Decision Making « Tim van Gelder

Archive for the ‘Decision Making’ Category

Boards sharing arguments

Posted in Boards, Decision Making, Decision mapping, Wisdom of Crowds on October 19, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Two recent publications suggest the Boards can improve their decision making by using structured techniques to improve information sharing.

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What Donna Should Do…

Posted in Boards, Decision Making, Decision mapping, Deliberation on October 1, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Julie Garland Mclellan has posted another of her Director’s Dilemmas. This time I had the interesting task of coming up with one of the three “answers” or commentaries, and used decision mapping to derive my recommendations. Here is the map: Click on the image or here to view the zoomable pdf file. Transcribing the [...]

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Board deliberations – white paper summary available

Posted in Boards, Decision Making, Decision mapping, Deliberation on September 10, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Now available: Enhancing Board Decisions with Decision Mapping (pdf) Boards can improve their effectiveness by refining their decision-making processes. To this end we recommend adoption of decision mapping to assist individual Directors to appreciate the logical structure of Board decisions, thereby enabling them to participate more effectively in Boardroom debates. Specifically, Management create decision maps [...]

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What is decision mapping?

Posted in Decision Making, Decision mapping, Deliberation on September 8, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

A brief overview of decision mapping, in a question-and-answer format

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Mapping Directors’ Dilemmas

Posted in Boards, Decision Making, Decision mapping on September 1, 2009 | 1 Comment »

It is well known that every issue of the Harvard Business Review includes a case study, an interesting business situation calling for a decision, with three expert commentaries. The decision mapping methodology fits these case studies very well, as I illustrated in a previous post. Every month Julie Garland McLellan, an Australian consultant to company directors [...]

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Deliberative decisions

Posted in Argument, Decision Making, Deliberation on August 10, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Much of my work at the moment revolves around the notion of deliberative decision making. In other words, this kind of thing: The meeting in the prime minister’s Sydney office was to consider raising the stakes: should the government reverse its previous position and seek to end the interminable blame shifting by taking over [...]

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Dangers of Datacentrism

Posted in Business, Critical Thinking, Datacentrism, Decision Making, Research, Thinking on May 7, 2009 | 3 Comments »

A common decision making trap is thinking more data = better decision – and so, to make a better decision, you should go out and get more data. Let’s call this the datacentric fallacy. Of course there are times when you don’t have enough information, when having more information (of the right kind) would [...]

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Board decision making – Draft Whitepaper

Posted in Boards, Decision Making, Decision mapping on May 4, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Geoff Williams and I have started circulating a draft version of a whitepaper Improving Board Deliberations: The Role of Decision Mapping. We intend to release a final (“1.0″) version in about a month, and are keen to receive feedback, especially from folks with direct experience of board-level decision making. Download (pdf)

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Decision mapping can make the right choice obvious

Posted in Decision Making, Decision mapping, Uncategorized on April 7, 2009 | 3 Comments »

Every issue, the Harvard Business Review contains a “case”, a fictional situation in which a senior executive, usually a CEO, has to make some hard decision. The situation is presented in an entertaining narrative, and then the decision problem is posed in a succinct question. Then three or four expert commentators provide insights and [...]

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