publications
“Risk Management 3.0: Moving from Compliance to Competitive Advantage”
Risk management is a critical element of aerospace project management and other industries with complex projects. However, many current...
webinars
Blue vs. Green Hydrogen—How to Decide
Are you interested in investing in low-carbon hydrogen projects, but don’t know where to start? Do you want to...
webinars
Risk Management 3.0: Moving from Compliance to Competitive Advantage
Today, risk management is a standard practice in aerospace projects, with organizations like NASA and the Department of Defense...
publications
“How Decision Quality Powered by AI is Dramatically Improving Project Value in Capital-Intensive Industries”
In capital-intensive industries like oil and gas, pharma, and others, multi-million and even billion-dollar high-stakes decisions are made on...
publications
“Mitigating Biases in Pharmaceutical R&D Decision-Making”
Decisions made during the pharmaceutical R&D process involve many risks and uncertainties, and substantial literature has been developed on...
publications
“Techniques to Maximize Value from CCUS Decisions at Every Stage”
Executives at an international energy producer were considering how to lessen the company’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by undertaking...
insights
Video: Indication Sequencing in Pharma
When the development team of a large pharmaceutical company was deciding on the order of the different indications for...
webinars
Hydrogen Scenario Planning
Hydrogen can play a pivotal role in achieving net zero goals, given its abundance and versatility. Realizing the commercial-scale...
publications
“How to Make Strategic Trade-Offs”
New CEOs with a fresh vision for the company or established leaders who are charting a new course face...
insights
Video: Portfolio Strategy for a Pharma Company
Watch this video of how a CEO fostered alignment on portfolio strategy.
publications
“A New Approach to Early-Stage Portfolio Decision Making”
Based on a 2021 webinar, this ebook describes an approach applied in life sciences to guide early stage, long-term...
publications
“Supporting Innovation in Early-Stage Pharmaceutical Development Decisions”
Pharmaceutical companies have frequent portfolio reviews to monitor development progress and prioritize development assets. The earliest assets are drug...
webinars
Rising to the Challenge in Aerospace Today: Better Decisions in a Rapidly Changing Environment
The aerospace industry is facing change that extends across technologies, systems, and organizations. The volume of business opportunities is...
webinars
The Importance of Portfolio Strategy in an Era of Real-Time Portfolio Management
Today, many pharma companies are investing in capabilities and tools to enable real-time portfolio management, in the belief this...
webinars
Navigating the Complex Landscape of Energy Transition Decisions
The current transition to reduce—and conceivably eliminate—carbon emissions is a transformational socio-economic event at an unprecedented scale. This movement...
webinars
Reinventing Capital Project Delivery
Embedding Decision Quality to Improve Project Success Large capital projects are a great place for building in decision quality—from...
webinars
Harnessing Conflict to Fuel a Healthy Decision Culture
Every healthy corporate culture has a set of common components—values, strategy, vision, people, practices, narrative. At its core is...
webinars
Embracing Uncertainty to Sharpen Scenario Planning and Forecasting
Scenario planning can help you broaden your strategic thinking about the future; design better, more robust alternatives; and harness...
webinars
Three Cheers for Simple Models: What COVID-19 Taught Us About Decision Modeling
Over the last 15 months we have witnessed policymakers grappling with how to respond to the spread of COVID-19...
webinars
A New Approach to Early-Stage Portfolio Decision Making
Comparing investments with long lead-times can be an exercise in futility. Trying to obtain credible inputs for outcomes 15...
webinars
Putting a Value on Data and Information Before Your Gather It
Organizations spend billions of dollars each year gathering and analyzing data. Is it worth it? Does more information always improve...
webinars
Judging the Quality of an ‘Agile’ Decision
The “agile” project management approach, which grew out of software development projects, features rapid iteration to communicate, integrate, and...
webinars
The Social Cost of Carbon
Carbon pricing is likely to take on growing significance in the coming decade as investors, consumers, and regulators increasingly...
webinars
How Oil & Gas Companies are Framing Energy Transition Strategy
Investors, consumers, and regulators are now expecting oil & gas companies to monitor and manage not only direct emissions...
publications
“Charting the Road to Energy Transition”
How the world’s largest oil & gas companies are approaching energy transition is evidence that committing to a net...
insights
Charting the Road to Energy Transition
How the world’s largest oil & gas companies are approaching energy transition is evidence that committing to a net...
webinars
The Coming Energy Transition: Value Metrics and Alternatives to Consider Now
Energy companies have no shortage of strategic alternatives to consider in the coming transition away from fossil fuels and...
webinars
Beyond Decision Rights: What Most Decision Processes Get Wrong
Today in business, the “advocacy-approval” process is the norm for decision making. You’re likely to have participated many times...
webinars
The Future of ERM: Risk-Informed Decision Making Throughout the Enterprise
Why forward-thinking CROs are leading the way in transforming risk-informed decision making throughout the enterprise. In leading organizations, the...
webinars
How to Establish a Healthy Decision Culture
At the heart of any healthy corporate culture is a healthy decision culture. Clarity of purpose, transparency of process,...
webinars
Decision Science for Data Scientists
The past decade has seen the integration of big data, artificial intelligence, and data science into business operations. The...
webinars
Data Science for Decision Professionals
The past few years have seen broad cross-industry adoption of data-driven decision making. Big data, artificial intelligence, and data...
webinars
Scenarios & Forecasting: Planning for Uncertainty
Gain a better understanding of the tools of scenario planning to create a vivid, compelling vision of how the...
webinars
How Game Theory Can Help Us Make Better Decisions
Game theory can provide useful insights into the competitive and cooperative kinds of strategic decisions regularly made by businesses...
webinars
Climate Change: A Decision Quality Approach to Policy
The polarizing issue of climate change intertwines science, geopolitics, economic trends, and the complexity of assigning a value to...
webinars
Accelerating the Journey to DQ with Distracted and Dispersed Teams
Successful Applications at Whiting Petroleum Today’s decision professional faces challenges like never before. Decision makers whose time is severely...
webinars
Toward Superforecasting®: Lessons from the Eli Lilly Probability Assessment Panel
Accurate forecasts can make or break a business. But as we learned in our September webinar with bestselling author Dr. Phil...
webinars
Premortem 3.0 – The Best Prevention for a Postmortem
Rethink the Premortem as a critical digital tool for today’s complex world in this webinar hosted by our friends...
publications
“Making the Business Case for a Patient Handling and Movement Program”
What is the value of a patient handling and movement program (PHAMP) in a healthcare or hospital setting? The...
publications
“Value-Driven ERM: Making ERM an Engine for Simultaneous Value Creation and Value Protection”
Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) began as an effort to integrate the historically disparate “silos” of risk management in organizations. Many organizations...
webinars
How to Build a Superforecasting® Team
Some forecasters are able to outperform the so-called experts – again and again. What sets these "superforecasters" apart, and...
webinars
The Great American Pastime: What Baseball Can Teach Us About Decision Making
Baseball is a highly strategic game, with important decisions being made both on and off the field. In this...
webinars
Creating Value from Flexibility and Uncertainty
Although an increasing number of companies use decision and risk management methods to deal with complex and uncertain decisions,...
webinars
Right Decisions Right Now: Observations from 30 Years of Decision Education
Powerful computers and massive data should have made decision making a breeze by now. So why are so many...
webinars
How Accurate are Weather Forecasts, Anyway?
A UT professor drills into the analytics of the weather forecast -- with lessons for business.
webinars
A Conversation on Ethics with Stanford Professor Ronald A. Howard
A decision scientist interviews Stanford Professor Ronald A. Howard, a founder of decision analysis, on the topic of ethics...
webinars
Successfully Negotiating from a Distance: Overcoming Physical and Psychological Challenges
Negotiating is complex enough as it is, but throw in some distance, and you may be in for an...
publications
“Three Things Every Executive Should Know About Risk
Business executives often have to make major decisions without knowing exactly how they will turn out. Many factors, all...
webinars
Decision Leadership: The Power to Influence Those Who Outrank You
Strategic decisions are often made in contests where the strongest advocate wins. Senior executives deserve better.
webinars
Three Things Every Executive Should Know About Risk (*Without the Complicated Math)
Business executives often have to make big decisions without knowing exactly how they will turn out. Here are three...
webinars
Overconfidence and Confirmation Bias in Business Decisions
Learn how to recognize overconfidence and confirmation biases so you can lead your teams to smarter, better decisions.
webinars
Strategic Innovation: The Power of Design Thinking in Business
How do businesses today reconcile the "creative" side of business with the need for financial and analytical rigor?
webinars
The Seven Deadly Sins of Strategy (Part II)
When organizations fail to develop and implement strategy that maximizes value, one often sees the same pattern of behavior...
webinars
The Seven Deadly Sins of Strategy (Part I)
When organizations fail to develop and implement strategy that maximizes value, one often sees the same pattern of behavior...
webinars
The Pitfalls of Heat Maps – Powerful Alternative Risk Management Methods
The risk heat map, used in many industries to understand and manage risk, is fundamentally flawed.
webinars
Five Mistakes Every Decision Maker Needs to Avoid
Anchoring on the past, rather than focusing on the future. Placing too much faith on intuition, even in simple...
webinars
DQ for Everyday Significant Decisions – When Decision Professionals will not be Present
Designed for decision professionals, this webinar explores how members of the profession can influence the vast majority of business...
webinars
Decision Making: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Why do seemingly good decisions sometimes turn out all wrong? This webinar, presented by two leaders in the field...
publications
“Johnson Quantile-Parameterized Distributions”
In the field of decision analysis, it is common practice to elicit data points from continuous uncertainties from experts, and then fit...
webinars
The Upside of Risk
Forward-thinking companies are moving beyond risk protection and compliance to embrace the upside of risk. These organization not only...
publications
“A 4-Step Process to Help Senior Teams Prioritize Decisions”
Leaders and their teams often pride themselves on their ability to deal with an onslaught of decisions. But the...
publications
“An Organization-Wide Approach to Good Decision-Making”
Strategic Decisions Group CEO Carl Spetzler and Larry Neal, the recently retired manager of Decision Analysis at Chevron Corporation,...
publications
“You Can’t Make Good Predictions Without Embracing Uncertainty”
Harvard Business Review has featured an article from Strategic Decisions Group CEO Carl Spetzler and Peter Hopper, who leads the...
webinars
How Biases Sabotage Your Best Decisions
The human intellect is extremely powerful and capable. But our minds have evolved with biases that work against good...
webinars
Game Theory and the Psychology of Fairness
What are the best ways to approach decisions when there are multiple decision makers, each with different information, motives,...
webinars
Negotiation: Closing the Quality Gap
Decision making frequently occurs in a negotiation setting, with each party bringing slightly different preferences and even opposing points...
webinars
Decision Quality: How to Make the Right Choice the First Time
Decision quality empowers you to make the best possible choice and get more of what you truly want from...
publications
“A Strategic Approach for Managing Oil and Gas Assets”
The global oil market is experiencing a structural shift. Faced with a rapid price decline, large oil-producing countries have moved to protect their market...
webinars
Diversity of Decisions: Adding Quality in All Situations
This webinar, designed for decision professionals, addresses how to determine and select the best decision-focused approach to deal with...
publications
“Strategic Perspective Needed in T&D Asset Management”
At an increasing pace, power system outages are destroying billions of dollars in value every year. The United States endures more...
insights
eBook: Closing the Decision Quality Gap
One of the virtues of decision quality is that it allows us to know if we’ve made a good...
insights
Infographic: The Top Three Megabiases
Most of us assume we make good decisions using sound reasoning. But in reality, we all fall victim to...
insights
Infographic: Building ODQ
How can your organization benchmark Decision Quality (DQ)? Achieving true Organizational Decision Quality (ODQ) requires more than the adoption...
publications
Article and Risk-Adjusted-Value Excel Tool
Business executives often have to make major decisions without knowing exactly how they will turn out. Many factors, all...
publications
“Microrisks for Medical Decision Analysis”
by Ronald A. Howard In this publication [$], Professor Ron Howard develops the concept of a micromort to assist with...
publications
“Decision Analysis: Practice and Promise”
by Ronald A. Howard In this paper [$], Professor Ron Howard coins the term “Decision Quality” and specifies the six...
publications
“Influence Diagrams”
by Ronald A. Howard and James E. Matheson In this paper [$], Professor Ron Howard and Dr. Matheson define and...
publications
“The Development of a Corporate Risk Policy for Capital Investment Decisions”
by Carl S. Spetzler In this publication [$], Dr. Carl Spetzler presents the first effort to assess and deploy a...
publications
“Probability Encoding in Decision Analysis”
by Carl S. Spetzler and Carl-Axel S. von Holstein Developed in consultation with Professor Amos Tversky and Professor Daniel...
publications
“Decision Analysis: Applied Decision Theory”
by Ronald A. Howard This is the publication that started it all. In this paper, Professor Ron Howard of...
publications
“Quantifying the Reliability and Value of 3D Land Seismic”
by Eric Bickel, Richard L. Gibson, Duane A. McVay, Stephen Pickering, and John Waggoner In this paper [$], Professor Eric...
publications
“Modeling Dependence Among Geologic Risks in Sequential Exploration Decisions”
by Eric Bickel, James E. Smith and Jennifer L. Meyer In this paper [$], Professor Eric Bickel, Professor Jim Smith...
publications
“Climate Engineering and Climate Tipping-Point Scenarios”
by J. Eric Bickel In this paper [$], Professor Eric Bickel presents a decision-analytic approach to decision-making for climate-change policy....
publications
“Managing R&D Portfolios for Improved Profitability and Productivity”
by James E. Matheson, Michael M. Menke, and Stephen L. Derby. This paper addresses four questions fundamental when using...
publications
“How SmithKline Beecham Makes Better Resource Allocation Decisions”
by Paul Sharpe and Tom Keelin In this paper, former SDG consultant Tom Keelin and Paul Sharpe of then-SmithKline...
publications
“Portfolio Management in an Upstream Oil and Gas Organization”
A portfolio management process and system changes how decisions are made in an organization and builds confidence in the...
publications
“Comparing NWS PoP Forecasts to Third-Party Providers”
by J. Eric Bickel Featured in Nate Silver’s bestselling book The Signal and the Noise, Professor Eric Bickel analyzes...
publications
“On the Decision to Take a Pitch”
by Eric Bickel. In this paper [$], Professor Eric Bickel applies decision analysis to an important decision made during all...
publications
“On the Decision Relevance of Stochastic Oil Price Models: A Case Study”
by Robert K. Hammond and Eric Bickel Hydrocarbon (oil, natural gas, liquids) are highly uncertain, so SDG uses a...
publications
“Reexamining Discrete Approximations to Continuous Distributions”
by Robert K. Hammond and Eric Bickel On most decision analysis projects, decision analysts weight the P10, P50 and...
publications
“Quantile-Parameterized Distributions”
by Thomas W. Keelin and Bradford W. Powley It is quite common in the practice of decision analysis to...
insights
Would Your Sourcing Organization Know a “Carrot” or a “Stick” if It Saw One?
Much of the world’s footwear, apparel and fashion accessories are sourced from Asia, with production hugely dependent on relatively...
insights
Liquified Natural Gas: All Around the World
The ‘age of gas’ is now well and truly upon the global energy markets. Fracking has sky-rocketed supply of...
insights
Improved Framework Needed for Indian Expressways
India’s highway operational framework is in desperate need of an upgrade. Its infrastructure suffers from lack of attention to...
publications
“Some Determinants of Corporate Risk Aversion”
by Eric Bickel In this paper [$], Professor Eric Bickel summarizes the rationale for developing a consistent corporate risk appetite...
publications
“The Relationship between Perfect and Imperfect Information in a Two-Action Risk-Sensitive Problem”
by Eric Bickel How much is data worth? How much is it worth to reduce uncertainty? These are common...
insights
Bringing Quality to Board Decisions
Board member accountability has intensified in recent years. Yet, too often board members are not effectively engaged in key...
insights
Deal Evaluation: 10 Failure Modes
Investors can easily get caught up in the excitement of an upswing. But before jumping into a deal head...
insights
Value-Driven ERM
Enterprise risk management (ERM) has grown increasingly sophisticated. Many companies start with a traditional checklist approach and limit their...
insights
Portfolio Management in an Upstream Oil and Gas Organization
A portfolio management process and system changes how decisions are made in an organization and builds confidence in the...
insights
Playing Chinese Checkers with India’s Hydro Sector
Both India and China are aggressively exploring hydropower projects with their eye on the same source: Water from the...
insights
Video: How Decision Quality Improves Leadership
SDG’s Peter Hopper explains how the firm’s Decision Quality approach helps leaders and teams reassess and reframe their most...
insights
Video: Decision Quality in the Life Sciences Industry
Watch Mark Seidler discuss the critical role of Decision Quality in the life sciences industry.
insights
Video: Decision Quality’s ‘Aha!’ Moment
SDG’s CEO Carl Spetzler explains how the firm redefined and reframed Decision Analysis (DA) methods as it pioneered the...
insights
Video: What Are the Origins of Decision Science?
SDG’s Carl Spetzler discusses the historical roots of decision science, which would eventually evolve into the field of Decision...
insights
Infographic: Evolving Risk Management
Faced with growing concerns over accountability, compliance, and liability, organizations have largely realized the need for true Enterprise Risk...
insights
Video: What Is the Future of Decision Quality?
SDG’s CEO Carl Spetzler discusses where he believes the Decision Quality (DQ) field is headed.
insights
Denationalize Coal Mining in India to Bring Tariffs Down
India’s government allocated around 44 billion metric tons of coal to public and private firms between 2004 and 2009...
insights
Infographic: The ODQ Maturity Curve
Every group’s journey to ODQ is unique in pace and design. Still, over the past three decades, SDG partners...
insights
Infographic: Five Habits of Highly Strategic Thinkers
Strategic perspective—the ability to step back and see the big picture—is an indispensable talent for powerful leaders. You can...
