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Despite evidence showing that cognitive biases – the systematic errors made by humans during cognitive processing, are prevalent among decision-makers, there is a lack of theoretical models providing insight into how these limitations of human mind might affect decisions made during performance management. This study aims to fill this gap and contribute to performance management scholarship by proposing a conceptual framework broadening our understanding of the role of cognitive biases in performance improvements practices and by highlighting remedies for cognitive biases.

Using benchmarking as an example, the authors integrate the knowledge from performance management and cognitive psychology literature. Examples of cognitive biases possible during benchmarking are used to illustrate how the limitations of human mind might have a critical role in performance management.

The cognitive biases might diminish the positive effect of performance improvement practice on organizational performance. As there is a prevalence of cognitive biases coupled with the inability of individuals to recognize and face them, the remedy for cognitive biases should be sought not at an individual but rather on an organizational level, in creating organizational cognitive biases policy (CBP).

The presented model provides new insights into the role of cognitive biases in performance management and allows seeing CBP as a safeguard against the effects of cognitive biases on performance. By referring to cognitive biases and CBP, our model also helps to understand why the same performance improvement practices might incite different opinions among decision-makers.

Flow-based leadership exists when leaders commit to maximizing their own peak performance (“flow”) and to facilitating the flow states of others. This results in team and organizational flow. Meaning making is what binds an organization to its purpose. A recent McKinsey study shows that when people work in flow, their productivity increases by five-fold and has the effect of elevating individual, as well as organizational, well-being. However, as leaders come and go in organizations, the commitment to a model of meaning-making and sustained peak performance can be tainted through politics, silos, and personalities as varied as the leaders themselves. How can an organization sustain a flow-based culture over long periods regardless of who is leading it. 

Georgia Smoke Diver (GSD) is an extreme, experiential training program in the fire service. There are over 1,000 GSDs as of this writing. At least 100 of these come back twice a year to help teach the class, which has about 40 students, on their own time and for no pay. They take time away from their families, often using precious vacation time, because they are committed to making firefighters better. This program changes lives. Since 1978, GSD practices mindful leadership development for growing and mentoring leaders. Their model of flow-based leadership fosters cultural intelligence and social capital to identify and nurture leaders over time. This chapter explores the dynamics of how GSD uses design principles to balance deliberate and organically driven leadership development.

The discussion questions relating to the case focus students’ attention on breaking away from the intuitive/emotional “boom mentality” driving their business decision and ask them to focus more on analytical decision criteria to support their “go” or “no-go” decisions.

The authors interviewed one of the partners of Burned-N-Turned several times and read the partners’ brief business plan for the food trailer.

Partners are wrapped up in the “boom mentality” in the Bakken oil fields in 2011 and jump into their decision to open a food trailer restaurant to serve the oil field workers and others. But have they omitted important considerations for their business decision?

The study is appropriate for undergrad strategic management courses. The authors have tested the compact case in three sections of capstone senior-level strategic management courses.

Research focussed on the scenario method has increasingly criticized the widely used intuitive logics (IL) approach to scenario development and introduced enhanced approaches, such as the backwards logic method (BLM) or the antifragile (AF) method, to overcome the restrictions associated with the IL approach. The BLM and the AF method have contributed to the further development of the scenario method by integrating backward reasoning and by increasing the method’s effectiveness for decision making. The purpose of this paper is to build on these ideas and introduce strategy scenarios as a further enhancement of the scenario method that directly applies the benefits of scenario-based planning to strategy development in corporations.

The authors argue that the existing methodologies do not fully integrate the benefits of scenario-based planning for strategic decision making and strategy development, as they mostly aim to develop macroenvironmental scenarios and test organizations’ existing strategies.

The paper suggests that changing the scope of scenario planning from environmental developments to the organization’s strategies themselves can further strengthen the method’s effectiveness for decision making.

The strategy scenario approach provides an enhanced approach to more comprehensively utilize the benefits of scenario-based reasoning for strategic decision making.

Detecting and describing intergenerational ambivalence in historical populations is a challenge because historians are dependent, for the most part, upon the evidence that has survived, rather than on evidence elicited by researchers from participants. In this respect, the distant past is more problematic than the recent past, of course; and studies of recent (but past) generations have been able successfully to integrate documentary, statistical, and interview material (Hareven, 1982; Macfarlane, 1977). Still, such studies cover only a short stretch of past time. The purpose of this essay is to review research on family history dealing with the past three or four centuries in order to see how the subject of intergenerational ambivalence has been dealt with, if at all, and how it might need to be incorporated into historical thinking when certain kinds of situations come under scrutiny.

This paper aims to present a tool-supported approach for visualising personas as social goal models, which can subsequently be used to identify security tensions.

The authors devised an approach to partially automate the construction of social goal models from personas. The authors provide two examples of how this approach can identify previously hidden implicit vulnerabilities and validate ethical hazards faced by penetration testers and their safeguards.

Visualising personas as goal models makes it easier for stakeholders to see implications of their goals being satisfied or denied and designers to incorporate the creation and analysis of such models into the broader requirements engineering (RE) tool-chain.

The approach can be used with minimal changes to existing user experience and goal modelling approaches and security RE tools.

Purpose – To examine the introduction of a practice known as Donation after Cardiac Death (DCD) into Australian hospitals notwithstanding that DCD constitutes a significant shift in medical practice. The shift is from holding off organ donation activities until after death has occurred (the Brain Death Scenario and Uncontrolled Cardiac Death Scenario) to progressing the injured patient to organ donor on the basis of an early prognostic call. The more precise term is ‘Controlled DCD’. What is controlled are the timing, location, mode and criteria of death.Findings – Controlled DCD first appears as an ‘inpatient trial’ in Pittsburgh, United States, in 1992, and has progressed, via various organisations and committees, to being used in a number of countries, including Australia and New Zealand, and being embodied in national, state and hospital protocols. Along the way, concerns that previously precluded such activity have been consistently raised and documented. Operational accounts reported in the medical literature do not acknowledge this history or the ethically problematic aspects of the practice. It is likely that these operational reports and related information sources, together with promotion of the positives of organ donation, have facilitated the practice’s progress through the relevant institutional committees.Social implications – Much is at stake when the quest for more organ donors starts changing what can be done to patients. How this practice has come to be tolerated in 2012, despite a number of irresolvable ethical issues, is a matter of vital community interest.Originality/value of chapter – This chapter is part of an ongoing study by the authors.