报告主题：Deliberative Long-term Decision Making

报 告 人：Ron Brandel Atley

时     间：2018年10月13日星期六18:00

主 持 人：谷征

工作语言：中文

地     点：主楼四层报告厅

报告内容：

Intelligence, confidence, intuition, education? What is the most important skill for executives and senior leaders in all areas of life? Many would argue it is the ability to make good choices when confronted with complex situations. In the end, there may be no more valuable skill for someone in anysort of leadership position.And in today’s increasing complex and dynamic world the ability to make careful, informed, and creative decisionsis anability that isincreasingly called for in more and more aspects of our lives, no matter what our position.

Authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein note thatstandard economic theories (and many of models and practices in business and finance based on thesetheories) pretend that humans “can think like Albert Einstein, store as much memory as IBM's Big Blue and exercise the willpower of Mahatma Gandhi.” Yet the reality is almost exactly the opposite, as shown by the work of behavioral economists(like Thaler, who received a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work), neuroscientists, and many others in the sciences. The human mind is filled with cognitive biases and blindspots, leading us to misunderstand the past, misconstrue the present and badly foresee the future.

Thankfully, the emerging multidisciplinary field of decision science— drawing on areas as diverse as behavioral economics, cognitive science, social psychology and management theory — has given us a great deal of new information and techniques for thinking deliberatively and making better choices when we need to make complex decisions in our professional or personal lives, choices that may have consequences that reverberate for years, even decades. In this short talk, we will look at some of those insights and practices, and briefly explore a few ways that we can benefit from making use of them.

At the end of the day, there is no foolproof algorithm for life’s difficult choices. But the research shows that there are ways we can get better at making them.