What The Session Is

This is a live, interactive decision-making experience for CEEC members.

Participants step into a simple poker-powered simulation where they have to make decisions with incomplete information, shifting confidence, visible pressure, and uncertain outcomes. Poker is not the subject. It is the environment that makes real decision patterns visible quickly.

No prior poker knowledge is required. No gambling is involved. The activity is facilitated as a decision laboratory, not a card-game lesson.

What Participants Will Experience

Participants will not sit through a lecture about decision-making. They will make decisions, see consequences, and then pause to examine what happened.

The room moves through four simple rhythms:

• a short setup so everyone understands the decision environment
• live decision rounds using a simplified poker structure
• facilitated pauses where patterns are made visible
• business translation, so the learning does not stay at the table

The debrief connects the experience to familiar leadership moments:

• acting before all the information is available
• reading weak signals
• managing confidence and overconfidence
• deciding under time pressure
• separating decision quality from outcome quality
• learning from a result without hindsight distortion
• noticing how incentives and social pressure affect judgment

The experience is social without being frivolous. It gives people an easy way to interact with other CEEC members while still creating a serious leadership conversation.

What Participants Get Out Of It

Participants leave with a clearer way to think about decisions under uncertainty. The useful takeaway is not a poker trick. It is a set of practical distinctions they can use in business:

• A good outcome does not prove the decision was good.
• A bad outcome does not prove the decision was bad.
• Confidence is not the same as evidence.
• Waiting for certainty can be as risky as acting too early.
• Pressure changes what people notice, ignore, and justify.
• Good decision-makers learn from process, not only from results.

For CEEC members, this is especially relevant because many operate across markets, functions, cultures, and ownership structures where the clean answer rarely arrives in time.

The AI Angle

AI makes decision-making more important, not less. Leaders now use AI as researcher, analyst, drafter, simulator, challenger, and adviser. That can improve speed and perspective. It can also create a new problem: weak assumptions can arrive in fluent language and feel more certain than they are.

The session includes an AI layer focused on judgment rather than tools:

• what can be delegated to AI
• what should be challenged with AI
• what must remain human judgment
• how to avoid outsourcing accountability
• how to test AI output without turning every decision into endless verification
• how to keep goals, context, values, and constraints visible when AI is involved

This keeps the topic current without turning the event into an AI software workshop.

About The Speaker

Balazs Fogoly, also known as Professor B, designs and facilitates decision-making experiences for senior leaders and executive audiences.

He is Co-Founder and Chief Play Officer of Ember Associates and an Adjunct Professor with INSEAD Executive Education. His work combines decision-making under uncertainty, leadership development, poker-powered simulation, serious games, and AI-supported judgment.

Before Ember Associates, Balazs built Hungary’s first online hotel reservation platform and later worked in institutional finance across Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank, and Standard Chartered. That background gives him direct experience with entrepreneurial risk, financial-market uncertainty, and decisions made under pressure.

His facilitation style is practical, contained, and senior-friendly. The aim is not to impress participants with poker. It is to help them see how they decide.