Indies Education · Business Curriculum
Decision Making
Use evidence, explicit trade-offs, and review loops to make better calls under uncertainty.
How Good Are Your Project Management Skills?
A serious project-management self-assessment examines evidence from live decisions and outcomes rather than producing a flattering personality score. This chapter offers a capability model, behavioral rubrics, artifact review, multisource feedback, simulation, development experiments, safeguards, and a 90-day growth plan.
The Stepladder Technique for Better Group Decisions
The Stepladder Technique structures how members enter a decision discussion so each person contributes before being influenced by the existing group. This chapter explains independent preparation, core-pair formation, sequential entry, evidence capture, order effects, hierarchy, remote adaptation, decision rules, validation, and limits.
Avoiding Groupthink: Build Decisions That Invite Dissent
Groupthink describes a pattern in which pressure for agreement undermines realistic appraisal. This chapter examines the theory and its criticisms, conformity, shared-information bias, authority, escalation, authentic versus assigned dissent, red teams, premortems, independent estimates, decision records, and safeguards for high-quality group choice.
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.
Prepare Yourself to Make Better Decisions
A rigorous, practical guide to prepare attention, objectives, evidence, emotional state, conflicts, uncertainty, and time so consequential choices are not made from avoidable cognitive depletion or urgency theatre. 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.
Equip Your Team to Make Better Decisions
A rigorous, practical guide to build team decision capability through clear rights, shared context, information access, methods, psychological safety, escalation, resources, and feedback. 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 Ladder of Inference: Test Your Reasoning
A rigorous, practical guide to slow the movement from selected data to meaning, assumptions, conclusions, beliefs, and action so teams can inspect reasoning and learn from disagreement. 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.
Decision Making Under Uncertainty: A Practical Guide
A rigorous, practical guide to choose robust, staged, and learnable actions when probabilities, mechanisms, outcomes, or future conditions are only partly known. 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.
Risk Impact/Probability Charts Done Right
Impact/probability charts can organize risk conversations but often create false precision and rank reversals. This chapter explains scale design, scenario wording, matrix mapping, confidence, velocity, controls, escalation, a worked portfolio case, and when deeper analysis is mandatory.
Risk Prioritization: From Scores to Action
Risk prioritization allocates scarce attention, capital, and response capacity across uncertain scenarios. This chapter offers a rigorous portfolio method covering mandatory gates, exposure, tail harm, velocity, controls, dependencies, tractability, information value, sequencing, and review.
Quantitative Pros and Cons: A Decision Guide
Quantitative pros and cons extends a simple list into a transparent multi-criteria decision model. This chapter explains objectives, alternatives, measurement scales, swing weighting, scoring, uncertainty, sensitivity, stakeholder distribution, validation, and the false precision that can turn arithmetic into camouflage.
What-If Analysis: Scenarios, Sensitivity, and Action
What-if analysis asks how outcomes change when assumptions or events differ. This chapter distinguishes sensitivity, scenario, stress, break-even, and simulation methods; explains model validation, correlated inputs, thresholds, decision rules, communication, and the dangers of treating a spreadsheet as reality.