Leadership, decision making and innovation

De Vere Holborn Bars - Click here for venue details



The context of this masterclass:

This masterclass elaborates on the award-winning Harvard Business Review article on Leadership by Snowden and Boone. The article provided a simple model of decision making that distinguishes between decisions that can be made analytically, where there is a right answer, and those where gut feel or intuition seem to be the only way forward. There is a science to managing these complex and intractable areas, it’s not about guess work, but the forms and tools of process and analysis are no longer applicable. This masterclass will teach that science.

Why this event?

A leader not only has to make decisions, but has to evaluate and enable the decisions of others. This must be done within changing circumstances and in situations where there are multiple interdependencies and contingencies – few of which can be known in advance. Command and control structures still work, but any leader knows that merely issuing instructions and expecting compliance only works in highly stable situations.

Traditional decision theory relies on the assumption that if you get the right information to the right people at the right time, and couple that with the right incentives, then people will make the right decisions. In practice, this idealistic model breaks down in part because it does not match the evolutionary capabilities of human beings. Increasingly, understanding gained from the cognitive sciences demonstrates that human beings make decisions based on matching literally thousands of stored patterns with a very partial scan of the information that is presented to them. Given this understanding from science, we need to radically rethink the models of decision making and communication that were good enough for a more stable age. Just as Newtonian physics provided predictive capability and remains useful, but not universal, so traditional management methods prove valid, but within boundaries.

Building on a major article written by the masterclass leader in Harvard Business Review (a copy of which will be made available to delegates as pre-event reading) this masterclass will provide delegates with a multi-domain model of decision making. Specifically it will enable delegates to distinguish between different situations and then choose the appropriate model for both diagnostics and intervention.

A one-day masterclass designed to help you:

• Gain insight into the science of uncertainty; understanding complexity
• Learn how to do more with significantly less; focus on effectiveness rather than efficiency
• Discover the richness and possibilities of taking a scientific approach to decision making and innovation within your organisation
• Delegate and communicate in complex environments
• Know when to take expert advice, when to test it, when to ignore it
• Understand how to use distributed cognition; the wisdom of crowds
• Move beyond scenario planning and move to real time
• Understand and create the pre-conditions for innovation