A Book in the Making

Since a few years, ComTeam offers a seminar for experienced executives on “Managing Complex Decision-Making Processes”. After having studied most of the literature covering this topic, we decided to write a script for the seminar, because the books seemed much too complicated.

Over the years now, this script has grown into a little book and therefore it seemed appropriate to make a “real” book out of it. This was a decision quickly made by the authors: Lorenz Forchhammer, Elke Lorenz and Marco Stoll. But different from a script, a book has to be self- explicable. Therefore we not only had to go through the whole description of the decision process again, but we also decided to make it more transparent by simultaneously describing the process in an a case-study. And we added an extensive part describing different useful methods.

So, what is the content of this book: “Complex Decision-Making – A Textbook for Complex Decision –Making in Companies and Organizations”?
Mainly what we do is to describe the method step by step. Together with the board of a travel-insurance company we called “Globo”, the reader will learn how to decide for or against expansion of the business.

For each phase of the process, several methods to support the process are described.

But at the same time, different aspects connected to the subject will be discussed, such as:

• Where is the point, where a decision-making process starts to become complex?
• How does such a process differ from a change process or conflict-management?
• What is the impact of intuition in a decision-making process?
• What does participation mean in such a process and what is the role of the decision maker?
• How do you get sustainable decisions?

The authors realized pretty soon, that – quite similar to decision- making processes- the devil is in the details. Is the description of the process really clear? Does the case study follow the steps logically and stringent? How detailed must the description be? How much background information is necessary? To find answers to these and other questions the authors decided to retreat for a week at the end of March to the still winterly South of Sweden. The clear, cold air helped us to find clear thoughts. At the end of the week the authors could say: “The book has hatched; now it must fly”.

When will that be? In the next few days the manuscript will go to the editorial office. The publishing is scheduled for fall 2009. And of course, you as our customers will be the first to learn when the new book flies out into the world.