Strategic Decision Making

George Wright has held Faculty positions at LBS and Leeds Business School, and is currently at Strathclyde Graduate School of Business, where he consults to major blue-chip clients such as Philips and IBM. He has conducted extensive research into the role of judgement in forecasting and decision making, with particular emphasis on the simplification strategies of managers which lead to poor decisions.He has published both academic and trade books on forecasting and decision making, and contributed to various journals within the field. He founded the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making with Wiley in 1988 and is Associate Editor of the Wiley journal Journal of Forecasting and the journal International Journal of Forecasting.

• Series Foreword by Digby Jones ixAbout the author xiPreface xiiiAcknowledgements xv1 Challenging Routines 1Success formulas 3Frames of reference 42 Decision Making in Management Teams 15Groupthink 17Alleviating groupthink 253 Overcoming Overconfidence 29Overconfidence 30Confirmation bias 32Hindsight bias 33Expert predictions 33Alleviating overconfidence 394 How to Think with Scenarios 43Scenario planning 44Scenario construction: the extreme World method 45Using scenarios in decision making 49Scenario construction: the driving-forces method 55The benefits of scenario planning 625 Dealing with Decision Dilemmas 73Avoiding difficult decisions 74Case study of a management team facing a decision dilemma 76Dealing with psychological reactions to difficult decisions 806 Expectation and Decision Making 85Decision trees 86Blame culture and risk taking 937 How to Make Trade-offs 105Simplifying choices can result in poor decisions 106Making trade offs 1138 Harnessing the Minds of Managers 121Strategy development 122A technique for the facilitation of strategic thinking 123The role of the facilitator 124Lessons from this book 126Notes 131Appendix A 137Appendix B 138Appendix C 139Index 141

"..this series has much to commend it..." (Modern Management, February 2002)  "…a fascinating and readable combination of psychological theory, paper and pencil thought problems and quotations from contemporary media…" (Productivity Digest, May 2002)