Anna Graham attended the Effective Decision Making: Thinking Critically and Rationally workshop at The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School last week. The program is designed to guide participants to think rigorously and critically to improve judgment, providing Anna with an enhanced strategy to master the major challenge of being a decisive, strategic leader in our fast-paced, complex, and uncertain industry environment.
Alongside 44 other attendees from all over the world—with 6 out of 7 continents represented—Anna spent 4 days learning how to turn decision-making into a science.
The workshop was led by Annie Duke, a professional poker player, who reinforced that gut feelings and group thinking weren’t the most effective tactics to make meaningful decisions. Instead, she guided attendees to think carefully about the problem they were trying to solve and produce solutions based on facts and logic rather than intuition or consensus opinion.
Anna and her peers broke into small groups where they worked through several different exercises designed to help them practice these new skills in their everyday lives. The exercises ranged from identifying specific problems and coming up with solutions based on facts rather than gut instincts to role-playing situations where participants had to act out scenarios using logical reasoning.
“In the past, I used to think that there were good and bad decisions. But now I know that there are only good and bad outcomes. Now that I’ve learned how to make good outcomes, I feel confident and inspired to use and share these decision-making skills.” Anna reported.
