Advising Well, Being Advised Well
A programme for leadership and client-facing teams. People practise both sides of advice, through games built on real experiments.
Why teams take it
Why teams take it
Leaders spend much of their week advising and being advised, by clients and colleagues alike. Very few have ever practised it.
Most communication training is about presenting and persuading. This programme is about the quieter part: whose view we trust, and whether we say the difficult thing while it is still cheap. It draws on the ADVICEdge framework from The Only Difference and on research into how people actually give and take advice.
Nobody sits through a lecture. People play, predict what happened, and then see what the research found. The surprises are the point, which is why the games themselves are not described here.
Outcomes
What people leave with
Their own habits, caught in the act
How they weigh other people’s views, whom they listen to and why, found out in the room before anyone explains it.
Advice on a real decision
Everyone brings a decision they face at work. Colleagues advise on it, and their advice is scored against the five ADVICEdge qualities.
A board the team wrote itself
A short list of what this team will not do when it advises, whether clients or each other, agreed and voted on before the day ends.
An ask already made
The advice each person has been putting off asking for, with a name and a date on it.
The shape of the day
Seven parts, one team
The morning is about taking advice, the afternoon about giving and asking for it. The last hour belongs to the team.
Whom we listen to
How we weigh other people’s views, and what happens to our judgement when someone sounds certain.
Money and motive
What changes when an advisor has something to gain, and whether being told about it protects us.
Depth and compassion
Advising on a case where the facts that decide the answer stay hidden until someone asks the right question.
Asking for advice
Why capable people put off asking, and how far off that instinct usually is. This part takes people out of the room.
Giving advice
Advising colleagues on the decisions they brought, and hearing advice on your own in a way that is hard to argue with.
Saying the difficult thing
Voice, flattery and the pull we all feel towards the people who agree with us.
The team’s own advice culture
The team turns the day on itself: where advice goes wrong here, and what it will do differently.
Built on research
The research behind the games
Most of the games recreate published experiments, so what people notice in themselves is the finding. Some of the studies the day draws on, each summarised in the Library with its source:
Averaging your view with an adviser’s usually beats picking one.
Jack B. Soll and Richard P. Larrick, Duke University, 2009
Without a track record to check, the confident adviser wins.
Sunita Sah, Don A. Moore and Robert J. MacCoun, 2013
Disclosing a conflict of interest can make advice more biased, not less.
Daylian M. Cain, George Loewenstein and Don A. Moore, 2005
People say yes to a request for help far more often than we expect.
Francis J. Flynn and Vanessa K. B. Lake (Bohns), 2008
A call connects us more than a text, and is less awkward than we fear.
Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley, 2021
Giving advice can motivate the giver more than receiving it.
Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Ayelet Fishbach and Angela L. Duckworth, 2018
AI affirms users about 49% more often than humans do.
Myra Cheng, Dan Jurafsky and colleagues, Stanford University, 2026
Formats
How it can run
Full day
The complete programme, 09:00 to 17:00, with lunch and two breaks.
Half day
Three and a half hours on the core of the programme.
Group size
12 to 24 people from one team, in person. Larger groups by arrangement.
Working togetherHow we prepare
It starts with a conversation with whoever is sponsoring the day: who will be in the room, whom they advise, and what you would like them to do differently in the month after. The cases are then written for your sector, so people are practising on decisions that look like their own.
Thirty days later, everyone gets a short check-in on what they changed, and you get a brief note on what the team reported.
The programme is led by Ritu Kant Ojha, author of The Only Difference and founder of ADVICEdge. He has spoken and trained at GITEX, IITs and IIMs, and Fortune 500 companies. More about Ritu as a speaker.
Bring it to your team
Planning a team day?
Tell us about your team, its size and the dates you have in mind. You will get a reply within two working days.