When faced with uncertain, stressful or otherwise complex situations, analytical decision-making skills and critical thinking capabilities are key for any business executive. It is crucial to be more efficient and more bias-free in your analysis and subsequent decisions. Even more so in volatile times: the decisions you make or advise on can have great impact. The 2-day Decision-making in high-stake situations program focuses on improving these capabilities: participants will enhance their skills in making better, more rational decisions as well as in dealing with stressful, high-stake situations.
Participants will improve both their personal and organizational efficiency to reach better business results. Applications to financial decision-making will be discussed, including managing risk and uncertainty, investment decisions, budgeting, forecasting, quantitative calculating, sampling, etc.
The program is highly interactive and hands-on. It is based on role-plays and exercises, real-life business cases and examples, and empirical, behavioral research. To start off, the participants will engage in a group decision role-play, set in a high-stake situation, demonstrating how decisions can be made more efficiently. A number of decision biases will be discussed. Next, we will take a Big Picture view to improve the participants’ decision-making through enhancing their critical thinking and problem-solving skills in business. Finally, participants will engage in a self-reflection exercise, where they will be asked to analyze and discuss a business decision they made or observed in their own organization.
How you will benefit
The Decision-making in high-stake situations program will help you:
- Improve your decision-making effectiveness
- Deal with stressful, uncertain or complex situations more effectively
- Better understand and deal with decision biases
- Improve your critical thinking and problem-solving skills in business
- Augment your personal and organizational effectiveness
- Discuss applications to your own organization
Program length
2 days
| Day 1 | 09:00 – 18:00 |
| Day 2 | 09:00 – 18:00 |
Is this program not the right fit for you?
We offer other programs which you might find more interesting or useful, such as:
An indicative outline is given below:
- Decision-making under uncertainty: Speed Ventures (exercise and debriefing)
- Efficient versus inefficient group processes
- Confirmation bias
- Improving decision-making processes
- Discussing processes first
- Decisions: reality versus models
- Default option: opt in, opt out in policy programs. Example: pension schemes
- Information search versus decision
- Effective judgment and decision-making
- Overcoming cognitive biases
- Not getting the right data: Looking for the wrong data
- Does this instance/event belong to a particular category?
- How often does this happen?
- What number should I attach to this?
- Key strategies: Independence of judgments + Framing the problem + Organizational processes
- Examples and applications to financial decision-making: investment decisions, budgeting, forecasting, quantitative calculating, sampling
- Overcoming emotional & egocentric barriers
- Managing your emotions. Example: investment decisions
- Decision paralysis
- Emotional reactions to risk. Example: assessing financial decisions
- Overcoming learning obstacles
- Looking at both successes and failures
- Creating data
- Overcoming cognitive biases
- Big Picture: Improving critical thinking in business
- Coping with uncertainty:
- Real-life case: Investment decision (dealing with financial uncertainty)
- Coping with complexity
- Applying statistical reasoning to everyday judgment
- Coping with uncertainty:
- Synthesis: NASA – Real-life case on decision-making in a high-stake, crisis situation
- Decision-making under high stress
- Self-reflection exercise & applications to your own organization
- Self-reflection exercise about a past professional decision
- Self-reflection exercise about improving organizational processes
Program preparation
There is some preparatory work required for this program. Pre-readings consist of case materials, chapters of a book and/or a few articles. These materials will be made available on a password protected webpage a few weeks prior to the program.
To ensure maximum benefit from the program for participant and fellow-participants, we strongly advise to prepare prior to attending.
The Decision-making in high-stake situations program is relevant to all executives and managers who want to improve and practice their decision-making effectiveness or their ability to deal with stressful, uncertain or complex situations.
The program is especially useful for:
- Executives who make important decisions
- Executives who analyze decisions
- Investment bankers
- Investment officers and analysts
- Risk officers
- Controllers
- Consultants
- Entrepreneurs
- Project Leaders
- Team Leaders
- Line and Functional Managers
- Business Unit and Department Directors
Please contact us should you feel the need to verify your level of knowledge, and/or the relevance of your work context.
Other programs that might interest you:
