Overview

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Make better everyday decisions by understanding how our minds work at work. This course explores how cognitive biases, mental shortcuts, and System 1/System 2 thinking influence workplace decisions—from budgeting and forecasting to hiring, performance reviews, and project approvals. You’ll also learn the difference between bias and noise, and see how poor judgment can affect results, risk, and team morale. Using practical workplace examples, you’ll explore common biases that influence managers and teams. These include status quo bias, loss aversion, anchoring, availability bias, hindsight bias, overconfidence, the expertise trap, groupthink, social proof, and the HIPPO effect. You’ll also look at how nudges and choice architecture can shape behavior—and how to use them responsibly, with integrity, transparency, fairness, and accountability. Most importantly, you’ll learn practical tools for making better decisions. You’ll use a “bias radar” to spot warning signs, run pre-mortems to uncover hidden risks, and try techniques such as red teaming, FIFA cards, stage-gate reviews, blind voting, and Fist of Fives. By the end of the course, you’ll be able to design meetings and decision-making processes that reduce bias and support better, more ethical choices across your team or organization.

Syllabus

Foundations of Cognitive Bias and Decision-Making

This module introduces the foundations of cognitive bias and shows why decision errors are not random mistakes or personal failings, but predictable patterns in how people think. You will explore heuristics, the Chimp Model, and Kahneman’s dual-process theory to see how fast judgment supports everyday work while also creating risks in complex or high-stakes management situations. By connecting bias and noise to ROI, productivity, and morale, this module frames better judgment as a practical leadership skill.

Mapping Major Cognitive Biases in Management

This module builds a practical map of the major bias patterns that distort management decisions across projects, budgets, forecasting, expertise, and group discussion. You will learn to recognize how inertia keeps teams attached to weak initiatives, how anchors and vivid examples skew estimates, how outcomes rewrite memory, and how overconfidence and hierarchy suppress better judgment. The result is a more usable vocabulary for diagnosing what is happening in real meetings, reviews, and strategic choices.

Ethical Influence and Choice Architecture

This module explores how managers shape decisions not only through authority, but also through the design of the choice environment. You will study the power of nudges, the mechanics of choice architecture, and the boundary between helpful influence and manipulation. Grounded in practical HR and incentive cases, the module helps you influence behavior more responsibly while preserving transparency, fairness, and accountability.

Practical Tools for Bias Detection and Decision Improvement

This module turns bias awareness into action by introducing tools you can use in meetings, project reviews, and team decisions. You will practice spotting bias signals in real time, stress-testing plans before launch, interrupting escalation and group pressure, and structuring consensus so disagreement becomes visible instead of suppressed. The emphasis is on repeatable tools that help teams make stronger decisions under real managerial pressure.

Building Bias-Resistant Decision Practices

This concluding module helps you move from isolated bias tools to durable decision practices that can improve how teams and organizations work over time. You will focus on building bias-resistant environments, testing ideas against disconfirming evidence, and integrating decision hygiene into recurring workflows. The module closes by helping you synthesize the course into a practical next step so you can turn awareness into a repeatable management discipline.