Better Decision-Making Outcomes Under Pressure — Harness Neuroscience + AI

Running a small or mid-sized business means making consequential decisions constantly — sometimes with incomplete information, no precedent, or corporate playbook, and the decision can be yours, alone.

This interactive session instantly reveals your decision-making patterns and explains why even experienced leaders make predictable, costly decisions under stress.

This session pairs the neuroscience behind how business leaders actually make decisions with the emerging discipline of prompt engineering to provide two tools to improve the business outcomes of their decisions.

Great decisions start with human judgment — and get sharper with the right AI prompt. Because AI can crunch the data — it still can't read the room. The nuance, the relationships, the trust calls — that's still on you."

Session 1: A guided, hands-on exercise that instantly reveals your decision-making patterns

In this interactive keynote, neuroscientist and researcher Lorne Epstein explores how the brain actually responds to risk, pressure, ambiguity, and complexity — and why even experienced leaders make predictable, costly mistakes under stress.

This isn't a lecture: you'll work through real business scenarios, hands-on exercises, and self-assessment tools that reveal your own decision-making patterns in the moment.

Includes a workbookdesigned for senior leadership teams navigating complexity, risk, and rapid change. Workshop exercises:

• Examine how decisions break down under pressure.
• Build skills that improve judgment, speed, and outcomes.

Grounded in neuroscience and established research on judgment and decision-making, the tools are designed for immediate application in leadership, strategy, and team contexts.

What you'll walk away with:

• A clear picture of your own decision-making tendencies — and where they break down under pressure

• The NeuroDecide™ framework: four traits that predict decision quality:

• Risk Appetite
• Ambiguity Tolerance
• Cognitive Flexibility
• Impulse Control

• Practical tools you can apply immediately to real decisions, like:

• Hiring
• Pricing
• Partnerships
• Growth bets

• A shared language for talking through tough calls with your team

Session 2: AI Prompt Engineering - the art of shaping

Prompt engineering is the practice of shaping what you tell an AI so it gives you the answer you actually need. Language models generate responses by predicting the most plausible continuation of the text they're given — a vague prompt leaves that prediction wide open, so the model guesses toward a generic, average answer. A well-built prompt narrows that space: stating the goal, audience, format, and constraints up front removes ambiguity and steers the model toward relevance instead of guesswork.

A few things consistently help: giving the model a role or frame, providing examples of the output you want, and asking it to reason step-by-step before concluding — which surfaces its logic instead of letting it skip straight to a guess. Treating prompting as iterative, refining based on what the first answer got wrong, usually beats trying to nail it in one try.

The payoff: better prompts reduce confidently-wrong answers and produce sharper, more useful output. Same model, same question — the gap between a shallow answer and a genuinely useful one is almost entirely in how it's asked.

About the keynote speaker, Lorne Epstein, SHRM-SCP, MSOD

Lorne Epstein, SHRM-SCP, MSOD, is a neuroscientist, researcher, and keynote speaker who consults with senior leaders on improving decision-making outcomes. His research, conducted at George Mason University, examines how neurotransmitter activity shapes individual and team decision-making under uncertainty. Lorne is the creator of NeuroDecide™, a neuroscience-based assessment used with CEO peer groups, corporations, and leadership teams. He has been quoted in Forbes and The Christian Science Monitor, and has led experiential workshops since 1993 for CEO peer advisory groups, corporations, law firms, universities, and government agencies — including more than 150 SHRM chapters and 25+ state and national SHRM conferences.

This event is empowered by these sponsors:

• M&T Bank
• LEITRIM Commercial Real Estate Advisors
• Douglas Commercial

About TAB TALKS Business Leader Speaker Series

Because TAB is synonymous with assisting leaders to move from knowledge sharing to knowledge application, each year, The Alternative Board | TAB BWI hosts Business Leader Speaker Series for our members, sponsors, partners and prospects on crucial topics that impact growth, profitability and leadership.

Our keynote speakers engage the audience which includes CEO’s / Business Owners / Principals of established small to mid-market companies. These inspiring, high quality speakers present topics relevant to our business community.

Past Speakers Series subjects included panels on AI, Building Business Value to Maximize Exit, Story Brand Marketing, Leadership DNA and Building a Resilient Business.

About TAB BWI

TAB BWI is the largest business owner peer advisory organization in the metro Baltimore Washington corridor and has been successfully serving the business community for nearly 20 years.

Our team advises small to mid-market business leaders throughout the Baltimore /Washington region, helping them build strategic visions and action plans to grow and sustain successful companies.

How do we measure success? In the past 33 months, TAB has played an important role in assisting 13 owners successfully exit their businesses.TAB's peer advisory board meetings and one-to-one executive coaching brings together 80 business leaders from diverse industries to leverage experience, generate creative ideas, analyze key data and develop practical solutions to make better decisions driving sales and profits.

TAB-BWI creates a powerful network for advice and support for independent business owners.TAB builds on the power of the peer board model by providing a business suite of services including Next Generation multi-level management and leadership training, Blueprint business planning tools, and StratPRO, aligning innovative strategy with staff alignment to build a company focused on the execution of Critical Success Factors leading to growth.