Over the years when dissent, when teaching decision
making processes to students and executives at MIT and elsewhere,
I often set up group exercises that let students practice
this sort of debate and constructive conflict in teams,
and it gives them firsthand experience on how these
processes reliably deliver higher quality decisions
than decisions that didn't have this kind of design process.
And so that's what I've talked about here.
I also, in what I teach students and executives
as well, will oftentimes watch
a clip of a movie motion picture called 13 Days,
which depicted the decision making process that President
Kennedy used during what was what's now called the Cuban Missile Crisis.
This is probably one of the most consequential decisions
that any president has ever made in history,
because it was the closest time that the U.S.
and Russia came to launching nuclear
warheads on one another, essentially starting World War three.
Here are some of my own highlights that play out in the movie.
And as you'll see, many of these kind of core activities
that Kennedy used in making this decision align with the four principles
that I'm suggesting in our program.
Number one, he was very clear about his goal,
and his goal was to avoid nuclear war.
Now, this is different than what tradition would have had suggested for a U.S.
president. And tradition would say.
The the the challenge
is to
overcome your adversary in the future adversary order.
That's what traditional policy would have recommended.
But he didn't take that route, the route that he took as he wants
to avoid nuclear war.
And as as you see in the movie, he had a lot of pressures
to make to follow sort of a more traditional decision process
as commander in chief.
So this is my first principle is to be very clear about the problem
or the decision
or the goals that you're trying to achieve with this decision process.
The second is that you'll see
that he actually owned the decision process
from the very beginning as commander in chief.
Now, he sought out lots of different perspectives
that he knew and his advisers knew were important to the decision making process.
And as you'll see, he sought perspective from people
who dislike him and even distrusted him.
But he knew those people had valuable expertise
that could inform his understanding of the problem.
This was my second recommendation in designing a decision process
is to seek out multiple perspectives to understand the problem that you face.
The third thing I want to point out is he utilized teams of advisors,
several sets of advisers to come up with creative solutions
and multiple solutions to this problem that he was facing.
Those alternative
solutions that he faced actually led to some of the decisions
that he actually made, the solutions that he actually put in place.
And the solutions creatively did avoid these
two countries going to nuclear war with one another.
So this was my third suggested principle, is to when you're
trying to arrive at decisions, especially on high stakes decision,
generate multiple alternatives and multiple solutions to consider.
And then finally,
I want to point out is that President Kennedy made the tough call.
Right.
And everybody sort of got behind him when he made those tough calls.
And this is my fourth
principle is that, you know, you make tough calls,
make sure that now you're
moving from decision making to decision implementation or decision execution.
So it's again, I think that the movie provides
an excellent illustration of some of the design principles
for decision processes that I'm recommending in this program.
One importantly, what I think the Cuban Missile Crisis shows is that if you have
a high quality decision process, you're going to produce higher quality decisions.
Right.
So that's the big point of sort of
when you think of of architecting a decision process,
you can architect a high quality process
and then you'll have higher quality decisions.
Research done by Ohio State Professor Long that suggests
that about 50% managers decisions
fail to achieve their intended outcomes.
So in general, I think you can rightly say that
status quo decision processes in organizations earn about an F,
okay in terms of rating scale
and he one of the big insights said
in this research was the actual decisions and the consequences of those decisions
is that managers used for decision processes
and making those decisions as transformational leaders.
I think you want to take some of the principles
and some of the processes that we're describing here
to help you make better decisions as you're looking at your organization
holistically in terms of change and innovation
by having a better decision process, we hope that you'll have better outcomes
and better consequences in those decisions that you make.
Remember that the best decisions can or
can become an outcome of the best quality processes.
And now we're going to turn our attention to sort of continue this logic of design
thinking, but applying it specifically to ways approaches to innovation.
And we're going to apply it to how to design high performing teams.