Over the years,
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.
That's what I've talked about here.
When I teach students and executives as well,
I will oftentimes watch
clips of a movie. It's a motion picture called 13 Days,
which depicted the decision-making process
that President Kennedy used during 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 this was the closest time that the U.S. and Russia
came to launching nuclear warheads on one another,
essentially starting World War III.
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 suggested for a U.S. president.
Tradition would say the challenge or the goal
is to overcome your adversary, to beat your adversary or to win.
That's what traditional policy would have recommended,
but he didn't take that route.
The route that he took is he wants to avoid nuclear war.
And as you see in the movie, he had a lot of pressure
to follow a more traditional decision process as commander in chief.
So my first principle is to be very clear about the problem
or the decision or the goal 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 perspectives 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.
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 these solutions creatively did avoid these two countries
going to nuclear war with one another.
So this was my third suggested principle.
When you're trying to arrive at decisions,
especially high-stakes decision,
generate multiple alternatives and multiple solutions to consider.
And then finally, the fourth thing I want to point out
is that President Kennedy made the tough call.
And everybody got behind him when he made those tough calls.
And this is my fourth principle.
When you make tough calls,
make sure that now you're moving from decision-making
to decision implementation or decision execution.
So, 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.
More importantly, what the Cuban Missile Crisis shows
is that if you have a high-quality decision process,
you're going to produce higher quality decisions.
So that's the big point.
When you think 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 Paul Nutt
suggests that about 50% of managers' decisions
fail to achieve their intended outcomes.
So in general,
you can rightly say that status quo decision processes in organizations
earn about an F in terms of a grading scale.
One of the big insights
that came from his research of actual decisions
and the consequences of those decisions
is that managers used poor decision processes
in making those decisions.
As transformational leaders,
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 become an outcome of the best quality processes.
And now we're going to turn our attention to continue this logic of design thinking,
but applying it specifically to approaches to innovation
and we're going to apply it to how to design high-performing teams.