Strategic Decision Making - Courses - Executive Summer School - Summer schools - Study

Decision making is a fundamental skill for any successful executive. But decisions at strategic level are hard to make. They require large amounts of resources and commitments, which may be irreversible. They involve long-term consequences that are hard to predict. And they require considering multiple, often conflicting, strategic objectives, which are difficult to balance, particularly in the presence of risk and uncertainty.

Traditional courses on strategy focus on environment analyses and a hyper-rationalistic prescription of generic positioning strategies. This approach, however, neglects that each organisation is unique, with its own strategic objectives, capabilities and strategic options – and that strategic decision making is at the core of any successful strategizing process. For these reasons our approach is focused, instead, on enhancing strategic decision making capabilities, recognising that both analysis and intuition are necessary for high-quality decision making.

This unique course is designed to enhance your decision capabilities when confronted with strategic choices, when searching for decision opportunities, and when designing strategies – both in conditions where there is sufficient time to conduct analyses and when there is only time to choose intuitively. The course will improve your analytic and intuitive abilities to make strategic decisions under such tough conditions.

The course brings together the internationally renowned LSE expertise in Decision Sciences research, and adopts a hands-on approach to teaching, which will help you learn the key principles and frameworks for high quality decision making and how to apply them into your practice. Both lecturers have extensive practical experience in applying this approach into real-world problems, and in teaching the content to executives and practitioners.

Benefits

During the course's very interactive five days, participants will:

• Get acquainted with the framework for analysing decisions with multiple objectives and uncertainty;

• Learn decision modelling skills for representing complex strategic decisions;

• Learn how to use decision software to support strategic decisions and gain hands-on experience for representing strategic objectives and value trade-offs, as well as uncertainties and risks;

• Analyse the impact of strategies on these objectives and choose high-value strategic options, taking into account strategic objectives, risks and uncertainties;

• Get acquainted with key principles of behavioural decision science;

• Learn how to better tackle decision problems that are hard to solve analytically, for lack of time, data, computational ability, or too much information;

• Be aware of systematic biases and traps that operate on individuals and groups and learn how to overcome them.

This course is intended to be beneficial for executives across every department of the organisation who are dealing, or are involved with, strategic decisions. It also would benefit managers who will be in leadership positions in the future, as well as anyone dealing with important decisions, either in private or public organisations, as well as small enterprises.

The course created one of the most inspiring
weeks I have had in many years.

Simen Revold
Director, Carlsberg Norway