Yesterday, we’ve welcomed a full house at our headquarters for Radu Atanasiu’s masterclass on Challenges for Business Decision-Making. The event gathered so much interest, that we’ve had to run 2 editions of it, with the second taking place Thursday evening, 17 April. If you want to join it, there are still a few available places, but let’s first see what you can expect from the event (without giving major spoilers).

How do we make decisions?

The event started with a few examples of decision making, debating what are the factors we think we take into consideration versus the ones we actually do, in both our professional and personal lives. We reviewed different types of decision making (certainty, risk and uncertainty), understanding the differences between them and some tools that can help in the process. We also understood how gut feeling and intuition helps shape our experience.

One of the new words I have discovered was satisficing. According to Business Dictionary, satisficing means examining alternatives until a practical (most obvious, attainable, and reasonable) solution with adequate level of acceptability is found, and stopping the search there instead of looking for the best-possible (optimum) solution. This is opposed to optimising, the process in which you look to identify as many solutions as possible and taking the right one. Optimising may seem better, the time economies satisficing brings you are of great value and can result in a higher personal satisfaction.

Rules of thumb for decision making

Of course, you will also get some practical advice on decision making, such as if a project has 3 “ifs”, don’t do it or the ratio between praise and negative feedback should be 3 to 1. Plus, a decision should be made before reviewing 3 important questions:

• Who makes the decision?
• How much time do we have available?
• What happens if we don’t do anything?

We’ve also discussed about our tendency to evaluate decisions solely on their outcome, starting from a cool quote from Nobel laureate Richard Thaler:

“You can imagine all kinds of good decisions taken in 2005 were evaluated five years later as stupid. They weren’t stupid. They were unlucky. So any company that can learn to distinguish between bad decisions and bad outcomes has a leg up.”

The event also helped create the setting for the more advanced class Radu is hosting in May, Complex Problem Solving for Business, a 2 day course including methods, tools and case studies from the participant’s experience.

Looking to find out more? Join one of our upcoming events!