Effective Decision Making

Prerequisites

No specific pre-requisite courses.

Objectives

Having completed this workshop the participants will:
Be aware of the common pitfalls that cause us to misread information and how to overcome them
Understand common decision making techniques and processes
Have an informed perspective on the role, benefits and limitations of machine intelligence in decision making
Be able to use proven techniques to influence others to 'buy into' their decisions

Decisions and popular techniques

Typical situations for decision making in business
The anatomy of decision making
Common Techniques
Force field Analysis
De Bono's PMI structure; Plus- Minus = Interesting
Decision Trees
Kepner-Tregoe
Kipling's 5W1H

Common pitfalls and how to avoid them - at the organisational level

How information travels in an organisation
Silos and goal conflicts
Group think
Company culture and management style

Common pitfalls and how to avoid them - at the individual level

Inherent biases and blind spots
Perception and bias
Base rates and the law of small numbers (aka the Gambler's Fallacy)
Cognitive Dissonance (rationalising and reframing as in Denning's Appalling Vista)
Prospect Theory (the perception of gains and losses)

Kahneman and Tversky's heuristic errors
Representativeness
Availability
Anchoring

Useful Tests

Occam's razor
Reductio ad absurdum
Pre-mortem
The most important concept in decision making - Materiality

Factfulness as an antidote to Fake Views

Hans Rosling's ten reasons we're wrong about the world and why things are better than you think

Financial Modelling - a practical illustration of machine and human collaboration

How do machine and human intelligence differ?
Using the Cynefin Framework and Known/Unknown Matrix to explore the differences

Financial Modelling - a practical illustration of machine and human collaboration
What should be hard coded into the model
What is best left to human judgement
How the two combine

What are the relevant trends in, and likely boundaries to, machine intelligence in business?

Communicating Decisions Persuasively

Influencing
Framing (90% chance of survival or 10% chance of dying)
People don't choose between things they choose between descriptions of things
Covering all the angles - FACERAP