Our Jam Session topic is Decision Making – particularly when the data is poor or non-existent.  We are looking at this from 3 angles:  emotional control, tactical methods and future visioning.

AGENDA:

11:15 AM ET  – Opening Comments by Lynn Yanyo, ISBM Executive Director

11:30 AM ET – “The Emotional Component of Decision Making:  How to Manage Your Brain to Make More Optimal Decisions” by Steven Howard

Steven Howard brings expertise in leadership, business development, and marketing. An award-winning author of 20 books with 40 years of international senior sales and marketing experience, his corporate career covered a wide variety of fields and experiences, including Regional Marketing Director for Texas Instruments Asia-Pacific, South Asia / ASEAN Regional Director for TIME Magazine, Global Account Director at BBDO Advertising handling an international airline account, and VP Marketing for Citibank’s Consumer Banking Group.  Steven specializes in creating and delivering leadership development programs for frontline leaders, mid-level leaders, supervisors, and high-potential leaders. In the past 25 years he has trained over 10,000 leaders in Asia, Australia, Africa, Europe, and North America.

His latest book is How Stress and Anxiety Impact Your Decision Making and is the foundation for this presentation.

Adults make tens of thousands of decisions a day — up to 70,000 according to some research. Too many of these decisions, in both the workplace and personal lives, are made under emotional duress. When this happens, the rational control center of the brain is no longer in charge, which leads to emotional hijackings and poor decision making.

Additionally, prolonged stress — such as what almost everyone is going through today — has adverse effects on the brain’s self-regulation control center. This is why we are seeing reports of increased alcohol abuse, binge eating, and domestic abuse as worrisome impacts of the pandemic shelter-in-place and lockdown policies.

In this session, award-winning author Steven Howard will share:

• • • How Stress and Anxiety Impact Your Decision Making
    • The Biggest Mistakes We Make When Facing Hard Decisions
    • The Role of Unconscious Bias in Decision Making
    • How to Respond, Not React, When Making Decisions
    • How to go from Mind Full to Mindful Decision Making
    • Simple Mindfulness Techniques You Can Use at Work or Home
    • Why You Need to Start Today to Protect the Long-Term Health of Your Brain

Steven will share research on how the brain functions during the decision-making process and why neuroscientists are focusing on how lifestyle habits impact your risks for Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, and stroke.

12:30 PM ET – Break/Networking – Facilitated Networking (3 Friend Minimum)

1:00 PM ET – “Practical Guidelines for Making Smarter Decisions” by Ralph Keeney

Decision making should be considered your primary management skill, because the only way you can purposefully improve your business is through the decisions you make. Everything else happens beyond your control, due to others’ decisions and happenstance. Your decisions empower you to enhance the quality of your life and to make contributions at work in businesses, organizations, and government. The timeliness and quality of your decisions directly affects others in your businesses, organization and families including resource balancing and allocation. Clearly, your decision-making skills are crucial.

Ralph Keeney is a consultant, speaker, author and advisor to individuals, organizations, and governments to make smarter decisions. Previously, he has been a professor at MIT, the University of Southern California, and Duke University; he also created and managed the decision and risk analysis group at a major consulting firm. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and author of several books. The most recent title is Give Yourself a Nudge.

Ralph’s presentation describes and illustrates concepts and procedures to enhance the key skills necessary to make smart decisions and avoid the ever-present decision traps that degrade our choices. These skills concern defining the decision that you want to face, understanding what you hope to achieve by making that decision, creating alternatives better than those readily available, and proactively identifying decision opportunities that offer significant benefits. Each of the concepts are practical to use and rely only on common sense and focused effort. Improving these skills will help you obtain the ultimate business advantage: making smarter decisions.

2:00 PM ET – Break/Networking – Facilitated Networking (3 Friend Minimum)

2:30 PM ET – “Learning from the Future Before it Happens:  Marketing as if the Future Mattered” by Liam Fahey

We only know the present by taking a vantage point in the future. Any marketing strategy, or marketing capabilities, or marketing investments, therefore must be assessed from the perspective of alternative futures. Hence, the need for scenarios. This session details how to craft fast-cycle scenarios to address marketplace uncertainty and ambiguity and then how to use them to inform marketing decision making. Special emphasis is placed on shaping and structuring data to create interesting and plausible alternative depictions of how the future might unfold (e.g. alternative industry projections), assessing the implications of alternative futures for current and anticipated decisions, as well as critiquing personal and organizational risk proclivities.

Dr. Liam Fahey is Cofounder and Partner in the Leadership Forum, and the creator and leader of its Intelligence Leadership Forum. He has been a faculty member at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and Boston University, and he now serves as Professor of Management Practice at Babson College. His consulting, teaching, research and writing focus is on enabling organizations to win in the marketplace through enhanced marketplace intelligence and insight. He advises leaders, conducts workshops, consults to analysis specialists and engages with work teams in all facets of generating and leveraging marketplace intelligence and insight.

3:30 PM ET – Speaker Panel Questions

4:15 PM ET – Closing Comments

4:30 PM ET – Happy Hour – grab a beverage and network on Gather.Town