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Data-Driven Decision Making
The key to competitive advantage in the 21st Century.
In this learning event, you’ll examine strategies for gaining the information needed to make effective decisions in the time frame required. You’ll look at the best of recent research, gain advice from leading thinkers and examine key decisions from real situations faced by real leaders. You’ll explore key elements of effective business metrics and gain skills in preparing better predictions. You’ll learn the principles of data analysis and see how they can clarify your view of reality. You’ll then use this information to prepare better forecasts and assess risks.
After you’ve acquired these real-world skills, you’ll discuss and plan how to begin applying what you’ve learned, creating an individualized plan for you to use when you get back on the job.
Learn how to:
- Develop organizational skills for translating unorganized data into information critical for your business success
- Learn principles for better assessing risk
- Explore strategies for preparing more accurate forecasts
- Gain skills in validating claims and knowing what questions to ask
- Evaluate your company’s culture to uncover key strengths and identify the dysfunctional elements that destroy profits
- Create team collaboration and alignment
- Explore the uses and limitations of intuition
- Recognize the pitfalls and risks in new business development proposals
- Discover the difference between fact and folklore in your own company
- Assess your current metrics are they holding you back?
- Determine your ability to track progress day-to-day
- Identify important stakeholders and assess your ability to meet their needs
- Gain cycles of learning through in-class workshops involving real leaders facing tough decisions
Business in the 21st Century
Today’s marketplace differs from yesterday’s in several important ways. Faster market cycles, more complex technologies, and leaner operations have all combined to make the margin of error very small on strategic decisions, and placed greater demands on today’s decision maker.
The Opportunity
In business today, exciting new technologies provide you with effortless access to almost unlimited quantities of raw data. Companies with the ability to convert this data into meaningful, actionable information will gain a valuable competitive advantage.
Learning That Creates Value
IIn this learning event, you’ll examine strategies for gaining the information needed to make effective decisions in the time frame required. You’ll look at the best of recent research, gain advice from leading thinkers and examine key decisions from real situations faced by real leaders. You’ll explore key elements of effective business metrics and gain skills in preparing better predictions. You’ll learn the principles of data analysis and see how they can clarify your view of reality. You’ll then use this information to prepare better forecasts and assess risks.
After you’ve acquired these real-world skills, you’ll discuss and plan how to begin applying what you’ve learned, creating an individualized plan for you to use when you get back on the job.
In-Class Workshops and Group Exercises:
A variety of demonstrations, large group activities and small group exercises will refine and enhance your ability to assess current issues and determine new approaches. You will learn by joining real leaders of real companies as they face critical decisions. You will gain cycles of learning by using the skills we discuss in class, and then examine “the rest of the story,” to see what actually happened.
Specifically you will:
- Identify ways in which intuition can help distill experience and aid in reaching decisions and ways in which it can distort our view of reality and create biases.
- Practice strategies of data analysis to gain an accurate view of reality.
- Examine ways in which individuals and groups make judgments and reach decisions.
- Craft visual displays of evidence and information that create alignment and compel action.
- Learn from Nobel Prize winning research on ways to detect and prevent the delusional optimism that contaminates innovative and ambitious new proposals.
- Explain the different types of data and explain uses of each.
- Inventory the measurements we use to track our progress and identify holes in our view of the future.
- Use decision trees to map alternatives and use them to understand potential payoffs.
Immediate Benefits of Taking This Class:
- Develop and explain the decision making process.
- Identify situations where your intuition might be biased.
- Identify the risks in new investment proposals.
- Think differently about numbers and appreciate the ways numbers can be used to aid intuition.
- Improve your ability to identify the stakeholders of a product or service and the metrics used to show how well we meet their expectations.
- Identify the type of data each metric represents and explain strengths and weaknesses of each.
- Perform metric QFD to uncover potentially damaging holes in our ability to determine how well we meet stakeholder needs.
- Learn the important attributes of effective visual displays of data and use these techniques to effectively communicate key information.
- Apply decision trees in a team setting to facilitate understanding of the alternatives and the potential outcomes.
- Perform sensitivity analysis on decision tree factors to determine which are the most important to the decision.
- Define risk and be able to identity the most commonly used methods of mitigating this risk.
- Be able to show the ways a leader contributes to the decision making process.
- Show how different frames of reference can influence feelings of risk.
- Identify the key aspects of a collaborative culture and assess strengths and weaknesses of your company’s culture.
- Use knowledge of culture to improve our ability to communicate and create change.
- View the latest research on how judgments and decisions are made.
- Explore the steps to begin our company’s journey to effective business analytics.