Good judgement may be the most valued skill in the world. Our biggest concern when faced with difficult choices is the daunting sense we might be wrong. This is especially true in an age of misinformation, polarization, exponential technological change and artificial intelligence. We’re bombarded daily with opaque, inconsistent and contradictory information that swamps, confuses and even angers us. When we don’t understand, we tend to imagine worst-case scenarios. This results in fear, and fear leads to bad decisions. Yet we have access to more data, expertise and analytical capability than any generation before us. The challenge is no longer finding information. It’s determining what matters, what questions we should ask, what evidence we can trust, and when human judgement must prevail. How do we make better choices and prevent unintended, even disastrous consequences? This course provides the answers.
In business, and in life, we’re accountable for the decisions we make. They reflect who we are and determine how we want to live. We like to believe a choice gone wrong is just bad luck or misfortune when it’s actually the result of poor decision-making. No one is born with this capability; it’s learned, tested and refined through experience. While we think we resolve problems sensibly and logically, decision making is largely an emotional process of evaluating consequences and making intelligent bets. Rarely is it governed by reason alone. AI adds a powerful new dimension to this challenge – it expands our cognitive capabilities but doesn’t relieve us of the responsibility for deciding what to trust, what to question and what we must own. People, not machines, must still reconcile the unavoidable tensions between what information to collect, the critical dimensions of risk, the pressure to move forward, and the mounting expectations of significant stakeholders.
Real-world decision making requires selecting the right data, an awareness of the caveats, and an understanding of the tradeoffs. Our innate biases, thinking traps and presumptions produce poor judgements. AI can’t eliminate those. It can expose alternatives and help us navigate complexity, but it can also introduce errors, false confidence and persuasive answers that appear more reliable than they really are. It might estimate probabilities but can’t determine what decision thresholds we can accept with confidence. As human and artificial intelligence become intertwined, the challenge is not to surrender judgement but rather to decide how each can make the other better.
Topics include:
❏ Judgement: Why smart people make poor decisions
❏ The batting average of successful decision makers
❏ Fatal flaws that shorten a decision maker’s tenure
❏ Simplification vs. complexity: The old world vs. the new
❏ AI and decision making: Capabilities, limitations, myths
❏ Hybrid intelligence: Designing human/AI collaboration
❏ Diagnostic tools: Systems thinking and scenario planning
❏ Separating signals from noise and seeing the bigger picture
❏ Assembling and leading the right decision-making team
❏ The bubble of ignorance and the iceberg of innocence
❏ Cognitive biases and thinking traps that impair judgement
❏ Counterfactual and probabilistic thinking: The ingredients
❏ The influence of diversity, trust, safety and inclusion
❏ Decision-making tools: Trade-offs and consequences
❏ Getting good advice: Caveats, options and better questions
❏ When AI gets it right – and when it gets it badly wrong
❏ Case studies: Crisis decision making – what would you do?
❏ Risk tolerance and assessment: De-risking and reframing
❏ What to do when you’re not sure what you should do
Includes a 61-page Pre-course Workbook of tasks and supplemental notes.