State before strategy.
I spent twenty years running experiments on what drives people when they cannot see what is driving them. Then I trained in helping people see it. I now design faculty and leadership programmes for universities and business schools.
Most change efforts reach for better plans and sharper tools. But a strategy is executed by a person, and the state that person is in shapes what they notice, what they judge, and what they do next. When that state is reactive or shut down, strong strategies come apart on contact with the room.
That has an evidence base. Twenty years of experiments on how associations formed outside awareness shape what people perceive and do: I worked in that literature and published in it.¹ Research on how acute stress alters decision-making is a field I follow closely though I have not worked in it.²
Almost everyone working in this area teaches regulation, meaning techniques for settling a difficult state. Regulation matters, a great deal. But applied before the state has been understood, it suppresses a signal without changing what produced it, and the pattern comes back. So the work starts one step earlier.
Attention before regulation.
For a lecturer facing a distressed student, that is the difference between calming someone down and understanding what they are actually saying. Calming someone down is a useful skill and worth having. But if that is all that happens, the student leaves quieter and no better understood, and whatever brought them to your office is still there next month.
Who this is for
Universities and business schools. Faculty and professional services staff who are asked to hold students in difficulty, usually without training for it. Students under sustained academic pressure who know what they should be doing and are not doing it. Institutions with duty-of-care obligations that need to be met in practice.
Executive education and alumni programmes. Programme directors who want a session their participants can use on Monday, and that does not read as another resilience module.
Companies and leadership teams. Organisations making frequent, high-stakes, relational decisions, where a leader’s capacity to stay clear affects far more than the decision in front of them.
Ways to work together
Talks and keynotes. Faculty and staff training. Student-facing courses. Executive and corporate programmes. Each one built around the specific pressures your people are under.
Every engagement starts with a conversation. I want to know what has already been tried and what did not work before I propose anything, so the proposal is built around your situation.
I design and deliver all of it myself. The person who designs the programme is the person in the room.
Currently
I teach The Action Gap at Esade, an undergraduate elective on why people who know exactly what to do still do not do it. It filled beyond its quota and generated a waiting list, in a Friday 17:30 to 20:00 slot that competes with everything a student would rather be doing.
My current research is on psychological safety in the classroom: what makes someone willing to speak when they only half understand something, and to keep going after an early setback. The most recent paper, with Raquel H. Ribeiro, is published in Research in Learning Technology.
About
Maria Galli, PhD. My doctorate in Management is from INSEAD, and I have held faculty positions at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Esade (Universitat Ramon Llull), where I am Academic Collaborator in the Marketing Department. My research on conditioning and nonconscious associative learning appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Consumer Psychology, where my 2011 lead article received the C.W. Park Award, given to the best paper published in the journal that year. I am co-author of the chapter on affect and cognition in the APA Handbook of Consumer Psychology.
Alongside that I completed the 350-hour Compassionate Inquiry® Professional Online Training, and later ten weeks of specialist training in recognising and responding to acute emotional distress. Participants work with those practices directly in every programme I design.
ORCID — my full record of scientific publications
Writing
I write essays in English and Spanish on the ideas underneath this work: how we show up, what emotions are for, why understanding has to come before strategy.
If you are weighing whether this fits your institution or your programme, a short conversation is the place to start.
A twenty-minute call to see whether this fits. If I am not the right fit, I will tell you.
¹ One example: Galli, M., & Gorn, G. (2011). Unconscious transfer of meaning to brands. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 21(2), 215–225.
² A good entry point is Starcke, K., & Brand, M. (2012). Decision making under stress: A selective review. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 36(4), 1228–1248.
Do you correct AI's answers more often than you use them? I run a small live programme that fixes that, and the fix is not a better prompt.