The Mind Behind the Machine

Senior leadership programme

Have you ever checked a transcript and found a colleague said something quite different from what you could have sworn you heard? Quoted a number with total confidence in a meeting — then discovered it was from a different report entirely? Gone back to a contract to find a clause you'd read twice during negotiation, only to discover it was never there?

These are all common human mistakes. And the typed reports, transcripts, contracts are systems and processes we have developed to mitigate our imperfect memory, assumptions, second guesses, inference.

Your brain — a pattern-recognition system refined over millions of years — doesn't process the world as it is. It processes the world as it expects it to be. It fills gaps, merges data points, closes loops that conversations left open, and builds confident narratives from incomplete information. It scores a deeper track during moments of stress, anxiety, high emotion, whilst often forgetting the regular and mundane. As in the 278th commute home.

Most of the time, this is a superpower. Occasionally, it's a disaster.

AI systems work the same way. And fail for often analogous reasons. These are the artefacts of probabilistic neural networks such as LLMs. They contrast dramatically with the strengths and weaknesses of the deterministic IT systems we are more used to working with.

The Mind Behind the Machine is a programme built on a simple premise: you cannot make good decisions about artificial intelligence until you understand natural intelligence. The biases that shape how humans think are the same biases that shape how AI fails — and how leaders misjudge both.

What Participants Gain

  • •The Mind-Machine Map - a proprietary framework mapping five cognitive biases to five AI failure modes, and the strategic implications for any organisation deploying AI
  • •A deep understanding of how AI systems process information - grounded in the same cognitive science that explains human perception, memory and decision-making
  • •A practical decision framework for evaluating AI opportunities, identifying where human judgement must remain, and avoiding the mistakes that destroy AI ROI
  • •Insights from original research synthesising the world’s leading AI thinkers - Amodei, Hassabis, Altman, Hinton, LeCun and others
  • •A peer network of senior leaders navigating the same decisions

Format

Keynote

60-90 minutes

A distinctive address for conferences, board away-days and leadership events. Not another AI trends talk - a genuinely different lens on the most important technology of our era.

Executive Workshop

Half-day or full-day

An immersive working session for senior leadership teams. Maximum 25 participants. Interactive, Chatham House Rule, designed to change how your team thinks about AI decisions.

Private Programme

Bespoke, multi-session

A deep engagement built around your organisation’s specific AI challenges. Multiple sessions with interim work and direct access to the programme director. For organisations serious about building lasting AI capability at the leadership level.

Who This Is For

This programme is designed for decision-makers, not technologists:

  • •CEOs, board members and C-suite executives making strategic AI decisions
  • •PE and VC investors evaluating AI-driven deal flow and portfolio value creation
  • •Heads of strategy and transformation leading AI adoption programmes
  • •Conference organisers seeking a keynote that goes deeper than the usual AI hype

This is not a technical AI course. It is a thinking programme - for leaders who need to make better decisions about AI, not build the models themselves.

Programme Director

Led by Elliot Ronald. Two decades of strategy consulting for FTSE 100, PE and sovereign wealth clients. Active frontier technology investor. Someone who can speak fluently to both the cognitive science behind intelligence and the commercial reality of deploying AI at enterprise scale. Experimental psychology at Oxford (neural networks and cognitive rule-learning).

Enquire

Places are limited and allocated on the basis of seniority and relevance.