Dynamic Decisions Podcast

Derrek Lennox is SVP of Corporate Development and CFO at Dougall Media, a managing partner at his own consulting firm, and an adjunct professor of corporate restructuring at York University's Schulich School of Business.

In this episode of the Dynamic Decisions Podcast, he doesn't just talk turnarounds, he hands over the exact frameworks he uses to make decisions under pressure.

The three-part framework (financial, process, strategy) Derek uses to diagnose whether a struggling organization can actually be saved.

His two-move method for cutting through bad data: ask questions, do the math, and never trust the first answer you get.

The real story behind an Indigenous-owned arena that flipped a $500,000 loss into a $1 million profit without a single layoff.

If you've ever wondered how a CFO actually decides, not just what he decides, this one's for you.

Michael Clark has spent nearly 25 years shaping how fast-growing towns handle growth, and he's built his approach around four clear priorities. As Director of Community and Economic Development for Collierville, Tennessee, he oversees planning, engineering, GIS, and building codes under one roof, and starts every day with a decision that has nothing to do with any of it.

Heres Michaels wisdom nuggets for any leader tasked with developing and growing economies:

• Priority 1: Protect your own personal health and wellbeing first.

Cheryl Parks, the self-professed "shyest girl in the room" has closed over $25 million in B2B corporate sales with clients like Wells Fargo and Discover Financial, trained more than 1,000 professionals, and teaches at Sales Gravy University alongside Jeb Blunt.

She joins host Teasha Cable to unpack why the sellers winning today aren't pitching, they're acting as trusted advisors, and what that actually looks like in practice.

• The real difference between "stuck pitching" and trusted advising, and why it comes down to whose agenda drives the conversation
• How Cheryl uses a pre-meeting intelligence brief, then deliberately sets her research aside to stay in curiosity mode
• Why buyers can sense hesitation in a seller's voice, and how "identity" replaces mindset as the real driver of sales confidence
• The three levers, nervous system regulation, the CAR framework, and decision velocity, that separate good reps from elite performers

Dorothy "Dot" George, Small Business Relationship Coordinator for the City of Birmingham, brings a rare mix of urban planning, tech project management, and twelve years running her own marketing firm to the job of connecting entrepreneurs with resources. She breaks down what cities can and can't do for small businesses, and why regional cooperation beats competition every time.

• Why the SBA's small business definition (500 employees or fewer) means 99% of U.S. business activity rides on getting this right
• How Dot applied agile project management from a $1.2 million Alabama DOT software initiative to build the city's Coffee and Convo series from scratch
• The regionalism case for why Birmingham, Bessemer, Hoover, and the rest of the Jefferson County metro have to work together, not compete

If you've ever wondered what a city actually owes its small businesses, this one delivers. 

Want the numbers behind it?

Download Birmingham's 2026 State of Small Business report at magiccityinsights.com.

Learn more about CModel Data, Inc. at:

www.cmodel.io

Sarina Pilaroscia didn't set out to build a skincare company. She set out to fix something for her father. He had lived with severe psoriasis for decades. While looking through her dad's medicines, she noticed a flammable warning label on a steroid foam. Whatever he was putting on his skin was so dangerous, it needed a warning label.

"Why is this the only option?"

That curiosity sent her deep into research mode, visiting libraries, building her own back room lab, followed by a two year Health Canada validated cohort study, all to prove that a far less "toxic" answer to psoriasis and eczema care could actually work.

That question became Phoilex, a phytoactive skincare line proven in a two year Health Canada cohort study and published in peer reviewed dermatology and pharmacy journals.

She's also co-founder of SSKN Skin Firm and a talent manager with Commission Entertainment Corp, so she clearly doesn't do anything halfway.

Heres what we talked about:

• The flammable warning label that made Sarina stop and ask a question nobody else was asking
• Why she skipped licensing someone else's formula and built her own R&D lab in the back of her mom's store
• The week her father's skin flared worse than ever, and the diagnosis that reshaped her mission: Topical Steroid Withdrawal
• The overnight regulation change that forced her to rebuild her supply chain, and what it taught her about staying flexible

This is a conversation about turning a family's worst years into clinical proof, and it might change how you think about the shortcuts your own family has been taking.

Who this is for: founders building in clinical or heavily regulated categories, anyone managing a chronic skin condition and looking for options beyond steroids, and entrepreneurs scaling a Canadian brand into the US market.

Listen now and subscribe to Dynamic Decisions for more conversations where empathy and evidence meet.

Abraham Salinas, Economic Development Manager for the City of Pleasanton, California, built his career in the unglamorous work of turning zoning and code into real investment. From reviving an abandoned commercial corridor in Brentwood, CA., to positioning one of the Bay Area's strongest office marketsfor what comes after the AI "boom."

In this episode, he explains how a small team competes without a big budget:

• How Brentwood turned an abandoned commercial corridor into a mixed-use district by pairing zoning changes with strategic city land sales to a medical provider and county services

• Why Pleasanton is diversifying into robotics, AI hardware, medical device manufacturing, and clean energy to reduce reliance on anchors like Workday and 10x Genomics

• How a single development agreement turned a vacant office building into 400 to 500 units of workforce housing, split between rent and for-sale

• Why cross-department data sharing, not expensive software, gave Pleasanton a free interactive site-selection map and business directory

Abraham takes our decision-making persona quiz live, and the results explain exactly why his projects keep getting built.

Dallas Snow has sat on every side of the commercial real estate table: sixteen years running operations at Jones Commercial Interiors, then advising Fortune 500 companies on their office footprints at PDR, and now recruiting corporate investment for the City of Grapevine, Texas, a city of 53,000 people that pulls in 52 million visitors a year.

In this conversation:

• Why Grapevine is down to its last 100 acres, and how that scarcity became its sharpest sales pitch

• Why attracting business to a city is a relationship game, not an incentives race

• How the city tracks whether growth actually helps residents, not just visitor counts

• What corporate real estate clients are prioritizing in 2026 that they weren't five years ago

If you work anywhere near site selection, commercial real estate, or economic development, don't miss this one.

Dr. Lorien Pratt didn't just watch the AI revolution happen, she helped build it. In the early 1990s, as a computer science professor, she invented transfer learning, the technique now running underneath every large language model and computer vision system in use today. Then she walked away from pure machine learning to found an entirely new discipline: decision intelligence.

In this episode, Lorien joins host Teasha Cable, her mentee, friend, and co-founder at OpenDI, for a conversation that skips past the AI hype and gets into what actually changes how organizations decide.

They dig into the last mile problem: why a trillion dollar resources company spent ten years and tens of millions of dollars building a digital twin that nobody ever deployed. Lorien explains why KPI dashboards function like a GPS that only says "there's traffic" instead of telling you where to turn, and why that gap between information and action is where most AI investment quietly disappears.

They also tackle the question everyone is asking in 2026: where does agentic AI actually belong? Lorien draws a sharp line between decisions that happen inside the digital world, where agents shine, and decisions with real world consequences, like hiring, contracts, and opening a new business, where she argues large language models remain fundamentally unreliable.

Along the way, Lorien walks through a real example of organizational silos derailing a government agency's building decisions, explains the authority and responsibility mismatch that drives leaders crazy, and takes Teasha's decision-making persona quiz live on air, with results that might surprise you.

If your organization has all the data and analytics money can buy but still can't seem to make a clear decision, this conversation names the problem and shows you the way through it. Listen now, and see where you'd land on the same persona test.

Dr. Bernadette Howlett has spent her career at the intersection most people don't think about: where data science, machine learning, and human-centered education meet. 

As Operations Analytics and Experiential Product Director at Western Governors University, she leads a team using predictive modeling and decision intelligence to help students finish the credentials they started faster, with better outcomes, and with less debt.

Her mission has a name: Stop the drop with debt

Because a student who leaves without a credential but with loan payments is the worst possible outcome and it's preventable.

In this conversation, Dr. B breaks down how WGU deploys a 78-feature predictive mode to: 

• Flag student momentum

• Surface personalized faculty outreach through a language model called FOME (Faculty Outreach Message Engine)

• Uses social norming principles to nudge students toward action

The faculty always reviews and can modify before anything goes out. 

The human is always in the loop.

She also shares the lesson that almost derailed the whole system: well-intentioned SLA dashboards that faculty loved in theory and resented in practice because managers turned them into performance metrics. 

The fix? Remove the dashboard entirely when they launched decision intelligence.

Other highlights from the conversation:

• How WGU reduced accreditation reporting from weeks to hours without removing human verification

• The employer who stood up in a meeting and said flatly, "We don't trust you" and why Dr. B thinks he was right

• Her decision-making persona breakdown: 50% values, 30% strategy, 10% contrarian, 10% evidence-based

• Why she calls evidence-based practice "the vessels that feed the heart"

If you work in higher ed, workforce development, or anywhere humans are trying to use data to help other humans, this one's for you.

Lexington, Massachusetts is the birthplace of American Liberty and home to nearly three million square feet of life sciences space a sector now decentralizing and forcing a hard rethink of the town's economic future.

Sandhya Iyer, Tourism and Economic Development Director, joins host Teasha Cable to talk about leading economic development where history is both a competitive asset and a complicating factor.

In this episode: why converting vacant lab space to workforce housing is a long-term play, not a concession; the difference between historic preservation and historic character; and why competing with neighboring communities by copying them is a losing strategy.

Sandhya also walks through her decision-making persona: 40% values-driven feeler, 30% data interpreter, 20% long-range planner, 10% assumption challenger. Her core belief: it's not the numbers that tell the story, it's how you narrate them to your community.

If you work in economic development, municipal leadership, or regional strategy, this one will make you rethink what a "win" actually looks like.