Overview

Master the skill of decision making with this engaging and practical guide taught by an award-winning scholar of leadership, decision making, and business strategy.

Course Description

Learn to approach the critical decisions in your life with a more seasoned, educated eye with this fascinating 24-lecture series that explores how individuals, groups, and organizations make effective decisions. The heart of this accessible series is a thorough examination of decision making at three key levels.

First, you’ll look at decisions made at the individual level, where you’ll learn that intuition is more than just a gut instinct and represents a powerful pattern recognition capability. Then, you’ll explore decisions made at the group level, answering whether groups are “smarter” and more capable of making critical decisions than individuals. Finally, you’ll analyze organizational decision making, where Professor Roberto demonstrates how some organizations encourage and reliably perform vigilant decision making in risky scenarios.

Whether you’re the head of a Fortune 500 company, a government agency, or an everyday household, you constantly make decisions important to you and those around you. These lectures offer you a toolbox of practical knowledge and skills that you can apply to various decisions—whether large or small—in your everyday life and work. Professor Roberto’s lively lectures are packed with useful anecdotes, tools, and advice designed to improve your ability to make informed decisions. As you explore the intriguing process of making a good decision, you’ll strengthen your grip on individual theories of decision making and the situations that illustrate them.

Course Lectures

01: Making High-Stakes Decisions

Examine the myth that bad decisions are most often made by bad leaders. Professor Roberto uses examples like the Challenger disaster and the Bay of Pigs invasion to uncover why good leaders can make bad decisions if their decision-making process is flawed.

Duration: 32 min

02: Cognitive Biases

Using the story of the tragedies on Mount Everest in 1996, Professor Roberto introduces three cognitive biases that play a role in bad decision making: sunk-cost effect, overconfidence bias, and recency effect.

Duration: 30 min

03: Avoiding Decision-Making Traps

Explore decision-making traps such as confirmatory bias, anchoring bias, and hindsight bias. Learn how Darwin avoided confirmatory bias by keeping a separate record of observations that contradicted his theory of evolution.

Duration: 31 min

04: Framing-Risk or Opportunity?

Understand how the way you frame a problem can significantly impact your choices. Learn why framing a decision in terms of what you have to lose can lead to riskier decisions.

Duration: 31 min

05: Intuition-Recognizing Patterns

Discover how to use intuition as a powerful tool in decision making when combined with rational analysis. Professor Roberto recounts case studies from firefighting and healthcare to explain the potential and pitfalls of intuition.

Duration: 32 min

06: Reasoning by Analogy

Learn how to use analogies to make sense of complex problems while avoiding the common tendency to overstate similarities and overlook key differences.

Duration: 32 min

07: Making Sense of Ambiguous Situations

Explore how we often make decisions and then rationalize them, a process called sense-making, which influences our behavior.

Duration: 29 min

08: The Wisdom of Crowds?

This lecture includes examples from game shows and the business world that demonstrate the usefulness of group decision making and the potential problems if group members are not fully engaged.

Duration: 32 min

09: Groupthink-Thinking or Conforming?

Discover why even diverse groups can make bad decisions if members cannot express divergent opinions, focusing on how groupthink led to the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Duration: 31 min

10: Deciding How to Decide

After the Bay of Pigs failure, President Kennedy and his advisors created a new process for group discussion and decision making to prevent future groupthink.

Duration: 30 min

11: Stimulating Conflict and Debate

Learn how constructive conflict can lead to new insights and stronger decisions. Discover methods to stimulate useful debate, including role plays and mental simulation techniques.

Duration: 30 min

12: Keeping Conflict Constructive

Understand how to eliminate dysfunctional conflict to cultivate effective teams, with cases from health care and the nonprofit sector.

Duration: 31 min

13: Creativity and Brainstorming

Explore IDEO’s effective product design process and learn how their innovative approach led to successful product development in just one week.

Duration: 32 min

14: The Curious Inability to Decide

Examine three modes of indecision in groups: “the culture of yes, the culture of no, and the culture of maybe.”

Duration: 30 min

15: Procedural Justice

Using case studies, Professor Roberto explains the challenge of building consensus among team members once a decision has been made.

Duration: 31 min

16: Achieving Closure through Small Wins

Learn how teams achieve closure through small wins, using cases about D-Day and Social Security to illustrate the concept.

Duration: 31 min

17: Normal Accident Theory

Discover how organizational culture and structure affect decision making, using the Three Mile Island accident as a case study.

Duration: 30 min

18: Normalizing Deviance

Explore how the Challenger space shuttle explosion resulted from a flawed culture at NASA and how leaders can reform such cultures.

Duration: 31 min

19: Allison’s Model-Three Lenses

Learn Graham Allison’s approach to examine decision making through three lenses, using the Cuban Missile Crisis as a case study.

Duration: 31 min

20: Practical Drift

Uncover why organizations make decisions that contradict their own rules, illustrated by a military friendly-fire case from 1994.

Duration: 31 min

21: Ambiguous Threats and the Recovery Window

Analyze how organizations minimize risks when threats are ambiguous, using the Columbia space shuttle accident as a case study.

Duration: 32 min

22: Connecting the Dots

Discover how failure to connect the dots led to a lack of appropriate action before September 11, emphasizing the importance of integrating various pieces of information.

Duration: 30 min

23: Seeking Out Problems

Explore how complex, high-risk organizations succeed by proactively looking for problems rather than ignoring red flags, with Toyota as a case study.

Duration: 30 min

24: Asking the Right Questions

Examine the trend of leaders focusing on how decisions are made within their organizations, emphasizing the importance of asking the right questions.

Duration: 30 min