Category: decision making

decision making, Management, uncertainty

Turning Uncertainty into Performance: the role of Processes

Processes, uncertainty, performance: three words that are used constantly, rarely together, and almost never with precision. Yet their relationship is at the heart of what distinguishes an organization that masters its activity from one that improvises. Because a process is not just a tool for standardization—it is the way in which an organization gradually transforms novelty into something manageable. Understanding this mechanism changes the way we manage an organization, diagnose its weaknesses, and evaluate what really works—and why.

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decision making, Strategic surprise

Resolving uncertainty with AI, or the scientist illusion of management

“With AI, it’s now easier to resolve uncertainty,” a business leader recently told me with confidence, arguing that with the mass of data now available and the almost infinite capacity to analyze it, the subject was more or less closed. This is a widespread, long-held belief… and a very false one at that, a scientistic illusion of management that refuses to die. The link between data and uncertainty is much more complex. Without a thorough understanding of this link, decision-making in uncertainty is based on flawed models, with catastrophic consequences.

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decision making, Leadership, Management, uncertainty

Charting Your Course: Leadership in the Face of Uncertainty

In a world where traditional benchmarks are faltering, leadership is facing a profound crisis. We are no longer confronted with calculable risks, but with genuine uncertainty — a situation that calls into question our individual, collective, and societal mental models. This rupture requires us to reconsider our understanding of leadership. But on what basis?

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decision making, entrepreneurship, uncertainty

To reduce uncertainty, try cooperation!

How can uncertainty be reduced? This is the question that is preoccupying all executive committees in France and the rest of the world in these troubled times. The most obvious temptation is to mobilize the arsenal of predictive thinking: foresight, scenarios, modeling, customer surveys, and nowadays, of course, AI. However, uncertainty is not resolved through forecasting, but through action. And in this regard, the most powerful action is cooperation. One blind person holding the hand of another blind person? Not necessarily: cooperation means that we no longer need to predict in order to act creatively and move forward without being paralyzed.

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decision making, Management, transformation

Stuck in their projects? Why managers should learn about politics

There is a paradox in business: many of those who are supposed to lead it sometimes admit their inability to move forward with their innovation or transformation projects. And this is not just true of middle managers. I often hear people say, “There’s nothing I can do at my level”. Coming from senior executives, this admission is surprising. The reason is often that these leaders have not recognized the political dimension of their role. By political dimension, we mean the ability to influence the group to move in a particular direction, in this case, to move stalled projects forward. This ability rarely rests on formal authority; it must be built. A useful historical example is how Lyndon Johnson managed to dominate the US Senate before becoming President of the United States.

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decision making, Uncategorized

The Power of Vertigo: Thinking Clearly in the Face of Uncertainty

With the inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the United States on January 20, we are entering a period of radical uncertainty even greater than we’ve experienced in recent years. We thought we lived in an uncertain world? We haven’t seen anything yet. Accepting this uncertainty means accepting a kind of vertigo, a sense of a world out of balance. For the philosopher André Glucksmann, accepting the vertigo of renouncing certainties is a source of strength. Vertigo is a form of liberation that allows us to think clearly and is a lever for creativity and transformation. But there’s no guarantee that we’ll have this power.

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decision making, Management, strategy, uncertainty

Singularity, the ultimate resource in the face of adversity

In times of turmoil and pervasive uncertainty, our instinct is to play it safe. We often retreat, conform to successful norms, and dampen our uniqueness to avoid risks. However, a compelling chapter from Apple’s 1997 turnaround tells a different story: embracing and asserting our distinctiveness might just be the secret to thriving amidst adversity.

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