Strategic Decision Making for Leaders

Sharpen your decision-making skills

Leading a team, board or company to success involves making critical decisions, giving sound advice, and evaluating the decisions of others. However, in fast-changing business environments, managers must often make decisions under severe time constraints and with insufficient information. In these situations, if they rely only on habitual problem-solving techniques and intuition, they can fall prey to unconscious biases that hinder their ability to make the best decisions.

Strategic Decision Making for Leaders is aimed at executives who make important decisions in their organisations and are responsible for establishing decision-making processes. The programme delivers the tools and frameworks to help you improve your decision-making and better guide your team’s decisions.

Through interactive classroom sessions, case discussions, simulations and group exercises, you will develop a practical understanding of what drives your own behaviour and that of the people around you. As you analyse the psychological processes behind decision-making in the face of uncertainty, you will strengthen your ability to recognise and overcome systematic biases in the context of your working environment. You will also gain a set of easy-to-use rules (nudges) that will help you challenge assumptions, support smarter decision-making processes, and build exceptional teams.

The programme examines how short-term decision-making can create obstacles that hinder organisations in the long term – for example, decisions made during recruitment or succession planning. You will explore how to adopt more sustainable decision-making processes to help your organisation avoid the pitfalls of a short-term focus, particularly in high-risk environments.

You will return to work with a comprehensive understanding of the strategic decision-making process, along with concrete guidelines on how to make better decisions, apply efficient processes, and deliver consistent results.

How you benefit

• Develop critical thinking skills, sharpening your intuition in the face of risk and uncertainty
• Learn ways to discover, manage, mitigate and avoid decision-making traps
• Learn to leverage the power of ‘nudges’ – a light-touch way to influence human behaviour and improve decision-making
• Boost your ability to build high-performing teams by understanding what conditions enable teams to make better decisions than individuals
• Become a more strategic leader and decision-maker by understanding the long-term impact your decisions can have on your organisation

Participant profile

Strategic Decision Making for Leaders is designed for:

• Senior executives and key decision-makers
• Managers responsible for building high-performing teams
• Managers who frequently lead projects and want to improve their ability to make smart, sound decisions

This programme particularly benefits executives who must frequently make strategic decisions under high levels of uncertainty.

This programme qualifies for the INSEAD Certificate in Global Management.