Indies Education · Business Curriculum
Decision Making
Use evidence, explicit trade-offs, and review loops to make better calls under uncertainty.
Rationalize Your Project Portfolio Responsibly
A rigorous, practical guide to turn a crowded project inventory into a coherent portfolio by testing strategic contribution, value, risk, dependency, capacity, option value, and stopping discipline. 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.
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.
Hartnett’s Consensus-Oriented Decision-Making Model
Hartnett’s Consensus-Oriented Decision-Making model guides groups from framing and open discussion through proposal development, concern testing, modification, decision, and implementation. This chapter explains its seven steps, consensus meaning, facilitation, stand-asides and objections, authority, evidence, accessibility, power, failure modes, and responsible use.
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.