Making high-stakes corporate decisions: A Corporate Governance Podcast

Making high-stakes corporate decisions: A Corporate Governance Podcast

Decision-making is the central theme of this Corporate Governance Podcast episode. Anyone on a board or running a company as part of the executive team will know how much more pressurised the decision-making environment is. Sometimes, it goes as far as leaders shying away from decisions for fear of being “culpable” if something goes wrong. 

The reality, however, is that corporate governance is all about making these tough decisions, even if the stakes have climbed in the last few decades. 

Dan chats with Grant Purdy; consultant, coach, and author of Deciding: A guide to even better decision making. Grant has spent nearly fifty years helping leaders make better decisions, based around a Universal Decision-making Method that centres itself on the concept of sufficient certainty. 

Grant Purdy has spent nearly fifty years helping decision-makers have effective conversations about whether their decisions are providing sufficient certainty that intended outcomes will be achieved. For most of his career, that work sat under the label of risk management, until he came to believe the label was the wrong frame entirely.

He was a nominated expert to the ISO working group that wrote ISO 31000 (the international standard for risk management) and ISO Guide 73, and provided substantial input to ISO/IEC 31010. He was a member of the Australia/New Zealand joint standards committee on risk management for fourteen years, chairing it for ten, and led the Australian delegation to the ISO technical committee that maintains the standard. Before that, he was Group Risk Manager at BHP Billiton, Managing Director of Aon Pacific Risk Management, and held senior roles at Andersen, DNV and IRCA, working across more than twenty-five countries.

For the last twelve years until he retired, Grant worked throughout the world advising major clients on projects and decisions as an Associate Director of Broadleaf Capital International.

Deciding (2020), co-authored with Roger Estall, is the book in which the two of them explain the universal decision-making method we all use: a five-step method any Decider can, if they are aware of the steps, better apply to any decision. If Deciders become more conscious of when and how they are making decisions and more skilled in applying the universal method, they will gain a greater degree of informed confidence about the outcomes of their decisions.

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