Critical Thinking for Managers

Managers have to make critical decisions almost every day. As they make these critical decisions, managers often use shortcuts (heuristics) - such as basing a decision on past experience, or basing a decision on intuition. While using these short cuts are often useful, employing these heuristics can also leads to biases in decision making. Often times, managers are not even aware that their decision making is flawed. This program introduces managers to increase self-awareness of their usage of heuristics and the cognitive biases that result from that usage. This program will also help managers to identify techniques to avoid such biases in order to strengthen the relevance and reliability of decision making.

Program Benefits

Through this program, you will learn the followings:

• The two-system model of decision making
• Decision making shortcuts used by managers such as affect heuristic, anchoring heuristic, availability heuristic, etc.
• Cognitive biases that impact decision making such as halo effect, recency bias, escalate commitment, etc.
• Strategies to deal with such biases

Upon completion of the program, participants will receive a certificate of participation issued by HKUST Business School.

Who Should Attend

Young managers and executives from diverse industries who want to make better decisions more effectively and be more aware of the biases that may be affecting decision making would benefit from this program.

Program Content

• Identify situations where managers use heuristics to make critical decisions
• Identify situations where such usage of heuristics can be beneficial/harmful
• Improve the ability of managers to identify biases in decision making that result from the usage of heuristics
• Develop strategies to avoid such biases in individual and team decision making for better decision making and problem solving