It is estimated that an adult makes around 35,000 remotely conscious decisions everyday, from whether to have a bagel or a sandwich for lunch and what to wear, to whether to accept a new job offer or relocate to another country. Needless to say, decision-making is fundamental to the way that we live, work and relate to others - but choices can be difficult to arrive at when relevant objectives and good solutions are not salient, or when we are surrounded by unprecedented levels of uncertainty.

Following our hugely successful in-room one-day MBA, where Dr Valentina Ferretti, fellow in decision science at the London School of Economics and Political Science, engaged the audience with her fascinating and interactive session on decision-making, we have invited her to deliver a two-day bootcamp.

Discover how to hone your ability to make better and more resilient decisions through cutting-edge solutions for the key traps in the most crucial phases of your decision-making process. With Valentina, you will acquire a set of easy-to-use rules that will help you to challenge assumptions, support smarter choice-making processes, and build bias-proof teams.

Blending experiential learning with thought puzzles, practical sessions and group analysis, this masterclass will see you emerge prepared to expand your solution space when confronted with important decisions, assess the performance of different strategies despite the uncertainty surrounding us, and choose high-value options.

Course Content

Why do we need to start making better decisions?
The five stages of a good quality decision-making process: framing, expanding, measuring, eliciting preferences, and aggregating and testing
What are the key decision traps and which solutions may help us to identify and avoid them?

This course is for ...

Anyone keen to feel more confident about their strategic decisions, both in the personal and in the professional domain
Anyone intrigued by the fascinating field of behavioural decision science who wants to develop their decision-readiness in these uncertain times
Anyone interested in learning how to recognise and address blind spots in their decision-making approach, such as our own cognitive biases, and how to mitigate them

Tutor Profile

Dr Valentina Ferretti is a fellow in decision sciences in the department of management at the London School of Economics and Political Science, associate professor in project appraisal and decision making at the Politecnico of Milan, and a visiting lecturer at the University of Oxford and École Centrale Paris. Valentina is a decision process engineer, with a focus on decision behaviour, analysis, support and resilience. She is interested in how decision process boosts can improve subjects’ active competences for better and more empowered strategic decisions across different domains, ranging from policy making, to environmental decision making, and management. Valentina is the winner of the 2017 INFORMS Decision Analysis Practice Award and of the LSE Teaching Excellence Award for her inspirational teaching on how to make better decisions.

Course Details

Date: Tuesday 10 and Wednesday 11 August 2021
Time: 2pm-4.30pm (BST)

This masterclass is available globally. If you are joining us from outside the United Kingdom, please use this time zone converter to check your local live streaming time.

You will be sent a link to the webinar two hrs before the start time. Please email masterclasses@theguardian.com if you have not received the access link within one hour of the scheduled start time.

All Guardian Masterclasses are fully accessible but please contact us at masterclasses@theguardian.com if you have any queries or concerns.

Full course and returns information on the Masterclasses website

How to make better and more resilient decisions: a two day workshop