Enabling leaders to make effective decisions

­Dave Snowden, founder of Cognitive Edge co-authored (with Mary Boone) the front page article of the latest edition of the Harvard Business Review.  For those of us who've been involved in Dave's complexity and narrative work over the years, this is a key milestone - indicative of how our way of thinking is starting to make in-roads into mainstream thinking.

To quote Tom Stewart (HBR Editor), "Most leaders are told that it is important to be (or appear to be) decisive. Fair enough — but how is one to reconcile the imperative of decisiveness with the reality of ambiguity? There's a growing body of academic research about decision making under uncertainty. (If you Google the term, you will get — or I did — 284,000 hits.) Not much of this research has worked its way into practical frameworks for managers. To me, one of the great values of "A Leader's Framework for Decision Making" is that it lives up to its title. In so doing, it connects sense-making to action in ways that are both wise and practical. "

Read Tom's Letter from the Editor, the article can be bought for $6,50.

You can also read Dave's blog

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