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Tibor Vörös has over 15 years of experience both in academic and corporate environments. He has worked in various management areas (knowledge management, decision making, business intelligence, information systems) as practitioner, but he also researched these topics and evaluated corresponding frameworks from the theory point of view. Vörös holds an MSc in Maths, Physics and Information Technology and is a Senior Lecturer at Central European University Business School. His research work ranges from social media to cultural and strategic issues for corporations. More recently Mr Vörös spent considerable time on various business simulations and created unique storyboards to help students experience real life problems in classroom situations. Current research work concentrates on the relationship of culture and technology. CEEMAN has selected Mr Voros as the winner of the Innovation in Course Design category for the CEEMAN Champions’ Award 2010. You can connect with Tibor here: https://people.ceu.edu/tibor_voros https://twitter.com/tiborvrs

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IN TOR 010 YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT:

• The realities of ‘rational’ decision making, including situations faced by executive leadership, including ‘fuzziness’, and both income and outcome uncertainties.
• Tools that help you make more grounded decisions without complete information. Warning: statistics can’t help if you first don’t acknowledge that uncertainties exist and affect decisions.
• Tibor’s work on making people aware and ready to tackle uncertainty and other decision making pitfalls, recommendations for better personal and team decisions; and the hidden powers of role play.

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OUR CONVERSATION INCLUDES THE FOLLOWING:

Organizations

• Daniel Kahneman

Topics

• Decision making, processes
• Rationality
• Uncertainty
• Bias
• Simulations and role play
• Negotiation
• Critical Thinking
• Data aggregation, analysis, statistics
• Assumptions
• Data quality

Places

• Budapest, Hungary

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EPISODE CRIB NOTES

Decision making Considered as a rational selection process. “In reality, it’s a lot more fuzzy.” Uncertain and incomplete views, both incoming and for outcomes. There are scientific probability methods to overcome. “But the important things is to realize there are uncertainties.” This often goes unassumed. Tibor implements several thought experiments and games in class. Huge fan of Daniel Kahneman Psychological attributes have strong influence on decision making, even in team processes. “They’re all bringing prejudices and assumptions.” “If you are aware of all this, you are already ahead.”   Navigating biases Great leaders have an ability to understand decision processes. It can be trained. Information Technology companies have lots of great innovators that might not be distinguished decision makers. Simulation situations help limitedly. “It will not help at understanding yourself.” Pushing people out of comfort zones. Role play. Business managers like to talk about the rationalities of their decision making, “but if we could see them in action we’d see something completely different.” Leaders who involve people and look for perspective are making steps to overcome bias.   Exercises and training Negotiation, critical thinking, data aggregation. But a large component is more social and emotional. Board meeting simulations. Decision making for good times does not apply for times of crisis. “You were getting constant positive feedback, you had no learning for other circumstances.”   Failure IT project. “Lots of utter failure.” The assumption is information is plenty, and its quality is good. But understanding underlying outcomes is also important. People apply processes the don’t understand to data, and they will get an answer.   Advice “Do a 1 hour role play exercise around decision making on a topic. On a social event.” Understand people, how they make decisions. Role plays provides more freedom to react openly as themselves. Naturally, don’t hold game outcomes against people, don’t criticize or fire them. Test existing structures for data evaluation and decision making. Ask simple questions pointed to a general decision making situation.

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Please share, participate and leave feedback below!

If you have any feedback you’d like to share for me or Tibor, please leave your thoughts in the comment section below! I read all of them and will definitely take part in the conversation. If you have any questions you’d like to ask me directly, head on over to the Ask Stephen section. Don’t be shy! Every question is important and I answer every single one. And, if you truly enjoyed this episode and want to make sure others know about it, please share it now: Also, ratings and reviews on iTunes are very helpful. Please take a moment to leave an honest review for The TOR Podcast!