Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain

Evan LaPointe, founder of CORE Sciences and a four-time founder (including Satellite, acquired by Adobe), explains how brain systems, personality, and self-awareness shape how people think, influence others, and work together. The conversation covers practical applications for meetings, strategy and vision, relationships, team culture ("habitat"), and focus.

01Key learnings

• Send questions to the right mental mode: most people over-rely on fast, recall-based thinking, so deliberately route problems to open-minded, creative, or humanistic modes to get better answers.
• Start meetings with priming, stating the context, shared goal, and guiding principles before jumping into decisions; mismatched principles cause most fights.
• Know your own personality and openness level, then be vulnerable with your team about how you naturally react to abstract vision and ask for translation or partners who are strong there.
• Choose an influence style that fits your personality (e.g., back-channeling, storytelling, devil's advocate) and a speed (slow, moderate, or fast), using cognitive dissonance questions for fast influence.
• Build relationships by first asking what kind of experience you are to others, then work on trust, which Evan describes as reliability and risk, and ability; experience matters most.
• Reverse-engineer outcomes and gain situational awareness by talking directly to customers, so your decisions reflect the real conditions people operate in.
• Build culture on logical deduction rather than inspirational mission statements: define the specific value your team creates for people, and let that value set standards and permissions.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.