Over the years when you sit 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
clips of a movie, the 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 this is the closest time that the U.S.
and Russia came to launching nuclear warheads on one
another, essentially starting World War three, which would have undoubtedly
killed millions of people probably pretty quickly as well.
Historians have also
watched the movie and given it their blessing that the way the dynamics
are played out in the movie are mostly correct and accurate.
So this is one of the reasons that I recommend it
and I recommend it to you as well.
Here are some of my own highlights that play out in the movie.
And as you'll see, many of these are 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 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 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 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 perspective from people
who disliked Dean 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 these 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 or multiple solutions to consider.
And then finally, the fourth thing 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, when you make tough calls,
make sure that now you're
moving from decision making to decision implementation or decision execution.
So at the end, 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 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 you'll have higher quality decisions.
Research done by Ohio State Professor Paul Nutt suggests
that about 50% managers decisions
fail to achieve their intended outcomes.
So in general, I think you could rightly say that
status quo decision processes in organizations earn about an F.
In terms of a grading scale.
And he one of the big insights that 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, 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.