The leader’s field guide to enabling better work, workforce, and workplace decisions

For many companies, success hinges on the ability to thrive in an unpredictable, ever-changing world. This isn’t always easy: leaders must be able to quickly identify and continuously respond to internal and external challenges and opportunities arising at the intersection of work, workforce, and workplace itself. In this chapter, we introduce a way to develop this ability through decision intelligence—a discipline that can enable your company’s leaders to sense events that matter, analyze decision alternatives, and act upon the best available choices.

Considering the human tendency to jump to conclusions in an increasingly noisy and complex world, how do leaders cut through the noise and determine what’s relevant to work, workforce, and workplace? The answer is the first component of the decision intelligence capability: sense.

Even the best insights are ineffective if leaders can’t make sound decisions about how and when to act upon them. The second component of effective decision intelligence involves learning to think like researchers to overcome the cognitive biases, hypothesis errors, and data traps that impede or misdirect sound decision-making. This step can be summed up in a word: analyze.

Existing company cultures and decision-making processes often contain hurdles which can slow down or prevent their implementation. As a result, deciding to do something doesn’t often translate into something getting done. The missing connection between deciding and doing can be summed up by the word act.