Risk is difficult to analyse as our data is noisy, uncertainty is high and dependencies are not always obvious. Given that ambiguous and uncomfortable data is easy to ignore, how do we improve our awareness of risk in decisions?

Decision Making for Leaders in Uncertain Times

How do we make better decisions through the application of data, such that we can be better ancestors?

This is a 10-hour, one hour a week for ten weeks, masterclass course open to anyone but principally aimed at senior leadership, executives, board members, NED's and Directors. Each Tuesday or Thursday Morning at 8.30 GMT there is a 50-minute call. There is no pre-reading, no homework; all the content and learning is bound within the sessions. Each session has 20 minutes of content and 30 minutes of open-debate and rapid-fire questions.

The value and takeaway will be your ability to:

  • understand the evidence, proof and truthfulness of data presented

  • determine how you are being framed

  • ask questions of "data" and determine consequences

  • assess and check for other outcomes from the same data and analysis

Private Course/ Team or Company

This is a single flat fee irrespective of how many sign up or attend. It may not be recorded. All materials remain the property of Digital20 and are licensed under a creative commons licence for use and re-use by the company as long as not used in a commercial manner to create direct income from their use.

The minimum team requirement is 5

Public Open Course

The ROI is unknown for your situation but the course fee values your time at £1 per minute. Because of different circumstances, all reduced fee requests will be granted, without question, and you receive the same materials. The course is aimed at leadership and potential, therefore all places are based on qualification criteria.

The maximum number on each course is 15, the minimum is 10.

"Tony's C-Level masterclass using data insights to drive effective decision making for executives is relevant and brings cutting edge thinking. The content is about business management, governance, effective decision making and leadership (but not technical). He provides models and frameworks that help leaders make better ‘informed’ decisions. We utilised Tony and his content to host a series of CEO Roundtables to help our customers understand data better, enabled by Google, and help them frame the questions to ask of their data to make better decisions. We improved customer engagement, loyalty, big picture thinking and to help drive increased revenues." Kevin Sparks MD Google Cloud

Course Content


  1. Choice, decision making and judgment; is your relationship constructive or destructive? Exploring the relationship between choices, decisions and judgement and how our questions indicate if our relationship is curious and constructive OR linear, framed, and destructive.

  2. Data is creating more and more signals and noise. Our hierarchy and structures appear unable to cope with the volume of data, so what does it all mean?

  3. Are Balanced Score Cards and KPI’s innovations nemesis? #data for #growth through #innovation. Discover and break the right number of critical links between outcomes and rewards/ incentives. Find and modify reinforcement linkages between outcomes and culture so that all questions can be rewarded.

  4. Power, agency and influence: a new framework about complex relationships exploring the relationship between power, agency and influence. The intent is to unpack each of these words and their relationships to each other. Power, agency and influence can have a constructive or destructive relationship cycle. We will explore how power, agency and influence in a constructive cycle lead to better outcomes and conversely how power, agency and influence in a destructive cycle lead to worse outcomes.

  5. The S-Curve in an age of emergence Exploring how the S-Curve can help us with leadership, strategy and decision making in an age of emergence: (properties or behaviours which only emerge when the parts interact as part of an inclusive whole)

  6. Humans want principles, society demands rules and businesses want to manage risk, can we reconcile the differences? The linkage between principles and rules is not clear because we have created so many words and variances in language that there is significant confusion. We are often confused about what we mean as we are very inconsistent in how we apply words and language, often to provide a benefit to ourselves or justify our belief. To unpack the relationships we need to look at definitions, but we have to accept that even definitions are inconsistent. Our conformational bias is going to fight us, as we want to believe what we already know, rather than expand our thinking. The conclusion — our rules are not aligned with our principles and this is an issue.

  7. Data: evidence and proof (part 1)

Data is Data Data is not oil, gold, labour, fire, sunshine. "Data is Data" and because we don't understand its complexity we keep making up bad analogies. This explores what data is.

Does Data have a purpose? If the purpose of data is “to share state” then the two essential characteristics data must have are rights and attestation. As data becomes information (knowing state), knowledge (patterns of states), insight (context in states) and wisdom — these characteristics of rights and attestation matter even more.

Wisdom is nothing more than new data. Wisdom is definitely not a pinnacle When you hear or read the list that ends in Wisdom, starting from data, we are framed into imagining a triangle, with wisdom at the top as something to aspire to. But wisdom itself if just another data point that needs to be tested.

  1. Data: choice, decisions and railroading (part 2)

Data For Better Decisions — Nature or Nurture? Exploring why it is likely that if you pick a DATA philosophy/ ontology/ structure, you can only get what that structure will shine a light on or enable.

Is the data presented to you, enabling a real choice? Unpacking why senior leaders need to develop skills to see past big noticeable loud (data) noises and uncover small signals if we want to be part of a Board that makes the challenging judgment calls.

  1. Quantum Risk: a wicked problem that emerges at the boundaries of our data dependency Data sharing has a number of new issues that we have not had to contend with before and the quantum data risk has a direct effect on our capacity for making a good decision from data

  2. Peak Paradox A framework that allows you to explore big issues that need to be talked about, without conflict