Curated for Managers & Professionals
Better decisions, not louder opinions, are what distinguish strong managers.
Overview
Management decisions are made with incomplete information, competing objectives, and biases that bite hardest under time pressure. This track focuses on structured decision-making, risk assessment, and the group dynamics that distort judgment in meetings, using scenarios drawn from workplace situations.
Management is decision-making under uncertainty, usually with incomplete information and limited time. What separates excellent managers from average ones is rarely technical or industry-specific. It is general reasoning: structuring decisions explicitly, knowing when intuition is reliable, reading arguments charitably before challenging them, and dodging the biases that distort high-stakes choices.
The exercises here focus on the decision-making, bias-recognition, and argument-evaluation skills that show up in real management work. Hiring, prioritisation, vendor selection, performance review, strategic choice. They draw on decades of research into how people actually decide.
Stakes
Research on managerial decision-making keeps finding that organisations with structured decision processes outperform those running on intuition, even when the intuitive decision-makers are highly experienced. The payoff concentrates in high-stakes calls: hiring, pivots, large investments, restructuring. A handful of debiased decisions a year compounds.
The exercises also build a meta-skill. You learn to tell which decisions deserve slow, structured thinking and which are fine on intuition. Managers who get that distinction right avoid both paralysis and recklessness.
Roadmap
A three-step study plan, in the order that produces the fastest gains.
Anchoring, sunk cost, confirmation, and status quo bias distort hiring, prioritisation, and strategy. Learning the patterns first makes the decision exercises easier.
These exercises drill the moves that separate good managerial choices from bad ones. Option enumeration, criteria clarification, expected value, opportunity cost.
Most management means evaluating proposals and reports from other people. Argument Analysis lets you do that faster and more accurately.
13 Curated exercises
Hand-picked exercises in the order we recommend.
Train yourself to recognize the most pervasive cognitive biases that distort everyday thinking. Through realistic scenarios spanning workplaces, hospitals, and personal relationships, you will learn to name each bias, understand its psychological roots, and apply concrete strategies to counteract it before it derails your next important decision.
Explore how cognitive biases systematically warp financial judgments, consumer choices, and risk assessments. Through scenarios drawn from investing, medicine, shopping, and organizational life, you will learn to detect the invisible forces that push decisions away from rationality and practice concrete techniques for resisting them.
Master the advanced metacognitive tools that researchers and elite decision-makers use to detect and counteract bias in real time. Through scenarios involving forecasting, strategic planning, personal finance, and intellectual discourse, you will build a practical debiasing toolkit and confront the sobering reality that knowing about bias is not the same as being immune to it.
Examine how the presence of others, group loyalty, social hierarchies, and cultural narratives systematically distort individual and collective reasoning. Through scenarios set in hiring committees, courtrooms, medical offices, and social media, you will learn to recognize and resist the social forces that silently override clear thinking.
Develop the ability to quantify tradeoffs, recognize hidden costs, and systematically compare alternatives instead of relying on gut reactions. These skills prevent costly oversights in career moves, major purchases, and everyday resource allocation.
Build fluency in distinguishing risk from uncertainty, calculating expected values, and recognizing the psychological biases that warp human risk perception. These skills protect you from both reckless overconfidence and paralyzing overcaution.
Master structured decision frameworks for high-stakes choices involving multiple competing objectives, uncertain information, and diverse stakeholders. These methods turn overwhelming complexity into manageable, defensible comparisons that you can articulate to others.
Strengthen your ability to navigate morally complex situations by applying structured ethical frameworks rather than relying on intuition alone. These skills are essential for leaders, professionals, and citizens who must justify decisions affecting others' lives and well-being.
Develop the ability to surface the unstated beliefs that silently hold arguments together. By practicing on arguments drawn from business strategy, policy debates, and everyday reasoning, you will learn to find the invisible load-bearing walls that, if removed, cause the entire argument to collapse.
Sharpen your ability to weigh evidence like a scientist, distinguishing gold-standard research from persuasive-sounding but unreliable support. You will practice evaluating evidence from medical claims, business reports, and media stories, building the judgment to know when data actually supports a conclusion.
Tackle multi-layered arguments drawn from philosophy, technology policy, and scientific controversy, where you must simultaneously track premises, identify reasoning patterns, and weigh competing considerations. This exercise builds the judgment to evaluate arguments that resist simple categorization.
Confront the scenarios where human intuition about probability fails most dramatically, from emergency rooms to courtrooms to casinos. These puzzles expose systematic flaws in how our brains estimate likelihood, teaching you to recognize when your gut feeling is being hijacked by cognitive shortcuts. Mastering these foundations will change how you evaluate risk in medical decisions, financial choices, and everyday life.
Develop the skills to interrogate statistical claims you encounter in news headlines, pharmaceutical ads, corporate earnings reports, and political campaigns. These exercises train you to spot the specific techniques that make misleading numbers look convincing, from axis manipulation to cherry-picked comparisons to survivorship bias. You will learn to ask the right questions before accepting any statistical claim at face value.
In depth
The research on managerial decision-making is unusually clear. Kahneman, Lovallo, and Sibony distilled decades of it into twelve structural questions that reliably improve executive decisions, and the same questions work at every level. Is there self-interested bias behind the recommendation? Has the team fallen in love with its proposal? Were dissenting views genuinely explored? Is the diagnosis leaning on one salient analogy? Are the numbers anchored to an arbitrary figure? Has anyone taken the outside view? Each question maps onto a bias these exercises train against.
The meta-skill is knowing which decisions deserve structure. High-stakes, novel, or irreversible calls reward pre-mortems, devil's advocates, written option memos, and delayed commitment. Low-stakes, routine, reversible calls should be made fast, because the overhead is not worth it. Managers who structure everything become bottlenecks. Managers who trust intuition everywhere make expensive mistakes on the calls that count.
FAQ
Theory
The exercises build the reflex. These modules explain the reasoning underneath.
Learn to spot the logical fallacies and mental shortcuts that quietly derail clear thinking, in other people's arguments and your own.
Turn critical thinking from theory into practice: dismantle arguments, question deeply, think like a scientist, and decide well under uncertainty.
Take critical thinking beyond theory. Learn to generate ideas, judge the media you consume, and solve tangled real-world problems.
