Olivier Sibony
Even the Experts Need Help
Intro
Olivier Sibony is an expert strategic thinker, a well-known writer, a keynote speaker and a consultant whose insights have helped people improve the quality of their decision-making skills. The French strategy specialist has dedicated his career to coming up with practical tools and solutions to help people make the best decisions possible, which he communicates in various books, lectures and academic papers. By helping powerful business people and managers realize the cognitive biases and thinking traps that we are all susceptible to, Sibony has placed himself as a master of behavioral science who is able to give advice on when to trust our instincts and when we need to resist them.
He is particularly interested in uncovering the heuristics involved in real-life management, which, unlike the textbooks students read, involve complex, uncertain and ambiguous situations. Wanting to better capture the real-life circumstances under which people make decisions, his ideas emphasize the need for individuals to gain behavioral science knowledge alongside industry-specific knowledge.
A wise leader, therefore, does not see herself as someone who simply makes sound decisions; because she realizes she can never, on her own, be an optimal decision maker, she views herself as a decision architect in charge of designing her organization’s decision-making process.
– Olivier Sibony, in his book You’re About to Make a Terrible Mistake: How Biases Distort Decision-Making and What You Can Do to Fight Them 1
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
