Dan Markovitz

Biography

Dan Markovitz is president of Markovitz Consulting, a firm that makes organizations more profitable by improving operations and execution. He is a faculty member at the Lean Enterprise Institute and teaches at the Stanford University Continuing Studies Program. His newest book, on better problem solving, is “The Conclusion Trap.”

Talk

Better Decision Making: Avoiding the Conclusion Trap and Other Pitfalls

Organizations (and individuals) frequently struggle to make good decisions. They spend money, invest in new technology, and invest enormous amounts of time and effort reorganizing in fruitless efforts to solve thorny problems. Why?

Years of training and reinforcement in school and at work, time pressures and deadlines, and inherent psychological biases cause us to jump to conclusions before we even understand the problem we’re attempting to solve.

This session will help you make better decisions by eliminating that tendency. You’ll learn a powerful, four-step process that ensures you will deeply understand a problem before pursuing any given solution.

Following this framework enables you to generate insight before you take action. Rather than needlessly hiring more people, blindly reengineering a process, or spending money on new equipment and technology, you’ll be able to identify the bottlenecks, root causes, and structural impediments that create the problems in the first place. It reduces the chronic fire-fighting your organization suffers from, while increasing the likelihood that the problem stays solved.

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