Science reassures, art disturbs (Proverb)

This intriguing exploration of underlying forces in decision making takes as its starting point a wealth of high profile decision disasters. In brilliantly readable analyses, Helga Drummond shows how better awareness of the inherent uncertainties of the decision making process could have made the outcomes very different.

Examples showcased include:

The Hatfield rail crash
The Kursk submarine disaster
The Challenger disaster
The year 2000 fuel crisis
The WWII Dardanelles expedition
The Barings Bank collapse
The Taurus Stock Exchange Project The Hillsborough tragedy
The King's Cross underground fire
The Millennium Dome

This entertaining yet instructive book offers new insight into the realities of decision making, and shows how you can confront them to improve your prospects of success.

This edited volume looks at whether it is possible to be more transparent about uncertainty in scientific evidence without undermining public understanding and trust. With contributions from leading experts in the field, this book explores the communication of risk and decision-making in an increasingly post-truth world. Drawing on case studies from climate change to genetic testing, the authors argue for better quality evidence synthesis to cut through the noise and highlight the need for more structured public dialogue. For uncertainty in scientific evidence to be communicated effectively, they conclude that trustworthiness is vital: the data and methods underlying statistics must be transparent, valid, and sound, and the numbers need to demonstrate practical utility and add social value to people's lives. Presenting a conceptual framework to help navigate the reader through the key social and scientific challenges of a post-truth era, this book will be of great relevance to students, scholars, and policy makers with an interest in risk analysis and communication.

An incredible ability awaits managers who practice Theory of Constraints (TOC) techniques: they can take a problem, look beyond the less important details, and directly identify the source of trouble. They've been known to promptly resolve perplexing matters - while the uninformed remain stuck.
So many more managers could gain the benefit of TOC thinking... if they only took the time. Eli Schragenheim now offers an informative and enjoyable self-learning method, proving how TOC can be invaluable at a wide variety of workplaces.
Management Dilemmas: The Theory of Constraints Approach to Problem Identification and Solutions conveys TOC methods through "virtual experience"-stories of managers and the situations they need to resolve. Take note of the dilemmas they're facing. Think about how you would respond under those circumstances. Then, compare your reactions with Schragenheim's TOC-influenced analysis.
Associated with Dr. Eli Goldratt (the founder of TOC) for seven years, Schragenheim doesn't tell how the stories end. Instead, he encourages the reader to try out TOC techniques-especially the need to arrive at the most precise answer by raising the right questions. The conclusions you reach today could greatly help your on-the-job thinking tomorrow!

Decision making plays a major role in virtually every theory of organizational behavior. However, decision theory has not provided organizational theorists with useful descriptions of how decisions are made, either by individuals or by individuals in organizations. The earliest offering came from economics in the form of the "normative" rational view of decision making. The underlying presumption was that decision makers are all striving to maximize return or minimize loss, that decisions are based upon unlimited information, and that they have the capacity to use the information efficiently. They know the options open to them and the consequences of pursuing one or another of those options. The optimal course of action is revealed by applying the appropriate analysis and choosing the most profitable option. The key concepts are rationality, analysis, orderliness, and maximization, and even a moment's thought demonstrates the gap between these concepts and real-life experience. From the viewpoint of organizational theory, the primary problem with the normative view of decision making, and by analogy with much behavioral decision research, is its reliance on the "gamble metaphor." That is, decisions are characterized as gambles in an effort to capture the inherent risk. This metaphor has the advantage of simplicity, but it is a flawed simplicity.
This book is about a different kind of behavioral theory -- image theory. It is a psychological theory of decision making that abandons the gamble metaphor and the normative logic that the metaphor supports. Instead it sees decision making as guided by the beliefs and values that the decision maker, or a community of decision makers, holds to be relevant to the decision at hand. These beliefs and values dictate the goals of the decision. The point is to craft a course of action that will achieve these goals without interfering with the pursuit of other goals. The book begins with an overview of image theory that outlines the basic concepts of the theory and a little of its history. The next two parts correspond to the theory's two decision mechanisms, the compatibility test and the profitability test. The final section contains extensions and developments of the theory as well as cognate ideas that have their basis in the theory. This book's purpose is to provide -- in one place -- the theoretical and empirical work that has been done up to now and to suggest directions for future work.

This book covers a large spectrum of cutting-edge game theory applications in management science in which Professor Georges Zaccour has made significant contributions. The book consists of 21 chapters and highlights the latest treatments of game theory in various areas, including marketing, supply chains, energy and environmental management, and cyber defense. With this book, former Ph.D. students and successful research collaborators of Professor Zaccour wish to honor his many scientific achievements.

Young children start school already able to do a surprising amount of mathematics. This book examines the nature and origin of subject knowledge and is based on information gathered from observing the interactions between teachers and their first-year pupils. It demonstrates the necessity of the classroom teacher to draw on many kinds of knowledge in order to deal with various issues surrounding classroom learning and teaching. Two important core areas are knowledge of lesson structure and of subject matter; this book address the area of subject matter and, as such, it should be of interest to classroom teachers and lecturers in education.

If you aren't using the term "naturalistic decision making, " or NDM, you soon will be. Even as a very young field, NDM has already had far-reaching applications in areas as diverse as management, aviation, health care, nuclear power, military command and control, corporate teamwork, and manufacturing.
Put simply, NDM is the way people use their experience to make decisions in the context of a job or task. Of particular interest to NDM researchers are the effects of high-stake consequences, shifting goals, incomplete information, time pressure, uncertainty, and other conditions that are present in most of today's work places and that add to the complexity of decision making. Applications of NDM research findings target decision aids and training that help people in their decision-making processes.
This book reports the findings of top NDM researchers, as well as many of their current applications. In addition, the book offers a historical perspective on the emergence of this new paradigm, describes recent theoretical and methodological advancements, and points to future developments. It was written for people interested in decision making research and applications relative to a diverse array of work settings and products such as human-computer interfaces, decision support systems, individual and team training, product designs, and organizational development and planning.

If you aren't using the term "naturalistic decision making, " or NDM, you soon will be. Even as a very young field, NDM has already had far-reaching applications in areas as diverse as management, aviation, health care, nuclear power, military command and control, corporate teamwork, and manufacturing.
Put simply, NDM is the way people use their experience to make decisions in the context of a job or task. Of particular interest to NDM researchers are the effects of high-stake consequences, shifting goals, incomplete information, time pressure, uncertainty, and other conditions that are present in most of today's work places and that add to the complexity of decision making. Applications of NDM research findings target decision aids and training that help people in their decision-making processes.
This book reports the findings of top NDM researchers, as well as many of their current applications. In addition, the book offers a historical perspective on the emergence of this new paradigm, describes recent theoretical and methodological advancements, and points to future developments. It was written for people interested in decision making research and applications relative to a diverse array of work settings and products such as human-computer interfaces, decision support systems, individual and team training, product designs, and organizational development and planning.

Best Team Skills gives you the tools you need to achieve the highest performance through the most productive encouragement and motivational methods available. Dr. Losoncy identifies the 50 skills that will most encourage your team members. Using 100 encouragement opportunity exercises, he works as your personal trainer to reinforce your progress. Just as there are vital technical skills that team members need in their own areas of expertise, there are also consequential team skills that are necessary to build responsible, involved and committed team players. If you want to become a more encouraging team member or help your entire team to become mutual encouragers, Best Team Skills is for you. Written not only for your work team, you can also can also apply Losoncy's techniques to your home or sports team. Presented in an easy-to-read format, each skill is put to use quickly for immediate feedback and success.

The challenges faced by 21st-century businesses, organizations and governments are characterized as being fundamentally different in nature, scope and levels of impact from those of the past. As problems become increasingly complex and wicked, conventional reductive approaches and data-based solutions are limited. The authors argue that practical wisdom is required. This book provides an integral and practical model for incorporating wisdom into management decision making. Based on a cross-disciplinary conceptualization of practical wisdom, the authors distinguish systematically between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom-based decision making. While they suggest that data, analytics, information and knowledge can assist decision-makers to better deal with complex and wicked problems, they argue that data-based systems cannot replace optimized human decision-making capabilities. These capabilities, the authors explain, include a range of qualities and characteristics inherent in philosophical, psychological and organizational conceptions of practical wisdom. Accordingly, in this book, the authors introduce a model that identifies the specific qualities and processes involved in making wise decisions, especially in management. The model is based on the empirical fi ndings of the authors' studies in the areas of wisdom and management. This book is a practical resource for professionals, practitioners, and consultants in both the private and public sectors. The theoretical discussions, critical arguments, and practical guidelines provided in the book will be extremely valuable to students at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, as well as upper-level postdoctoral researchers looking at business management strategies.

Many, if not most, of one's important decisions are made in the context of one's work. However, because workplace decisions cover such a broad range of issues, it often is difficult to detect underlying commonalities in how they are made, and in how things go wrong when they do go wrong. As a result, there are nearly as many different descriptions of workplace decisions as there are decisions themselves. In this volume, the best features of these diverse descriptions are unified in a new, intuitively compelling view of decision making called "Image Theory." The result is a clear picture of real-life, day-to-day workplace decision making that allows us to think constructively about how such decisions are made and about how to improve them when improvement is necessary.

This book describes an effective decision-making and planning architecture for enhancing the navigation capabilities of automated vehicles in the presence of non-detailed, open-source maps. The system involves dynamically obtaining road corridors from map information and utilizing a camera-based lane detection system to update and enhance the navigable space in order to address the issues of intrinsic uncertainty and low-fidelity. An efficient and human-like local planner then determines, within a probabilistic framework, a safe motion trajectory, ensuring the continuity of the path curvature and limiting longitudinal and lateral accelerations. LiDAR-based perception is then used to identify the driving scenario, and subsequently re-plan the trajectory, leading in some cases to adjustment of the high-level route to reach the given destination. The method has been validated through extensive theoretical and experimental analyses, which are reported here in detail.

The future may still be unpredictable, but nowadays, disasters are not. We live in a time of constant, consistent catastrophe, where things more often go wrong than they go right. So why do we still fumble when disaster hits? Why are we always one step behind? In The Devil Never Sleeps, Juliette Kayyem lays the groundwork for a new approach to dealing with disasters. Presenting the basic themes of crisis management, Kayyem amends the principles we rely on far too easily. Instead, she offers us a new framework to anticipate the "devil's" inevitable return, highlighting the leadership deficiencies we need to overcome and the forward thinking we need to harness. It's no longer about preventing a disaster from occurring, but learning how to use the tools at our disposal to minimize the consequences when it does. Filled with personal anecdotes and real-life examples from natural disasters like the California wildfires to man-made ones like the Boeing 737 MAX crisis, The Devil Never Sleeps is a guide for governments, businesses, and individuals alike on how to alter our thinking so that we can develop effective strategies in the face of perpetual catastrophe.

Offering an approach outside the mainstream of Management of Technology (MOT) thought, the objective of this text is to inform decision-makers, policy-makers and educators/students about the range of management technology, policies and programmes in each region.

Offering an approach outside the mainstream of Management of Technology (MOT) thought, the objective of this text is to inform decision-makers, policy-makers and educators/students about the range of management technology, policies and programmes in each region.

In this thought-provoking book Dr Newman looks beyond the conventional techniques of problem solving to the underlying process. He identifies eight stages and explains how to recognize which technique is appropriate to which stage. On this basis managers can generate solutions at both the personal and the organizational level. He shows: c how to overcome the four main obstacles to developing a balanced problem solving style c how to manage the relationship between problem solving style and stress c how to use physical movement as an aid to problem solving. A unique feature of the book is a Problem Solving Styles Profile that enables each reader to apply the material in the text to improve their own problem solving capability. Written in a lively and practical style and drawing on examples from a wide range of real-life problems, Dr Newman's book is certain of a warm welcome from managers, team leaders and professionals of every kind.

Professional organizations-such as accounting and consulting firms, law firms, and investment banks-are fundamental to the functioning of the global economy. Yet many of the most powerful are notoriously private. This book uncovers the complex, messy, and surprisingly emotional challenges of leading professional organizations-revealing the realities that lies beneath the 'professional' surface which these organizations present to the outside world. Individual professionals-highly educated, highly intelligent, and highly opinionated-are generally reluctant to see themselves as followers and may be equally reluctant to put themselves forward as leaders. They value their autonomy and confer authority on their leaders on a highly contingent basis. How does a professional come to be seen as a leader within a professional organization? How do leaders maintain their position once they have reached the top of their organization? How do they navigate the complex power relationships among their professional colleagues and actually get things done? Leading Professionals: Power, Politics, and Prima Donnas analyses the complex power dynamics and interpersonal politics that lie at the heart of leadership in professional organizations. It is based on Laura Empson's scholarly research into the world's leading professional organizations across a range of sectors, including interviews with over 500 senior professionals in 16 countries. It draws on the latest organizational and leadership theory to analyse in detail exactly how professionals come together to create 'leadership'. It identifies how change happens within professional organizations and explains why their leaders so often fail.

First published in 1994. Mission Statements: A Guide to the Corporate and Nonprofit Sectors offers the most exciting opportunities for advancing the study of organization direction in the four decades that it has been actively pursued. The study of missions of organizations has remained on the "back burner" of scholarly pursuits because of the great difficulty that researchers have faced in gathering appropriate formal statements from corporations and nonprofit organizations. As a result, the importance of missions to distinguish among organizations and to guide the development and execution of implementing strategies has become a nearly universally endorsed but unenthusiastically practiced element in organizational planning activities. This information laden new book by John Graham and Wendy Havlick invites managers and academic researchers to undertake the study of missions with greater expectations that much can be learned about the organizations, their leaders, and their strategies through a comprehensive assessment of their written statements of values and priorities.

In recent years, there has been increasing implementation of group and team decision-making within organizations, much of it managed electronically, between members of what are "virtual" groups or teams. Recent research into effective team implementation emphasizes "trust" as an intermediary process, and trust must be a part of any account of team decision-making. This book provides an integrated framework that represents process in decision-making by interactive groups and teams. This framework furthers both our understanding of process and our capabilities in implementation, based on an account of group decision-making that differentiates the information types contributing to decision quality and relates them to process in interactive groups and teams. Author Steve Silver emphasizes the social structure that is inherent in the interaction of decision-makers as group or team members and effects on the information they exchange.

This highly practical book explains how executive teams in global companies can work together to successfully drive change, enable fast growth or restructure the business. It demonstrates a clear correlation between team development and business results and even deals with special issues for teams in the not-for-profit sector and emerging markets.

Planning for the management of nuclear wastes, whatever their level of radioactivity, is one of the most important environmental problems for all societies that produce utility, industrial, medical, or other radioactive waste products. Attempts to site low-level radioactive waste disposal facilities in Western industrial societies, however, have repeatedly engendered conflicts between governments, encountered vehement opposition on the part of local citizen groups, and given rise to overt hostilities among involved parties. "LLRW Disposal Facility Siting" is the result of a study designed to learn more about the causes underlying failed and successful efforts to site LLRW disposal facilities. The study is based on case histories of LLRW disposal facility siting processes in six countries. Siting processes in five states within the United States and in five additional countries are analyzed using information obtained from public documents and supplemented by interviews with key participants. The selected states and countries are major generators of LLRW and each has made efforts to establish LLRW disposal facilities between 1984 and 1994. They vary widely in the approaches they have adopted to LLRW management, the institutional structures developed for managing the siting process, the means used to involve stakeholders and technical experts in the facility siting process and the amount and type of data used in making decisions. The analysis of these case histories provides general lessons about the advantages, disadvantages, strengths, and weaknesses of the various approaches that have been attempted or implemented. The text provides data for academics and researchers working in the area of environmental management.

The author covers fourteen tools to help you find the information you need and offers step-by-step instructions for constructing each one. He shows you how these tools can be combined with a set of simple problem-solving steps that can act as a powerful change agent to help reduce or eliminate process problems.

Five-Step Problem-Solving Process

Identify the problem: Clearly state what needs improvement.

Analyze: Determine what causes the problem to occur. Evaluate Alternatives: Identify and select actions to reduce or eliminate the problem. Test Implement: Implement these actions on a trial basis to determine their effectiveness. Standardize: Ensure that useful actions are preserved.

Diversity and inclusion (D&I) isn't just an HR exercise - it can make a real different to your team performance too. By making everyone in your team feel like they belong, you'll be able to boost motivation and productivity. Everyone Included helps you make inclusion, belonging and wellbeing central to your team. By helping everyone feel that they belong, your team will foster genuine inclusion and be ready to adapt and evolve in the future. With a step-by-step plan to design and implement a diversity and inclusion plan that brings results: Where are you now? - Understand your team profile now by conducting a belonging Audit to identify your how inclusive your team is. What do I do next? - Design a D&I plan, including a business case to win support, and identify key metrics to measure its effectiveness How do I keep going? - Ensure your programme continually improves and remains relevant by creating measurements and feedback loops Everyone Included is your comprehensive, step-by-step guide to creating a diversity and inclusion strategy that delivers results for your team.

Just making a decision can be hard enough, but how do you begin to judge whether it's the right one? Chip and Dan Heath, authors of #1 New York Times best-seller Switch, show you how to overcome your brain's natural shortcomings. In Decisive, Chip and Dan Heath draw on decades of psychological research to explain why we so often get it very badly wrong - why our supposedly rational brains are frequently tripped up by powerful biases and wishful thinking. At the same time they demonstrate how relatively easy it is to avoid the pitfalls and find the best answers, offering four simple principles that we can all learn and follow. In the process, they show why it is that experts frequently make mistakes. They demonstrate the perils of getting trapped in a narrow decision frame. And they explore people's tendency to be over-confident about how their choices will unfold. Drawing on case studies as diverse as the downfall of Kodak and the inspiring account of a cancer survivor, they offer both a fascinating tour through the workings of our minds and an invaluable guide to making smarter decisions. Winner in the Practical Manager category of the CMI Management Book of the Year awards 2014.

Onboarding is such an important part of an employee's success. It starts well before the employee decides to apply with an organization in the forms of employment branding and the candidate experience. It includes sourcing, interviewing, background checks, and extending the job offer. Next comes new hire paperwork, orientation, and training. Lastly, performance management. On some level much of onboarding touches every single component in the employee life cycle. Yet, when it comes to onboarding managers, we do nothing or very little. But we expect managers to help onboard new employees. They are an active part of the recruiting process. Managers are expected to train and develop employees. They are required to coach and mentor employees for exceptional performance. It's time for organizations to give managers the same foundation for success that we give new hire employees. Manager Onboarding will walk HR managers and business leaders through the process of creating a manager onboarding program. While onboarding has many touchpoints in a manager's career, this book is going to focus on the new hire or newly promoted phase. This book is for HR and business leaders who are looking for a roadmap to designing a manager onboarding program. The book touches on just a bit of theory and a whole lot of practical knowledge. It is filled with stories and examples about how companies' onboarding programs work-both for new employees as well as managers.