Course Objective & Scope
Even seasoned leaders unconsciously cherry-pick data that confirms their initial instinct (confirmation bias), keep funding failing initiatives (sunk cost fallacy) or anchor on the first number spoken by the most senior person in the room. Drawing on the work of Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky and Olivier Sibony, this course examines cognitive biases and decision noise in corporate settings.
Because awareness alone rarely stops bias in the moment, participants design structural 'decision hygiene' protocols and debiasing checklists for their organisation's hiring, budgeting, project gate and strategy reviews.
Who Should Attend?
- Managers and directors making resource, product, budget and people decisions
- PMO, strategy, HR and procurement leaders
- Technical and business leads serving on review or investment committees
- No technical prerequisites
Key Takeaways
- Recognise when fast System 1 intuition misleads complex business judgements
- Diagnose confirmation bias, sunk cost, anchoring, overconfidence and availability traps in live cases
- Counter groupthink and HiPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion) dynamics in team meetings
- Embed structural decision-hygiene rules into workflows rather than relying on willpower alone
- Apply a practical debiasing checklist and upfront kill criteria to project and budget reviews
Curriculum
System 1 and System 2: When Mental Shortcuts Become Costly Traps
- Fast intuition versus slow analytical reasoning and the limits of expert gut feel
- Distinguishing systematic bias from decision noise (unwanted variability)
Five High-Cost Biases in Strategy and Resource Allocation
- Confirmation bias, sunk cost fallacy and the planning fallacy
- Anchoring, overconfidence and status-quo bias in business cases
Social Amplifiers: Groupthink, the HiPPO Effect and Information Cascades
- How early speakers and senior titles distort group judgement
- False consensus, cascade effects and group polarisation in committees
Decision Hygiene and Structural Debiasing Techniques
- Independent pre-scoring, reference class forecasting (the outside view) and red-teaming
- Setting upfront tripwires and project kill criteria before emotional attachment forms
Corporate Decision Process Audit and Checklist Workshop
- Auditing a real internal process (project gate, vendor selection or hiring) for bias vulnerabilities
- Building a 10-point Decision Hygiene Checklist for team and committee use
Other Courses in This Category
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Testing the quality of evidence across reports, market studies, internal metrics and AI outputs; covers correlation vs causation, survivorship bias, base rates and source triangulation.
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Defining weighted decision criteria (MCDA) before evaluating options, separating knockout must-haves from scored trade-offs and building decision matrices on a real organisational choice.
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Overcoming brittle single-point forecasts with 2x2 scenario matrices, early-warning signposts, trigger-based contingency plans and Gary Klein's Pre-Mortem method on a real initiative.
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Using LLMs as structured devil's advocates and Red Team partners rather than sycophantic yes-men; covers steelmanning, assumption hunting and stress-testing strategic proposals before approval.
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Defining the real root problem instead of chasing symptoms; covers the Problem Statement Canvas, MECE issue trees, 5 Whys, scope boundaries and aligning stakeholders before jumping to solutions.
- Live Course
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Hypothesis-driven analysis, argument mapping (claim-evidence-warrant), deductive and inductive reasoning, spotting logical fallacies and assumption mapping; participants solve business cases systematically.
- Live Course
- 5 modules
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