Here we are, the end of Module 4. Four modules, getting in depth about decision-making and how to make better decisions, how our brains work. I don't think we're going to leave this last video without some really valuable, in fact, I think really useful things that you can do, that you can rely on. It's really a body in a set of checklists. The truth is there's a lot of things that we all can do as managers or as individuals, as individual contributors, to make better decisions and reduce the odds of a decision breakdown. Many ideas already come up. Of course, they have in this course all the way through, in this module or the preceding ones. A good capstone maybe for this entire course, is to compile and share a full inventory of potential safeguards. In other words, things that you can do to greatly reduce the odds of these emotional tags, and there's one plan at a time and all the other things we've talked about from hurting you. The good news is that I've done the work, I have compiled those safeguards and create those inventories. You have a series of readings coming up right after this video that will give you those checklists. The safeguards, they vary in complexity and not all will be needed every time to be sure. I mean, we don't want to be too slow as we've talked about. But better considered a checklist or even a catalog of things you can do to make better decisions and to avoid decision mistakes. Or as I like to say, to really avoid the trap of thinking you're right when you're actually really wrong. There are four checklists. The first one on experience, data, and analysis. I'm not going to walk you through all of it because there's a lot of ideas, but just to give you a little bit of a feel. There's an assumption analysis which I gave you as an application exercise just earlier in this module. There's opportunities to expand the experiences. We talked a lot about experience. Expand the experiences you or any of the other decision-makers have. For example, you can visit customers to see how they're using your products or services, which again, connecting more dots , that's design thinking. Satya Nadella talked about that. You can bring in external experts, advisors who won't have the same biases as you do. I mean, there's a whole raft of techniques to break the decision-maker, to break you out of old mindsets. For example, sometimes even adopting a blank slate to think fresh or doing a scenario analysis. This checklist, and I just share with you a bunch of parts to it, this checklist is a whole bunch of things you can do. Again, how do you look at it? How do you think about it? This is true for this, the checklist that I just briefly described, and the three that I'm about to describe. You're making an important decision, you're worried about one of the motional tags or biases, you're worried about one plan at a time, you're worried about or you want to make sure you don't fall into the traps of attachments or unnecessary or inappropriate attachments or prejudgments, could be about experience, could be about self-interest, could be about expert, any one of these things. You're just alerted that this is something you want to be careful on. Well, that's what the checklist is for and you go through it and you say, this one makes sense for me, for this decision, for this situation. That's what it is. It's a menu for you to pick. Second checklist is around group debate and challenge. You can add new members to the team. That's called diversity. We understand that. I've talked about that at length. Very important. You want to make sure you hear from every single person on the team without anyone dominating the discussion, and I've talked about that as well when I talked about generating real debate and real discussion. But the important part here is you don't want one person often the team leader to completely dominate what everybody else is saying. I once worked with a board of directors where there was a senior director, had the most status, let's call it, on the board and nobody would say a word until this guy started talking. Naturally that put a real damper on real discussion. Then there was a meeting that I was at that he couldn't make it for whatever reason and that was the best meeting I was ever had for that company when I was working with them. Because all of a sudden without the big guy there, everybody was talking, nobody was dominating the discussion and that's really what you want. Lots of other ideas, brainstorming, bringing in a facilitator, identifying risks that occur with each option on the table, many other specific ideas. Again, that's your menu, that's your catalog that you look through. The third checklist is around governance. Governance refers to oversight, people approving a decision. You want to make sure that the people providing oversight and that are providing or have responsibility for approving a decision, have enough experience or truly understand what's being discussed. That's actually pretty important for a lot of decisions that involve complex technologies or topics that are constantly changing. Anything about cybercrime is one example. That's not always the case on the team, or might not be that your boss or your boss's boss is as deeply entrenched in different aspects of technology that you and your team are in. But they have governance responsibility, they're the ones that have to approve it. That could create a problem. Your checklist should be, let's make sure in that room there are people that are truly the content experts. You can create a checklist of potential red flags and you can suggest how to address them, another thing you can do when it comes to governance. Then the fourth checklist is around monitoring. This is, the decision has been made, you've said yes, you're implementing it. Now you want to monitor it, you want to make sure that it's going in the right direction once that decision is made. It's about ensuring robust monitoring, ongoing evaluation so you can make changes as you need them. Remember what I said earlier I think really in the last video, you don't want to decide and forget. If it's important, you want to continue to monitor and evaluate and think about it. That follow-ups on assumptions that we've talked about that fits here, adding experiments when possible so that ongoing adjustments can be made, that's important here, all of these things. Whenever you're making an important decision, a quick look at the checklist will give you plenty of ideas on how to protect yourself at the same time that you're pushing forward the best ideas you can generate. Four checklists around safeguards, things that have been proven time and time again by leading organizations, by great leaders, by great companies, and also by research. You have that, there are readings to come right after this video and they're things you can keep. Final point, while the safeguards are mostly focused on decisions in your work-life, many will also be relevant for any type of decision, including your personal life, your family life as well. All it takes is for you to be open and think about that and go through those checklists and take a look. Making better decisions is within the reach of each of us. We've covered a lot of ground in this course and I've offered many opportunities for you to practice, how to think about decision situations, how to make adjustments. I know there'll be parts of this course that you'll probably want to come back to on occasion when you think it could help you think through a decision, and maybe there'll be other parts that might not be as salient for you. That's okay, that's normal. But you want to be able to do that, you want to capture that. The reality is that we're all people, we're all humans, and we have brains that have evolved in complex ways that in this course I've shared with you some of the most important of those complex ways and they sometimes create problems for us, for how we think and how we process information, for how we decide. You now know a lot about these biases, about these emotional tags, about the limitations to expertise and experience, and you know a lot now also about how to deal with all of that. Your goal, my goal, is really to try to do the right thing, to put yourself in a position to accomplish your goals, your objectives, to make really good decisions. That's what we want. You may want to go back over your notes and especially what you wrote in response to these application exercises that I suggested along the way. Like I said at the end of the first course in this specialization, lessons learned from the Why Smart Executives Fail project, these notes that you're taking, these exercises that you're doing, what you're really doing is you're writing your own book about strategic leadership and in this course about decision-making. I'm going to tell you right up front, as great as my books might be, this will be the best book you're ever going to read because you now are writing it and at this point, you're halfway through. This is exciting. Keep on going, capture the learning. Thank you for being with me for this course on decision-making.