved to leave their comfort zone. Works in 30/45/60 minute forms.

Risk and uncertainty have suddenly become sexy haven’t they? A two pronged attack by popular books like Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink on the one hand and a top-down battering by the forces of economic uncertainty on the other have got us all thinking about how risk and uncertainty dominate our lives.

This is interesting to me because when I started working professionally as a keynote speaker many years ago, I would say that the majority of the people I spoke to didn’t believe that their lives were particularly uncertain at all. Perhaps it took the realisation that the money in their current accounts were not actually 100% safe to wake some people up from this slumber.

Indeed, if there is going to be a positive take-away from this potential lost decade it may be the understanding that uncertainty actually dominates every aspect of our lives – all the time! So the best thing we can do is start understanding how it works and what that means for the way we make decisions in business and life.

This speech identifies the source of risk and uncertainty in the fabric of the universe before looking at its effect on us all economically, psychologically and culturally.

It takes the audience on a journey through the butterflies and black swans of chaos before concluding that a certain world would be a boring one! Thus, it is the way in which we rise to the challenge of the unknown and embrace risk and uncertainty that defines who we are.

Along the way it touches on the real truth of risk management – that uncertainty and risk will eventually take their toll on us all. Everything will end at some point so ultimately it’s a question not of promising immortality, but being realistic about this and its implications.

Suitable For: People with some knowledge of risk, particularly in finance and similar, who want a thought-provoking opening or close to their day/session. The speech is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally impactful for those who are already interested in the subject but it is also in many ways, my most personal and emotional speech with the ambition of moving and rousing an audience in the middle of hard times. Works in 30/45/50 minute forms.

Judgement and intuition are obviously partly the products of time, for which there is no substitute. But all learning can be accelerated and understanding exactly what judgement and intuition are is the first step to perfecting their use.

So what exactly are intuition and judgement? We use the terms a lot without actually thinking about what they mean.Watching the film above will go some of the way to explaining the answer to that big question. Our judgements are the basis of the decisions that we make. “I trust this person”, for example, is a judgement based on your experience of them. Upon the basis of such a judgement you might make a decision to invest time or energy or money into your relationship with them.

But where exactly did that judgement come from? Clearly it wasn’t random. But neither was it necessarily something that you can describe exactly. It might just be something of a feeling that you have after four years of knowing them, or even – be honest – just four minutes!

This is where intuition comes in. For judgements – the basis of our investment calculations – are rarely just the products of our conscious minds.

More often, they are the product of the sum total of our experience, much of which we can’t remember exactly.

Very often – whisper it quietly – we have feelings upon which we base crucial decisions. But there is nothing wrong with this. Indeed, I like to show people the power of their intuition and the value in trusting and acting on it once it has been educated and challenged.

The key is to understand when judgement and intuition should be trusted. And when it’s wiser to check and challenge them carely and consciously before making a final decision.

This presentation on judgement and intuition is suitable for decision makers and those who want to be both intellectually stimulated and moved to change. Crucially, like all my speeches, it shows us how we can make better decisions in the future, through anecdote and fact.

It is perfect for the body of any day’s agenda in which people are thinking about why they do what they do and how they can do it better. Works in 30/45/60 minute forms.

As a speaker on irrationality I obviously owe a great debt to Dan Ariely who – along with other great thinkers such as Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky – have done a huge amount to research and popularise this subject.

As a poker player and not someone who has spent my life academically studying this subject, I cannot compete with these titans of economics and psychology. But I see my job as a speaker on irrationality, NOT as a pioneer in the same way but as a champion, evangelist and disseminator of such theories.

So how irrational are we as human beings and how can any speaker on irrationality help us make better decisions?

Well, have think about this: we’re scared of flying when the most dangerous part of any flight is the car journey to the airport, and we’re all terrified of terrorist attack when we’re 1000 times more likely to die of stroke.

In business we place huge emotional emphasis onto sunk costs that we’ll never get back when we should be thinking more rationally about the future – because it’s here that the results of our decisions are actually going to play out.

None of which is to say that one 60 minute speech is going to rid us of all such biases! And neither, if I’m totally honest, do I think it should. There is a tendency of some of the thinking and literature on this subject to hold up a completely unrealistic rational model as the perfect decision making mechanism which is to deny the inherent beauty of human beings – that is, their capacity for emotion!

My contribution to this subject is the coining of the term “rational-emotional” decision making,, and as a speaker on irrationality I have tried to popularise this to a broad audience worldwide. I hold that many of the decisions we make are ultimately going to come down to personal preference over and above objective truth. Indeed – to get a little technical for a moment – that is precisely the way we maximise our own utility expectations.

What all of this means, ultimately, is that the best thing we can do is BE AWARE of how irrational we are and constantly ask ourselves how well it serves us. I believe that the most meaningful thing that any team can do is ultimately to TALK about these things with a calibrated language, and that as a speaker on irrationality the best thing I can do is start that conversation.

Works in 30/45/60 minute forms.

Effective motivation and persuasion techniques are crucial in business today. From motivating our sales team to effectively persuading customers and clients to buy and act in a certain way… their importance can barely be overstated.

Originally, I was asked to speak – as a motivational speaker – about the way we motivate ourselves as individuals. Increasingly, however, I am being asked to speak at conferences to sales and management teams about the way we use these very same skills in the motivation and persuasion of others. So this speech is about why we do what we do, but specifically aimed at people who have to motivate and influence others.

The fact is that people are irrational. That’s not news, we’ve kind of known that for a long time. But the precise ways in which we are irrational are not just surprising, they are often quite mind blowing in their implications:

The addition of mints or mint chocolates to the bill in a restaurant increases the size of the tip by more than 10%. Canned laughter on a comedy makes us all more inclined to laugh. People are much much more confident of an election candidate’s chances of winning after voting for them than beforehand…

Another example of just how irrational people can be is that people have much less idea of how much something should actually cost than we previously thought! Consequently,  they are prepared to pay much much more for something than traditional laws of supply and demand would otherwise dictate.

What does this mean? Well the old laws of negotiation are not to be the first person to name a price. But the new laws of motivation and persuasion are turning all that on its head. Better to name a price that defines the value of the product than allow the other party to establish the anchor at a lower level from which you then have to work up!

Once you understand HOW and WHY someone is making their decisions, it becomes so much easier – in both poker and business – to influence them to make different ones!

My speeches on motivation and persuasion are suitable for anyone who has to motivate others, from leaders to sales people. It allows insight into powerful persuasion techniques and also creates a rousing beginning and end to a day. Works in 30/45/60 minute forms.

A distilled, punchy, version of the daytime keynote (with more “laffs”) this is one of Caspar’s specialties and constitutes about 30% of his work. This is a specific kind of after-dinner presentation in that it has a business-focused message but is delivered in a visual, polished and very funny way. It is most suited to relatively senior teams who want something acceptable to all without sacrificing the humour necessary for a successful after-dinner presentation. It is also suitable for many black tie events but not “Sportsman’s Dinners”.

N.B. Caspar does still use the photos in his powerpoint deck for his after-dinner which makes this technically unsuited to some venues and audiences.

Suitable for audiences of 10 or 10,000 the speech works best opening or closing a conference (opening people’s minds or sending them away on a high). It is also used to fill the difficult “after-lunch” slot with lots of energy!

Under 45 minutes the speech has very little interaction although above 60 (and certainly above 90) audience participation and exercises are important and incorporated abundantly. Can be delivered with or without Q and A

The speech uses a prominent visual presentation with dozens of funny photos that illustrate the point being made, something which makes is especially suited to international audiences. It is also suitable for sales teams and more junior groups who need to be “motivated” to push through difficult times.

As a trained facilitator, Caspar is very comfortable delivering a longer interactive session like this – suitable for groups of between 4 and about 100 – either instead of or in addition to a keynote speech.

More so than the shorter formats, this session tends to work best when delivered to relatively senior teams or those who have “decision making status” within an organization or partners of professional services firms. It is even more effective when delivered to mixed groups where different strata of an organization can talk to – and learn – from each other.

About 40% of Caspar’s work still involves actually playing poker either within or – in the vast majority of cases – after the presentation itself. Caspar also has a team who has worked with him for 10 years doing this for over 20,000 people. This can be brilliant fun for all involved but it must be discussed in advance as it can be logistically difficult.