vimeo.com/.../844255320

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 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 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 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.

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.

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.