New Methods for Choosing Rationally in a Complex World

We hope you will attend because…

Ø  Decision-making is central to everything you do as a leader and most of the results you value.

Ø  Research shows that most people, including most executives, rarely make the best available choice; more often, they unknowingly commit choice-making errors that lead to mediocre results.

Ø  This program will teach you new, research-based methods that can substantially improve your ability to make better, more rational decisions as a leader and to manage group decision-making more effectively.

Decision-making lies at the very heart of leadership. Leaders, by definition, decide what results need to be achieved; what kinds of performance are needed to achieve them; who should do the work, the resources to be invested; and how to leverage the results when achieved.

Most executives can improve significantly. Most people, including executives, believe that making rational, high quality decisions is much easier than it really is, because it is so easy to attribute mistakes to luck or external factors and so difficult to “rewind history” and see the possibilities that were squandered.

Fortunately we can do that with choice-making experiments and simulations, and when researchers do this, they find thatpeople are not very good at making complex decisions in modern contexts; people choose suboptimally more often than not, and they choose disastrously far too often.

This program will give you big advantages.The positive side of the revolution in our understanding of decision-making is that it has given us new ways to make wiser, more rational decisions that can bring us much closer to the optimal results that we seek. The goal of Decision Making for Senior Executives is to introduce you and other executive leaders to this new and surprising body of research-based insights and three mutually complementary types of methods for making wise decisions. 

The program teaches participants to make decisions rationally. We start by providing participants with a clear understanding of the origins of bad choices -- and good ones. When smart people, including smart executives, make bad choices, it is usually due to one of three types of causes, each of which has a corresponding set of solutions:

1)       Bias Management Methods: People fall into common choice-making biases that have been “programmed” into human nature by biological evolution. These worked well to meet the urgent, rather simple needs for quick choices of our remote hunter-gather ancestors; but modern decisions are much more complex and layered, and they relate to longer-term issues. Our ancient biases lead us to make very bad choices. The program will teach you how to detect each bias in yourself and in others; how to avoid damage by “de-biasing” your own decisions; how to help collaborators to recognize and deal effectively with biases; and how to exploit the biases of competitors and opponents by taking “the other side” of their bad choices. This approach comes highly recommended by world-class business decision-makers, Warren Buffett and Charles T. Munger of Berkshire Hathaway.  Bias Management will become your first line of defence when making decisions.

2)       New Rational Decision-making Methods: Another cause of bad decision-making is the fact that modern decision-making involves large amounts of diverse information (a mix of apples and oranges, so to speak). Data needs to be collected and organised in just the right way to “crunch diverse kinds of value into a single currency” so that alternatives can be compared and the best one chosen. Research-based, reality-tested “Rational Computational Methods” now exist that do just this, but many executives follow older models. The second “key” to making better decisions is therefore to use the right method. The program will teach you what to look for in such methods so that you can use them to good effect in your work as a leader-decision maker.

3)       Organising Effective Decision Making in Groups and Teams: In theory, making decisions in groups should offer mostly advantages -- of greater collective knowledge and more person-hours of thought on the issues -- but in fact, group decision making has its pitfalls. In some groups, yielding to the power or authority of some members or the simple feeling of “safety in numbers” leads to conformity, excessive risk-taking, spurious consensus and other mistakes often referred to as “group-think errors.” There is also the danger that some participants in group decisions will actively avoid making the best decision for the organisation and play the role of persuasive advocates for the special interests including their own. The third key to good decision-making lies in organizing group decision making to focus it on rational analysis, and to avoid both group-think and “high-jacking” by persuasive advocates. The program will teach you how to use “process watch-dogs,” disinterested experts, and other resources that allow you to more effectively reap the benefits of collective brainpower in group and team contexts.

The program gives participants ample opportunities to practice bias detection skills, to learn to use formal rational methods, and to consider how to set up systems for making even-handed, objective decisions in groups and teams. We will also consider specific kinds of decisions that support the other four essential leadership skills: i.e. decisions involved in persuading others, in improving or maximizing performance, in supporting innovation, and in finding and managing information.

The last activity in the program is to help participants initiate work on individualised decision-making improvement plans that they can put into practice on the job and in their careers more generally.