Decisions, Decisions

Consulting and Seminars from

H.F. Lillywhite, Logical Learning and Consulting

503-649-7647 email: decisions@hfl-llc.com

The quality of our work and our lives depends, to a great extent, on the quality of the decisions we make.

Decision Making Tips

Conflict Resolution

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Seven Deadly Sins of Decision Making (and more) - one hour

Goal: Participants will learn to recognize and avoid common decision-making errors.

This seminar discusses several common problems that lead to bad decisions. These problems seem to be hard-wired into the human brain, they affect people regardless of intelligence or other abilities. Only by being aware of them and by making a conscious effort can we avoid the mistakes they cause.

The purpose of the seminar is to raise participant awareness and provide tools to help avoid these traps. There are of course more than seven such problems and we will mention some without going into detail. However we will urge participants to think of any that are likely to cause problems in their lives.

Should a client want to include more "sins," that option is available.

The problems discussed in this seminar are:

Overconfidence
Anchoring (being unduly affected by irrelevancies)
Desire vs. reality (emotional thinking)
Probability blindness
Illusory correlations
Reconsideration under suitable scripts (finding a way to make data mean what you want it to)
Confusion of means and ends

The seminar format is interactive with the leader presenting questions and examples. Participants are asked to think about how similar problems might affect their work or life. Most participants will recognize that they are sometimes fooled by normal human errors. This will motivate them to think carefully about the source of those errors and how to avoid them.