Indies Education · Business Curriculum
Decision Making
Use evidence, explicit trade-offs, and review loops to make better calls under uncertainty.
Agile Project Management: Evidence, Value, and Control
Agile project management organizes uncertain work around valuable increments, feedback, and adaptation. This chapter explains principles, product ownership, backlogs, iteration and flow, technical quality, governance, forecasting, metrics, scaling boundaries, organizational design, and the failure of copying rituals without changing decisions.
Program Management: Govern Benefits and Interdependence
Program management coordinates related projects and operational change to realize strategic benefits. This chapter explains program purpose, benefits maps, component architecture, governance, interdependencies, tranches, stakeholder transitions, risk, capability, metrics, closure, and why consolidating project status is not enough.
Cautious or Courageous? Calibrate Business Risk
A rigorous, practical guide to calibrate boldness to stakes, reversibility, downside, evidence, option value, and organizational resilience rather than rewarding fear or bravado. It combines a defensible decision model, a worked business case, implementation steps, measurement architecture, ethical guardrails, leadership questions, and field exercises for operators who need to turn analysis into coordinated action.
Howard Marks’ Second-Level Thinking Skills
A rigorous, practical guide to reason beyond the obvious first-order story by examining expectations, market price, consensus, second-order consequences, probabilities, asymmetry, and what must already be believed. It combines a defensible decision model, a worked business case, implementation steps, measurement architecture, ethical guardrails, leadership questions, and field exercises for operators who need to turn analysis.
Blindspot Analysis: Find What Decisions Miss
A rigorous, practical guide to identify systematically unseen risks, assumptions, stakeholders, incentives, data gaps, and failure paths through structured external challenge and evidence. It combines a defensible decision model, a worked business case, implementation steps, measurement architecture, ethical guardrails, leadership questions, and field exercises for operators who need to turn analysis into coordinated action.
Critical Thinking for Better Business Decisions
A rigorous, practical guide to evaluate claims, evidence, assumptions, alternatives, inference, and consequences with disciplined openness rather than reflexive scepticism. It combines a defensible decision model, a worked business case, implementation steps, measurement architecture, ethical guardrails, leadership questions, and field exercises for operators who need to turn analysis into coordinated action.
Reactive Decision Making Without Losing Control
A rigorous, practical guide to respond rapidly to genuine signals while preventing urgency, emotion, salience, and fragmented ownership from turning every event into uncoordinated action. It combines a defensible decision model, a worked business case, implementation steps, measurement architecture, ethical guardrails, leadership questions, and field exercises for operators who need to turn analysis into coordinated.
Linear Programming: A Practical Business Guide
A rigorous, practical guide to allocate scarce resources optimally under explicit linear objectives and constraints while testing feasibility, shadow prices, sensitivity, and model limits. It combines a defensible decision model, a worked business case, implementation steps, measurement architecture, ethical guardrails, leadership questions, and field exercises for operators who need to turn analysis into coordinated action.
Monte Carlo Analysis: Model Uncertainty Clearly
A rigorous, practical guide to represent uncertainty with defensible input distributions, dependency, repeated simulation, and decision-relevant output ranges instead of one deterministic forecast. It combines a defensible decision model, a worked business case, implementation steps, measurement architecture, ethical guardrails, leadership questions, and field exercises for operators who need to turn analysis into coordinated action.
Ten Common Decision-Making Mistakes to Avoid
A rigorous, practical guide to diagnose ten recurring failures of framing, evidence, alternatives, uncertainty, participation, commitment, execution, and learning. It combines a defensible decision model, a worked business case, implementation steps, measurement architecture, ethical guardrails, leadership questions, and field exercises for operators who need to turn analysis into coordinated action.
Organize Team Decision Making for Better Results
A rigorous, practical guide to organize collective choices through clear decision rights, relevant participation, shared evidence, independent judgment, structured dialogue, commitment, and review. It combines a defensible decision model, a worked business case, implementation steps, measurement architecture, ethical guardrails, leadership questions, and field exercises for operators who need to turn analysis into coordinated action.
The Delphi Method: Design, Consensus, and Evidence
The Delphi method gathers expert judgment across iterative questionnaire rounds with controlled feedback. This chapter explains when Delphi is appropriate, panel selection, anonymity, round design, evidence briefs, consensus definitions, qualitative synthesis, attrition, stability, disagreement, reporting, ethics, and how to translate expert judgment into accountable decisions.