Abstract:
Health care and community-based organizations are navigating uncertainty, with shifting policies, funding instability, and mounting operational challenges that require high-stakes decisions with incomplete information. Grounded in decision science, organizational transformation, and continuous improvement principles, this first session of a two-part webinar series highlighted practical frameworks that help teams make better decisions under stress, avoid common cognitive traps, and translate insight into measurable impact. Part two will provide attendees with the opportunity to practice the frameworks live using challenging decisions from their real-world experiences.
About this event:
Every day, health care professionals and leaders make complex decisions amid ambiguity, often with limited data, high emotional load, and real consequences for staff, patients, and communities. Yet decision-making is one of the most critical leadership skills that professionals are rarely trained to develop. This first session of a two-part webinar series unpacked how Decision Intelligence reframes decision-making as an explicit and structured practice.
This webinar was grounded in the Decision Intelligence 4 Health framework, focusing on four interconnected dimensions:
- Decision Quality: Ensuring decisions are well-framed, aligned with values, and free from common cognitive traps like bias and faulty reasoning
- Strategy Execution: Linking decisions to execution frameworks that ensure decisions lead to measurable, meaningful outcomes
- Continuous Improvement: Applying improvement science (e.g., PDSA cycles) so teams learn and adapt with each cycle of decision and action
- Ethics, Science, and Technology: Integrating ethical considerations and appropriate tools (from cognitive frameworks to analytics) into how decisions are made and enacted
During the session, attendees explored how structured decision processes help teams navigate deep uncertainty, articulate trade-offs, and align on shared goals. The interactive session also included practical decision frameworks, live examples, and guided reflection to equip attendees with actionable tools they can use immediately.
The recording of this webinar will benefit health care and community leaders, operational managers, program staff, and others committed to improving organizational decision-making, especially in environments marked by uncertainty, policy change, and complex trade-offs.
Registration for part two of this two-part webinar series will go live in the coming week. Visit CIN’s landing page to stay posted.
At the end of the workshop, attendees were able to:
- Apply structured decision-making frameworks to make more effective decisions under stress and with limited information
- Identify common cognitive biases and reasoning traps that undermine decision quality, and use strategies to mitigate them
- Implement at least one practical decision tool that can be used immediately in your organizational context to improve decision quality
The speaker was:
- Tomás J. Aragón, MD, DrPH, Adjunct Faculty and Impact Fellow at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health
Resources from the webinar:
- Meeting slides: these slides detail how to make better decisions under constraints, challenges and tradeoffs
- Decision Intelligence 4 Health handout: this handout gives context for and details the decision framework