vimeo.com/.../844255320

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.