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A global financial services company wanted a bespoke workshop to help its executives speed up decision making. 135 attendees joined across two sessions in the UK, with additional participants via video link from India and the US. The work combined behavioural science from Kotter, Kahneman, and Heath with practical exercises rooted in the team's own live cases.
We worked with a global financial company to create a bespoke workshop to help them speed up their decision making processes.
Many large companies find decision making difficult. As John Kotter, author of Accelerate, writes:
“Part of the problem is political: Managers are loath to take chances without permission from superiors. Part of the problem is cultural: People cling to their habits and fear loss of power and stature, two essential elements of hierarchies. And part of the problem is that all hierarchies, with their specialised units, rules, and optimised processes, crave stability and default to doing what they already know how to do.”
We ran two workshops for executives in our client’s offices. A number of participants also joined the workshop via video link in India and the US.
We started by giving a brief explanation of how decision making works, drawing from literature and case studies (see sidebar). Then we briefed the participants to engage in a series of short discussions in breakout groups to identify specific cases and examples from their work.
Discussion prompts included:
After hearing the conclusions from each group we added to these by highlighting some recommended approaches from literature, plus a series of useful tools.
Finally the groups worked through an exercise applying the recommendations and insights from their group discussions to a realistic scenario case study created especially for the workshop.
We finished the workshop by challenging participants to create an action plan for better decision making. Prompts included:
We provided a summary of the workshop’s content and recommendations, plus a decision making toolkit to each participant.
Decision making in large companies is rarely a thinking problem. It is a political and cultural problem, with the thinking layered on top. Executives know how to weigh trade-offs. What stops them is the absence of permission to act without consensus, the cost of being seen to be wrong, and the cultural drift toward stability that any large hierarchy produces over time.
The workshop that works in this context combines a short input on the literature with structured discussion on the team's own live cases, then a scenario exercise that lets them apply the ideas under low-stakes conditions. The lesson worth recording: a decision-making toolkit on its own is not enough. What changes behaviour is the practised conversation about who owns the decision, who has the right of veto, and what good-enough information looks like.
Most work like this starts with a 30-minute call to understand the team, the context, and what good would look like. From there we agree the shape of the work together.
