Decision Intelligence Braintrusts

A facilitated learning and working group that helps people make better decisions, individually and together.

People make decisions all day, but very few have ever been taught how to make them.

Some move too quickly and become confident before the evidence warrants it. Others keep looking for more information long after they have enough. Risk gets distorted by fear or excitement. Rules that worked in one situation are carried into another. And when pressure rises, emotion, assumptions, and the way information is presented can have more influence than people realize.

AI adds another issue. It can provide extraordinary support, but it can also make it very easy to hand over the thinking along with the task.

Decision Intelligence is the ability to make better judgments and decisions, particularly when information is incomplete, risk is real, and the answer is not obvious.

The Approach

The Braintrust combines SENSE Decision Intelligence with facilitated discussion around the decisions participants are making.

SENSE develops four core decision skills: Appropriate Confidence, Risk Appraisal, Decision Rules, and Objectivity. Together, they help people judge what they know, assess risk more accurately, develop useful rules for recurring decisions, and recognize when emotion, assumptions, or bias may be influencing their judgment.

The sessions are where participants put those skills to work. They bring real decisions, not case studies created for training. The group examines what is known and what is assumed, the risks involved, the rules being applied, and what may be biasing the decision. Participants learn from one another's experience as well as from the Decision Intelligence tools.

Between sessions, participants use SAGE, the SENSE AI Decision Coach. SAGE does not tell people what to do. It asks questions, helps them work through the relevant tools, and leaves the decision with them.

For organizations, the Braintrust is designed around the business need. It might bring together leaders making similar decisions across different functions, a management team navigating change, emerging leaders developing judgment, or people responsible for decisions where the consequences of getting them wrong are particularly high.

The length and cadence can vary. What remains constant is that the learning is applied to the organization's real work.

Outcomes

Participants become better at knowing when they have enough information to act, assessing risk, recognizing bias, challenging one another's thinking, making recurring decisions more consistently, and using AI to support judgment without outsourcing the judgment itself.

The aim is not to produce people who never make a wrong decision. No method can do that. It is to help people think more clearly about the decisions they make, know why they are making them, and become better over time, learning from the result.

From the Work

Participants have described stepping back from immediate problems, thinking more strategically, becoming more deliberate about risk and opportunity, and developing clearer rules for decisions they expect to face again.

The Braintrust uses SENSE for the Decision Intelligence learning, tools and AI Decision Coach, with ITD facilitation to apply them to the decisions participants are making in their own work.