Renowned Neuroscientist, Founder & CEO of Lab of Misfits and Ripple
Beau Lotto: Biography at a Glance
- Dr. Beau Lotto is a world-famous neuroscientist who motivates audiences by using the principles of neuroscience to understand personal evolution.
- Lotto provides the detailed steps to achieve a successful culture where teams are open to change and growth - and thrive as a result.
- Weaving in ideas from technology, art, fashion, music, and performance, Beau masterfully delivers his subject matter in a friendly, entertaining style that captivates audiences.
- Beau leaves audiences with ideas that create a more invigorating, inventive, and evocable company culture as well as more meaningful, post-transactional customer relationships.
- He’s been electrifying crowds for over 30 years, including a three-time gig as a mainstage TED-talk speaker, challenging his audiences’ perceptions about change.
- Beau is also the founder and CEO of two companies – Lab of Misfits, the world’s first neuro-design studio, and Ripple, which holds several highly influential patents in Augmented Reality (AR).
- He has earned a world-class reputation as a speaker, masterclass leader, and big-league corporate consultant in the areas of leadership, perception, neuroscience, and complex adaptive systems.
- Beua's message is an ideal conference kick-off – providing powerful, positive, and creative context that sets a tone for the content and collaboration that follow.
Videos
Biography
World-famous neuroscientist, Dr. Beau Lotto, will prepare and super-motivate your audience by using the principles of neuroscience (yes, you read that right). When you step back and consider the Big Picture, the strategy makes sense. We all know the world is changing fast — that’s a given. The challenge is to adapt…or die. What you need is a speaker who will show your audience how to thrive in the face of change. Beau gives your attendees, in practical plain talk, the neuroscience behind personal evolution. He provides the detailed steps to achieve a successful culture where your audience can empower evolvability and thrive as a result.
Beau’s megamix is more than just science, however; he weaves in ideas from technology, art, fashion, music, and performance. It’s the kind of subject matter, delivered in a friendly, entertaining style, that turns heads.
The result for you: usable ideas that create a more invigorating, inventive, and evocable company culture. As well, this could be your first step in creating more meaningful, post-transactional customer relationships. Think of his gift to your audience as insight backed by science.
Beau’s keynote visit is more than just another indistinguishable inspirational speaker yelling, “You can do it!” Much more. Here, you get a fact-based return on investment. Don’t let Beau’s science background give you pause – his talks are always common-sense, and peppered with humor, audience participation, and actionable principles that audiences can apply in their professional lives.
Beau, a renowned audience arouser, is a leading expert in perception, neuroscience, and complex adaptive systems. He’s helped navigate brands like Cirque du Soleil, Microsoft, and L’oreal to even greater successes. In corporate circles as well as in the scientific community, Beau is well-known and well-respected; he’s earned a world-class reputation as a speaker, masterclass leader, and big-league corporate consultant.
He’s been electrifying crowds for over 30 years, including a three-time gig as a mainstage TED-talk speaker. How? By challenging his audiences’ perceptions about change, getting them to look past their biases, and sparking ideas about how to create a more evolved, can-do organization.
“The biggest mistake we can make in uncertain times is to think we know.”
Topics
Leadership
What makes a good leader? When asked this question of a diverse audience, I’ll receive many different possible qualities that are ‘essential’. And yet, there are only three such descriptions that correlate with the success of a company. What are they and why do they matter?
Here we will address these questions from the perspective of behavioral neuroscience, and consider a new answer: the quality of a leader is defined by how they lead others into uncertainty.
Risk/Uncertainty
One of the most dangerous things one can experience in life is doubt. During evolution, if your ancestors weren’t sure whether that ‘thing over there’ was a predator, well … it was too late for them. Thus, we hate doubt … and that’s usually a good idea (throughout evolutionary history).
We are genetically programmed to do so: Sea-sickness, and indeed most of our mental health problems are direct manifestations of our fear. The deep irony, however, is that nothing interesting begins without it. So taking the risk to step into uncertainty is an essential aspect of adaptation, which we know is at the root of success in all natural systems. What’s more, nature also tells us when it’s best to risk uncertainty. So how to deal with uncertainty is the fundamental problem that your brain evolved to solve. Here we discuss in a highly experiential way how and why everything is uncertain, and nature’s solution to it.
Adapt or Die
The future is unknown. It always has been and always will be. Whether technological innovation, wars, climate change, voting … or a pandemic, every decision an organisation and leader makes is, in one way or another, directly related to uncertainty.
In nature, the most successful systems do not just adapt, they are adaptable. Indeed, adaptability is the ‘skill’ most sought by leaders and organisations. To adapt requires stepping into uncertainty. Adapting to uncertainty is born out of a way of being … a practice … that one engages in every day at work, at home with one’s children, with one’s partner, friends, and with the cashier in the grocery store.
Only by understanding how and why you see what you do can you adapt to and lead others into uncertainty. Becoming perceptually intelligent in conflict enables leaders and their teams and organisations to succeed when others fail.
Change
There is no inherent value in change. Whether change is good or bad is – like everything else in life – context-dependent. Here, using principles in behavioral and perceptual neuroscience, we’ll explore what lives at the heart of change: why it’s often essential for success but equally the most feared of human activities. Indeed, to ask ‘why?’ is historically the most dangerous thing you can do. Hence, organizations, businesses, religions, and even our education systems are designed to reduce question-asking. And yet all revolutions (and revelations) begin with a joke (“you mean it could be different from this?”).
See how and why questions and metaphors are mediators of change; what makes a good question; and how change – when properly pursued – has no direction or goal. This means change is personal and – when properly considered – inevitable.
How To See New Meaning In Data
There is no inherent value in any piece of information! Data is meaningless. Why? This is because the brain deals with meaning and not information since information doesn’t tell you what to do. In fact, THE fundamental challenge that the brain evolved to solve is to take meaningless data and make it meaningful. This is true even at the most basic level of our senses: seeing light, which is why we never see the world in any direct sense. Instead what we see is the meaning of information grounded in our personal, cultural, and evolutionary histories. And it’s the historical meaning of stuff that we literally see, experience, and know (not the stuff itself).
Here we’ll explore – and experience – how to see new meaning in data that has always been there, but remains hidden. The result will be an understanding of the principles by which the brain makes the meaningless meaningful.
