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Decision Making Under Pressure: Risk, Bias, Judgment
645 students
Decision Making Under Pressure: Risk, Bias, Judgment
decision making | leadership decisions | cognitive biases | risk management | prioritization | delegation | judgment
Last updated 9/2026
English
English [Auto],
What you'll learn
- Catch anchoring, framing and confirmation bias in your own reasoning first
- Choose a decision model that fits the situation: OODA, Cynefin, cost-benefit
- Recognise a conflict of interest before it shapes a call you are making
- Know which decisions you have no right to make alone, and escalate properly
- Score a risk on a heat map with criteria you can defend afterwards
- Decide what to delegate, and what it costs you when you do not
- Prioritise with the Eisenhower matrix and the do-defer-delegate-delete method
- Recognise a deferred decision for what it is, and break the pattern
- Make hard calls with no budget: reductions, retention, communication
- Learn alongside Mike's 1.6 million students from 185 countries
Explore related topics
Course content
15 sections • 40 lectures • 20h 55m total length
Requirements
- Responsibility for decisions that affect other people
- No background in risk, statistics or psychology required
- One recent decision you would make differently now
- English at intermediate level or above, since all lessons are in English
- Willingness to find your own reasoning at fault at least once
Description
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Bad decisions under pressure are rarely made by people who were not clever enough. They are made by the wrong person, at the wrong moment, on whatever information happened to be nearest.
What actually goes wrong
Four failures, and they compound. The reasoning is distorted before it starts, because anchoring and framing are not character flaws — they are how the equipment works, including yours. The call is taken by whoever is available rather than whoever should own it, and nobody defined an escalation threshold in advance, so it is defined afterwards by the outcome. Attention has already been spent on things that were urgent and unimportant, so the decision that mattered gets the last twenty minutes of a Thursday. And a large share of what looks like bad judgement is not judgement at all — it is postponement, which feels like prudence right up until the options run out.
What this course covers
Thirty-eight lessons across those four failures. The reasoning first: deduction, induction and abduction, strong and weak arguments, the standard errors, confirmation bias, anchoring and framing, telling fact from opinion under time pressure, and decision models — OODA, Cynefin, cost against benefit — matched to the kind of situation you are in. Then how different people decide: MBTI, DISC, PAEI, Belbin's roles, the Hogan assessment which is specifically informative under stress, and the Big Five, including how to read a type in conversation. Then the risk frame: the heat map, the fraud triangle, conflict of interest, the 4I model, ISO 31000, the risk hierarchy, escalation and which calls are not yours to make, warning signs inside a leadership team, culture as a control, the three lines of defence, and a decision-making checklist. Then ownership: why capable people do not delegate, SMART, RACI, what not delegating costs, and buying back the hours you need to think. Then priority: the Eisenhower matrix, do-defer-delegate-delete, time blocking, and the psychology of procrastination. Finally the hardest version — deciding with no resources: hiring in uncertainty, reducing pay and benefits in the least damaging order, choosing who leaves and on what defensible basis, delivering the news, and rebuilding stability.
A note on two blocks
The risk block was recorded for a people-function audience, but the content is general: ISO 31000, the three lines of defence, the fraud triangle and the high-reliability organisation do not change by department, and that function appears in two lessons out of ten as an example of a risk owner. The final block is about crisis decisions and its examples are reductions, pay and benefits — it is the most honest material I have on choosing without resources, and also the most sector-specific. Both are worth knowing about before you start.
Who is teaching this
I am Mike. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.
What is included
Lifetime access to all 38 lessons
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
A Udemy Certificate of Completion
Working models: OODA, Cynefin, the bias set, five personality frameworks, the heat map, the fraud triangle, ISO 31000, the three lines of defence, the decision checklist, RACI, the Eisenhower matrix, four-D
Direct treatment of the decisions people avoid describing in courses
Where to start
Take one decision you would make differently now. Then ask which of the four it was: distorted reasoning, wrong owner, wrong moment, or a decision you never actually made. Enrol now and start today.
Who this course is for:
- Managers making calls faster than the information arrives
- Leaders who decided correctly and were still overtaken by events
- Specialists newly responsible for choices with consequences for others
- Founders and owners deciding alone with nobody to check them
- Project and operations leads who own escalation but have no criteria for it
- Anyone whose default under pressure is to postpone and call it prudence
- Professionals heading into a downturn with fewer resources than last year