You can only get answers to the questions you ask.
The quality of the answers depends on the quality of the questions.
We make decisions constantly. Imperfectly.
- Small, medium, large, and mission-critical decisions, in our jobs, life and society are being made based on our early-formed habits.
- Inundated with information, and with ‘opinions’ by experts – proliferated with social media – we are losing our ability to properly analyze, deliberate, and reflect on decisions.
Learning to ask questions is becoming a mission-critical skill.
- We have to work with increasing complexity, and simultaneously increasing ambiguity. Black-and-white rarely applies anymore. And the repercussions of poor decisions seem increasingly severe.
- At the personal, corporate, national, and global levels, we need to rediscover, and get really good at, our critical reasoning and decision-making skills.
This work is based on over three decades of thinking about thinking; of actively practicing as a consultant, an executive, and an academic, with hundreds of business problems; and of teaching hundreds of managers how to unbundle problems and make decisions.
Our knowledge has been lost to the ages.
This blog is a guide to thoughtful, rigorous decision-making.
For business decision-makers, management consultants, and all of our many life choices:
- Critical thinking (asking questions)
- Debating (argumentation)
- Creative Thinking (forming new connections)
- Organizing information
- Problem-solving (process steps)
- Activating for action
on the foundation of:
- the Socratic method of understanding complexity
- the Aristotelian way of organizing arguments, and
- The impressive findings of modern neuroscience about how our brains connect and store facts and experiences (i.e.learn)
are integrated into the methodology.
Enjoy!
This is a blog about rigorous problem-solving applied to making thoughtful decisions.
Incorporating lessons from best-practices professional consulting, academic teaching, neuroscience of learning, and wisdom wherever we can find it.
We also look at the science behind the theory (learning, neuroscience), and topics where good debate is to be found. Just because!
To get started:
- If you are new here, this is a good place to start: Why you can’t crack that problem!
- Or, if you work with consultants [or are one], go here: The 10 secret ingredients of standout consulting
- Click “Decision-making” to focus only on our decision-making posts.
- Or see below for explore our blog by topic: decision-making; the neuroscience behind it; really cool science findings, even the all-important business education, and how asking the right questions figures in current social issues.
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Marina Kotsianas, M.S. Eng, MBA, combines a strategy consulting career that started at McKinsey & Co., with venture-capital-funded technology CEO experience, an academic position in Global Executive MBA consulting training, and several years in aerospace and automotive engineering. Her consulting practice focuses on growth strategies and global markets. She has successfully delivered hundreds of consulting projects in most industries in the U.S., Asia, Europe and LatAm.