Uncommon Sense: Strategic Judgment Beyond Best Practices

Most organizations do not fail because they lack talent. They fail because teams become great at doing the wrong things right.

As leaders face growing pressure to optimize processes, increase efficiency, justify every decision with data and eliminate ambiguity, many organizations unintentionally perpetuate the very conditions that weaken strategic judgment, suppress exploration and innovation and lock teams into yesterday’s logic. They continue practices that should be abandonedbecause stopping feels more dangerous than the cost of continuing.

This course will help leaders to recognize and interrupt these patterns. Drawing on strategic management, behavioral science and organizational design, the course addresses five core challenges:

1. The Optimization Trap: Why efficiency becomes a liability when applied to the wrong priorities, and why most organizations cannot stop doing what they should abandon.
2. Strategy Is Choosing What Not to Do: How to make strategic choices that create mutually reinforcing positions, and how to pressure-test those choices by identifying what must be true for them to succeed.
3. Data Informed, Not Data Driven: When judgment matters more than measurement, how to uncover what dashboards cannot capture and why AI makes human intuition more valuable, not less.
4. Range, Intent, and the Random Bees: How to design teams and authority structures that protect your organization’s ability to discover what it doesn’t yet know it needs. Includes a live intent-based leadership simulation.
5. Build Your Premises: Participants identify the unstated beliefs driving their organization’s decisions, assess which still hold true and formally challenge at least one of them.