Meet Chris Brandsey

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Chris Brandsey. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Chris below.

Hi Chris, great to have you with us today and excited to have you share your wisdom with our readers. Over the years, after speaking with countless do-ers, makers, builders, entrepreneurs, artists and more we’ve noticed that the ability to take risks is central to almost all stories of triumph and so we’re really interested in hearing about your journey with risk and how you developed your risk-taking ability.

From the outside, it might seem that I always land on my feet, progressing smoothly toward a promising outcome. The anxiety associated with the risks I take might appear as nothing more than an occasional nuisance, easily brushed aside. However, the reality is far less glamorous. My journey toward embracing uncertainty has been deeply rooted in self-discovery, understanding my own limits, and reconciling with society’s typical perspectives on risk tolerance—a process that has been anything but straightforward.

I’ve always been someone who makes bold moves, confident in my ability, and in the abilities of my partners and team, to achieve the desired outcome. For me, success comes from taking action and maintaining consistency, rather than meticulously de-risking every step along the way.

Understanding your tolerance for risk is essential, but it’s equally important to benchmark that tolerance against your peers. I vividly recall a professional education course at the California Institute of Technology, where I found myself among engineers and scientists who build rockets and manage space programs. As someone with a background in technology management within the Food and Beverage industry, I was clearly the odd one out.

One day, our professor administered a behavioral exam designed to assess how much certainty we required before making a decision. The results were plotted on an XY axis, with the level of certainty on the X-axis and predictability/control on the Y-axis. Unsurprisingly, the scientists and engineers clustered in the high-certainty, high-predictability quadrant. But there was one dot, positioned less than halfway between complete certainty and absolute predictability.

The professor pointed to the outlier and asked, “Who is this?” I hesitantly raised my hand, feeling the weight of every gaze in the room. It was a moment of discomfort—I feared I had exposed a flaw in my thinking amongst these bright minds. But later, during lunch, several classmates approached me with congratulatory remarks like, “You scored the best in the class.” It was then that I realized being an outlier was, in fact, an advantage.

This exercise taught me several invaluable lessons:

1. Many people feel constrained by uncertainty, a perspective I hadn’t fully appreciated before.
2. I gained clarity on my decision-making style, understanding exactly where I stood on the spectrum, allowing me to adjust my need predictability and certainty based on the unique situation at hand. Knowing where your default setting is crucial.
3. The ability to act with less certainty is a powerful tool to drive momentum, but it doesn’t always lead to stability. It’s vital to recognize when to prioritize swift decisions and when to focus on building a stable foundation, much like my classmates who design rockets.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

My name is Chris Brandsey and I’m the Founder of a consulting firm called Frame and Flight and Co-Founder of a technology startup called Emulsr supporting the Food & Beverage and Manufacturing industries. What I find most exciting about this space is working with super smart Innovation teams, Regulatory, Quality, Operations, and Supply Chain to make their technology and processes work for them. Too often we see the wrong technology investment and organizational change being made, which can create extra burden on a business. We work to help companies make the right decisions on technology investment and transformation with a long-view in mind.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

It’s hard to prioritize just three but seeing that you’re twisting my arm I would have to say:

1. Be fearless – pick the hard projects and know you can deliver
2. Know how to get things done – in a large organization it is an art form to be able to execute
3. Have strong ethics – deliver what you said you would deliver, don’t make empty promises, have a high degree of integrity

The best advice I can give to those wanting to develop is to deliver value to your organization and have patience on that value being reflected in promotions and other opportunities. I am still leveraging the value I created 12 years ago.

What was the most impactful thing your parents did for you?

The things that were the most impactful to me growing up where my Mom’s desire to expose us to as much as she could, even though I grew up in a small town, and my father’s unfettered dreams. My Mom put us in all kinds of sports and forced us though a decade of music. I chose baseball and piano while my brothers doubled down on guitar, drums, and also baseball. Still to this day we are a musical family where I write music or am learning a new piece every day. I’m far away from my childhood dreams of being a concert pianist but I feel like I enjoy it so much more having decided on another career.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.frameandflight.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisbrandsey/