The Art of Critical Decision Making

Watch The Art of Critical Decision Making

  • 2023
  • 1 Season

Making a good decision is a skill that can be learned, honed, and perfected. Now, approach the important decisions in your life with a more seasoned, educated eye. These 24 fascinating lectures provide you with the skills and techniques you need to enhance the effectiveness of your own decision making.

The Art of Critical Decision Making is a series that ran for 1 seasons (24 episodes) between November 1, 2023 and on The Great Courses

Filter by Source

Do you have Hulu?
What are you waiting for?
Nice! Browse Hulu with Yidio.
Ad Info - This show may not be available on Hulu
Seasons
Asking the Right Questions
24. Asking the Right Questions
November 1, 2023
Examine the trend of leaders moving from making decisions themselves to focusing on how decisions are made by everyone in their organizations. Smart leaders, as you discover, ask the right questions to glean the collective wisdom of their colleagues and staffs.
Seeking Out Problems
23. Seeking Out Problems
November 1, 2023
Explore how complex, high-risk organizations succeed by focusing on the possibility of failure. Leaders at these organizations proactively look for problems rather than ignore red flags. Also, learn how Toyota's application of these principles has contributed to its success.
Connecting the Dots
22. Connecting the Dots
November 1, 2023
Often in large organizations, no one individual can see or understand all the elements at the same time. Great organizations integrate various pieces to see the big picture. Discover how failure to connect the dots led to an inability to recognize the extent of the threat of a terrorist attack on American soil and therefore a lack of appropriate action before September 11.
Ambiguous Threats and the Recovery Window
21. Ambiguous Threats and the Recovery Window
November 1, 2023
When a threat is ambiguous, organizations are likely to minimize the possible risks. Look again at NASA but this time at the Columbia space shuttle accident, 17 years after the Challenger explosion, to understand how conditions changed or stayed the same in that culture.
Practical Drift
20. Practical Drift
November 1, 2023
Uncover why organizations make decisions that contradict their own rules and regulations. The concept of practical drift explains this phenomenon, as you see by studying a military friendly-fire case from 1994.
Allison's Model - Three Lenses
19. Allison's Model - Three Lenses
November 1, 2023
Learn Graham Allison's approach to examine decision making through three lenses. Use Allison's model to explore the Cuban Missile Crisis from the individual and cognitive perspective, the group dynamics view, and the vantage point of organizational politics and bargaining.
Normalizing Deviance
18. Normalizing Deviance
November 1, 2023
The tragic explosion of the Challenger space shuttle was likely the result of a flawed culture at NASA. The repeated and increased tolerance of questionable data and decisions ultimately led to a large-scale failure. How can leaders reform such cultures?
Normal Accident Theory
17. Normal Accident Theory
November 1, 2023
Discover how organizational culture and structure affect decision making by individuals and groups. Learn about the Three Mile Island accident to understand what went wrong in that system, and understand how catastrophes more often stem from a domino chain of bad decisions rather than one wrong choice.
Achieving Closure through Small Wins
16. Achieving Closure through Small Wins
November 1, 2023
To move forward through the brainstorming and decision-making processes, groups must find intermediate moments of agreement that Karl Weick calls "small wins." This lecture looks at how teams achieve closure through small wins, using cases about D-Day, Social Security, and the CEO of Corning.
Procedural Justice
15. Procedural Justice
November 1, 2023
Using case studies about Daimler Chrysler and an aerospace and defense firm, Professor Roberto explains the challenge of building consensus among team members once a decision has been made so everyone will work together to implement it.
The Curious Inability to Decide
14. The Curious Inability to Decide
November 1, 2023
Often as individuals or in groups we become paralyzed by indecision
Creativity and Brainstorming
13. Creativity and Brainstorming
November 1, 2023
IDEO is one of the world's leading product design firms, expert in developing creative and innovative products for many industries. What makes their process so effective? To help you understand their formula at work, Professor Roberto describes an experiment in which IDEO staff worked to design a new product in just one week.
Keeping Conflict Constructive
12. Keeping Conflict Constructive
November 1, 2023
Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for conflict to become unproductive. Understand how to look for and eliminate dysfunctional conflict to cultivate effective teams. This lecture includes cases on Sid Caesar's comedy writing team, health care, and the nonprofit sector.
Stimulating Conflict and Debate
11. Stimulating Conflict and Debate
November 1, 2023
Learn how constructive conflict can lead to new insights and stronger decisions. Discover four methods to stimulate useful debate: role plays, mental simulation techniques, creating a point-counterpoint dynamic, and applying diverse conceptual models and frameworks.
Deciding How to Decide
10. Deciding How to Decide
November 1, 2023
After the Bay of Pigs failure, President Kennedy and his advisors reflected on their mistakes and created a new process for group discussion and decision making to prevent future groupthink and promote diverse perspectives. Here, Professor Roberto introduces the concept of developing a decision-making process.
Groupthink - Thinking or Conforming?
9. Groupthink - Thinking or Conforming?
November 1, 2023
Discover why even diverse groups can make bad decisions if members are not able to express divergent opinions. This lecture focuses on how groupthink led to the Bay of Pigs invasion.
The Wisdom of Crowds?
8. The Wisdom of Crowds?
November 1, 2023
This lecture includes examples from game shows such as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and from the business world that demonstrate the usefulness of decision making by groups and the potential problems if group members are not fully engaged.
Making Sense of Ambiguous Situations
7. Making Sense of Ambiguous Situations
November 1, 2023
We might like to think that we carefully examine our choices before we make a decision. However, we often do the reverse - make a decision and then figure out why, and base future decisions on how we made sense of other decisions. This process, called sense-making by Karl Weick, constantly influences our behavior.
Reasoning by Analogy
6. Reasoning by Analogy
November 1, 2023
Learn how the Korean War differed from the threat of Adolf Hitler. Professor Roberto explains reasoning by analogy and how you can use analogies to make sense of a complex problem. At the same time, we must avoid the common tendency to overstate the similarities of one situation to another and overlook key differences.
Intuition - Recognizing Patterns
5. Intuition - Recognizing Patterns
November 1, 2023
Discover how to use intuition as a powerful tool in decision making when combined with rational analysis and acknowledge the cognitive processes that are part of our intuition. Professor Roberto recounts case studies from firefighting, health care, and the video game industry to explain the potential and pitfalls of intuition.
Framing - Risk or Opportunity?
4. Framing - Risk or Opportunity?
November 1, 2023
The way you or others frame a problem or decision can have a significant impact on the choices you make. Understand why framing a decision in terms of what you have to lose causes you to take more risks.
Avoiding Decision-Making Traps
3. Avoiding Decision-Making Traps
November 1, 2023
Explore more decision-making traps you can fall into if you're not aware of them, such as confirmatory bias, anchoring bias, attribution error, illusory correlation, hindsight bias, and egocentrism. Darwin avoided confirmatory bias by keeping a separate record of observations that contradicted his theory of evolution.
Cognitive Biases
2. Cognitive Biases
November 1, 2023
Using the story of the tragedies on Mount Everest in 1996, Professor Roberto introduces you to three cognitive biases that play a role in bad decision making: sunk-cost effect, overconfidence bias, and recency effect.
Making High-Stakes Decisions
1. Making High-Stakes Decisions
November 1, 2023
Examine the myth that bad decisions are most often made by bad leaders. Professor Roberto uses the examples of the Challenger disaster, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and Daimler's acquisition of Chrysler to uncover why good leaders can make bad decisions if the decision-making process they use is flawed.
Description

Making a good decision is a skill that can be learned, honed, and perfected. Now, approach the important decisions in your life with a more seasoned, educated eye. These 24 fascinating lectures provide you with the skills and techniques you need to enhance the effectiveness of your own decision making.

The Art of Critical Decision Making is a series that ran for 1 seasons (24 episodes) between November 1, 2023 and on The Great Courses

Where to Watch The Art of Critical Decision Making
The Art of Critical Decision Making is available for streaming on the The Great Courses website, both individual episodes and full seasons. You can also watch The Art of Critical Decision Making on demand at Amazon Prime and Amazon.
  • Premiere Date
    November 1, 2023
  • Watch thousands of shows and movies Watch thousands of shows and movies
  • All the TV You Love All the TV You Love
  • Watch Anywhere Watch Anytime, Anywhere
Ad Info - This show may not be available on Hulu