Decision Making: Complete Guide

via Coursera Specialization

Go to class Write review

Details

Go to class

Provider

Coursera Specialization
Pricing

Paid Course
Languages

English
Certificate

Certificate Available
Sessions

Self-Paced
Level

Beginner

Overview

Google, IBM & Meta Certificates – 40% Off

One plan covers every Professional Certificate on Coursera.

Unlock All Certificates

This four-course Specialization provides a complete toolkit for making better decisions in work and everyday life. You'll learn how to generate creative solutions, recognise and reduce cognitive bias, use measurement and evidence effectively, and apply practical frameworks to analyse problems, evaluate options and make confident decisions. Across the Specialization, you'll develop skills in creative thinking, critical analysis, decision trees, risk assessment, performance measurement, stakeholder analysis, behavioural psychology and structured decision-making. By the end, you'll have a practical set of tools that you can immediately apply to management, leadership, projects and personal decision-making.

Syllabus

Course 1: Decision Making: A Complete Guide to Better Decisions
Course 2: Cognitive Bias at Work: Make Better Decisions
Course 3: Develop Creativity: Proven Methods for Innovative Thinking
Course 4: Measurement in Management: Informing Leadership Decisions

Courses

0 reviews

View details

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.
0 reviews

View details

Led by world renowned instructor Chris Croft, the course combines practical tools with insights from psychology, management, and critical thinking. You'll learn how to avoid common decision-making traps, identify hidden assumptions, gather the right information, evaluate risks, and compare options objectively. You'll also practise many techniques such as stakeholder analysis, decision trees, rating charts, risk analysis, opportunity cost, and how to balance logic with intuition. For both work and home, the quality of your decisions has a direct impact on your success. In this practical course you'll learn proven approaches to making more confident and more effective decisions in every situation. We cover how cognitive biases, emotions, group dynamics, and personality can influence your judgement, and then how to use this knowledge to make better choices and avoid your own blind spots. The course also covers practical strategies for simplifying complex decisions, checking the quality of your conclusions, and improving your confidence when faced with uncertainty. Whether you're a manager, team leader, business professional, entrepreneur, or simply someone who wants to make better decisions in work and life, this course will provide you with a practical toolkit that you can apply immediately.
0 reviews

View details

Unlock your creative potential and learn how to think more innovatively in both everyday life and work. This course shows that creativity is a learnable skill, not a rare talent, and helps you understand the habits, beliefs, and environments that either block or boost your creative confidence. You’ll explore how stress, pressure, self-criticism, and limiting assumptions affect your ideas—and how to design routines, spaces, and mindsets that support focus, playfulness, and original thinking. Through practical tools and guided exercises, you’ll apply creative thinking across all stages of problem solving: clarifying problems, reframing challenges as opportunities, breaking complex issues into manageable parts, and looking beyond first instincts to generate stronger alternatives. You’ll experiment with rapid ideation, mind mapping, reversal and fixation-breaking techniques, language prompts, and technology-supported exploration to expand your range of ideas. You’ll also learn how to collaborate more creatively—using brainstorming practices that avoid premature judgment, leveraging outsider perspectives, and using constructive critique to refine ideas. Finally, the course shows you how to evaluate and test ideas realistically. You’ll practice assessing options using quality, feasibility, risk, and fit criteria; designing small-scale trials; and choosing the right timing and context for implementation. By the end, you’ll be able to integrate creativity techniques into your personal and professional routines so that creative problem solving becomes a reliable, everyday capability.
0 reviews

View details

Measurement in Management: Build meaningful KPIs, avoid common measurement mistakes, and improve business performance with practical tools. Taught by world renowned instructor Chris Croft, this course gives managers and professionals a practical, non-technical guide to using measurement to understand, control, and improve performance across the business. Known for his practical, straight talking and engaging style, you will learn practical tools to truly understand numbers within your business. Measurement is one of the most powerful tools available to managers—but only if you measure the right things in the right way. In this practical course, you'll learn how to use measurement to improve performance, make better decisions, and manage more effectively across every area of an organisation. You'll begin by exploring the principles of effective measurement, including when to rely on numbers versus intuition, whether everything can be measured, and the common pitfalls that lead to poor decisions. You'll learn how to avoid misleading comparisons, conflicting KPIs, measurement bias, spurious accuracy, and incorrect conclusions from graphs, trends, and statistical significance. The course then introduces practical measurement techniques for operations, projects, sales, marketing, finance, decision-making, self-management, and people management. You'll explore tools including Pareto analysis, benchmarking, process and output measures, Critical Success Factors (CSFs), Statistical Process Control (SPC), Quality Function Deployment (QFD), process mapping, productivity measures, customer metrics, ROI, profitability analysis, rating charts, risk analysis, and performance indicators for teams and organisations. By the end of the course, you'll be able to design meaningful KPIs, measure what really matters, interpret performance data with confidence, and build practical measurement systems that support continuous improvement, better management, and smarter business decisions.