Transcending Either-Or Decision Making

Jennifer Riel, an adjunct professor at the Rotman School of Management, describes a problem-solving method that helps leaders move beyond either-or decisions to make stronger choices. 

Imagine you’re trying to solve a problem, but none of your options are all that great. You could walk away. Or you could try to take the best from two inadequate options to reach a smarter, strategic solution. 

Making business decisions often means choosing one path over another—but that doesn’t always need to be the case. Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis argue that leaders should move beyond “either/or” choices and try to come up with solutions that embrace ambiguity and paradox. In this ...  Show more

Entrepreneurs make a mistake: They often think of decisions as binary, where one answer is definitely right and the other is definitely wrong. Astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter says there's a better way to approach decisions — and it's with "probabilistic thinking," a concept that's ...  Show more