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Showing posts with the label strategic thinking

Guarding the Mind for Better Business Strategy

Strategic decision making is not easy and comes with a number of fallacies that blind us to the actuality of the world around us. Executives should be aware of their bias and how this impacts their strategic decision-making. Using a few critical thinking tools helps to guard the mind from bias and ensure that decisions are more likely to be successful and have the largest impact. Executives are faced with all types of different types of pressures that range from investors to employees. Each person comes with their own influence and opinion. At times a presiding opinion forms and this puts pressure on everyone else to accept the premises of those opinions without providing critical thought. When you are at the top and your decisions impact a large group of people you don't have the luxury of making momentous mistakes.  The mind is seen as a manufacturing unit that results in the product of thoughts. These thoughts help us to reach conclusions about varying topics, beliefs, debat

Strategic Decision: The Difference between Data and Good Judgment

Strategic decision making can encourage you to stronger better paths to achieve important goals. When decisions are well thought out they can help you get closer to where you want to be while using much less effort. Understanding the difference between data and the interpretation of that data helps in seeing and then figuring out the choices that lead down varying paths. A few tips may help you think through options and make more accurate choices that help you improving business and career outcomes. Understanding the data and thinking through the options affords an opportunity to create critical thinking. Critical thinking can be defined as the objective analysis of information and options that leads to a decisive conclusion. To do this well requires that ability to see the possibilities and pick the ones that are not only most likely but also help you achieve your goals.   Step 1: Define Your Goals: Knowing your goals and what you want to accomplish might be the hardest pa

Poem: The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference . The Road not Taken speaks about the lives we live and the multiple opportunities we have to make decisions. Each decision leads down different paths where new opportunities and challenges reside. Where one decision is chosen a sequence of ot

Scientific Learning Fosters Strategic Decision-Making Skills

Permission to Use D.S. Socio-scientific answers are rarely specific enough to concrete. The complexity of making determinations in this field helps in highlighting which methods of strategic decision-making people are using. Research by Eggert & Bogeholz delves into the complex processes students use to make socio-scientific decisions based upon competing information and ambiguous direction (2010). Their results show that scientific thinking improves complexity of thought and strategy making. The process of making decisions that border between scientific research and sociological concepts is difficult. In scientific research it is necessary to answer ambiguous and specific questions like the potential societal benefits of research or the exact measurements used in instrumentation. It is hard for people to make cognitive models that can handle such widely dispersed information effectively.  Understanding science requires the ability to look at data, be open to new da

The Strategy of Level-K Decisions-Outside Bounded Rationality

Art Dr. Murad Abel Reviewing a number of game theory results the authors Crawford, Costa-Gomes, and Iriberri (2013) discuss why people often deviate systematically from equilibrium in game theory. By understanding why some choices appear irrational (level-k) it is possible to better determine under what circumstances such behavior is prevalent. Their paper reviews and analyzes a large swath of game theory results to make some conclusions.  Strategic thinking is a natural part of everyone’s life and influences everything from school choice to business decisions. In game theory each person seeks to maximize their payoffs based upon predicting the choices of others by assuming the rationality of the other players. This is called bounded rationality as all players work under the same assumptions.  There is also something called level-k responses. It is an assumption that all players actions will improve in an attempt to take the dominant stance that eventually leads to equi