Overview: Strategic Decision Making

Making clear, informed, effective decisions

About the Program

Successful executives need access to high quality information and analysis at the time they make decisions and the confidence that relevant information does not lie hidden beyond reach somewhere in the organization.

To that end, this program illuminates key lessons in how individuals and organizations can improve their capacity to make informed decisions.

1. The Essentials of Decision Making: Generic Functions
What are the generic functions that must be present to ensure a sound, systematic
decision making process? Who should be performing them?

2. Approaches to Organizing Information & Advice
Leaders receive information and advice in many ways and from many different sources. Learn the characteristics, strengths and limitations of three distinct organizational models employed by executive decision makers. Under what circumstances can each of these models make its greatest contribution?

3.  Coordinating Decisions in Complex Organizations
For leaders in complex organizations, the challenge of decision making requires the careful coordination of various parts of the enterprise.
 
This session examines the strategy used by senior executives and their staff to address the problem of both horizontal and vertical coordination and the implications for leaders in every organization.

4. Sequential Decision Making
How should you approach decision making when it is in the context of a multi-party negotiation? What strategies can be used to break gridlock and stalemates and to produce outcomes that enjoy wide support?

How do you weigh the benefits and costs of big issue decisions to various parties and take substantive and political realities into account on your way to a negotiated solution?

5.  Decision Making & Implementation
The view of a solution inside the organization can be quite different from the view outside the organization. To achieve implementation, you need consensus from those who will be affected by it. In this session, you’ll apply a case on making decisions to a context in which multiple strategies are at work, offering an opportunity to consider the nexus between substantive and political reality.

6. Framing Issues & Shaping an Agenda
Every issue has multiple sides. If, as the decision maker, you don’t frame an issue in the right way at the start, others will frame it for you. Learn the challenges and science of framing issues, how early decisions shape later ones, how decisions get sold, and how to identify the correct issue to frame.

7. First Things First
Executives are confronted constantly with the challenge of how to allocate their time and where to devote their resources. How do you establish priorities as a decision maker? What techniques can you use to ensure that the things that  matter most.