A Playful Experiment in How We Think

Join us for a lighthearted, fast‑paced experience that will have you laughing while gaining powerful insights into the neuroscience of teamwork, critical thinking, and influence—quite possibly the most fun you’ll ever have learning how your brain works.

Why this matters:
When you put smart people in small groups, give them five minutes, and ask a strangely simple question — Would you rather fight an ostrich or a giraffe? You get one of the most entertaining demonstrations of human decision-making you’ll ever experience.

• Part team challenge, part psychological experiment, and part comedy, this activity reveals how quickly our instincts collide with logic, evidence, and the persuasive power of other people.

Participants begin by choosing a side based purely on gut feeling. Then the real fun starts:

• Teams must create a collective battle plan using nothing more than imagination, basic tools, and the information they can argue their way into believing.
• To make things even more interesting, most every group experiences a “strong opinion holder” (Designated A-hole) whose job is to push debate, stir disagreement, and introduce just enough chaos to expose how groups actually make decisions under pressure.

By the end, people switch sides, defend surprising positions, and learn more about their own thinking styles than they expect. Some discover they’re driven by intuition, others by evidence or logic, and others by the social dynamics unfolding around them.

Who it’s for:
Forward-thinking leaders, facilitators, coaches, consultants, mediators, and innovators who want to understand how we form beliefs, test claims, persuade others, and adapt our views when confronted with new information.

Format:

• Online (Zoom)
• 90 minutes, highly interactive
• Bring paper for reflection or note-taking

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Dr. Ethan Eagle is both recovering engineer and a recovering awkward person — someone who has taken a somewhat embarrassingly long time learning that humans, not hardware, are the real engines of innovation. He now works from a simple belief: every person brings irreplaceable value to a creative enterprise. In a nod to Arthur C. Clarke, Ethan is fond of the saying, “Any sufficiently advanced creative collaboration is indistinguishable from chaos,” because, in his experience, great ideas don’t emerge from tidy processes — they show up in the wonderfully messy, human spaces where curiosity beats certainty. He also happens to hold a PhD in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan.