Lia DiBello

Lia DiBello Ph.D · 1st Principal Scientist @ Applied Cognitive Science Labs | Ph.D. in Cognitive Science

Dr Lia DiBello is a cognitive scientist and Chief Science Officer of Applied Cognitive Science Labs (ACSI Labs). One of the first people to work in cognitive science, she has studied how people become intuitive experts since she was nineteen, across more than fifty commercial companies, medicine and the military.

Her field work produced the business triad: the finding that people who stay successful in any economy hold one balanced picture of money, operations and supply and demand.

To change that picture when it stops working, her lab builds strategic rehearsals, compressed working futures in which people run three years of business in a single day and fail. She has run them with 9,000 people.

Her current platform, Future View, lets a person with intuitive expertise build their own rehearsals for their own clients, and is in use with the US Marine Corps. With Dr David Lehman, she developed the National Science Foundation-funded cognitive agility assessment; her product Truth Layer turns confident large-language-model answers into testable claims. She believes large language models can never be intuitive experts, and that the expert and the model are better together.

Lia DiBello Professional Reinvention: Rethinking Your Work After Thirty Years

102

Oct. 22, 2026

Lia DiBello Professional Reinvention: Rethinking Your Work After Thirty Years

Dr Lia DiBello, a cognitive scientist, studies how people become intuitive experts and what professional reinvention looks like after thirty years. Across more than fifty companies, medicine and the military, she found that the people who stay successful hold one picture in their heads of how a business works: money, operations, and supply and demand, all in balance, pivoting to whichever part the moment demands. She calls it the triad. Her simulations run three years of business in a single day, and one biotech team came back the next morning and saw they had to centralise filing and packaging. She's done this with 9,000 people, and it's the same every time. Her point: people don't learn anything new. They reshuffle what they already have. Your own picture of how a business works can still run on autopilot, and when it narrows, you become a one-trick pony with all your skill in one corner of the triad. Thirty years in, you have more to reshuffle, and you're better on the second tr…

Guest: Lia DiBello

Listen to the Episode