
What critical thinking is, and what it is not
How it differs from logical and creative thinking
Its role in management decisions
Objectivity, rationality and reasoning from evidence
Deduction, induction and abduction
What separates a strong argument from a weak one
Building an argument that survives challenge
Recognising errors in reasoning, including your own
What cognitive biases are
Confirmation bias, anchoring and framing
How they distort the reading of facts and the decision that follows
Practical techniques for reducing their effect
Separating fact from opinion
Verifying accuracy
Primary against secondary sources
Fact-checking as an everyday management skill
Decision models: OODA, Cynefin, cost-benefit
Using analysis and argument to choose
Managing risk and uncertainty
Cases from business and from ordinary life
Applying it inside a business
Using it in negotiation and communication
Its connection to creativity and innovation
Building your own development plan for it
Translating business value into a solvable question
Problem thinking against solution thinking
Telling a symptom from a problem
The Problem → Goal → Constraint → Metric framework
Stakeholder mapping and influence analysis
Elicitation techniques
Asking the business the right question
Handling conflicting requirements, and prioritising by value against effort
Business, functional and non-functional requirements
User stories, and the anti-patterns
Acceptance criteria in given-when-then form
Which documents are actually used, and definition of ready
What a process means when you have to analyse it
The as-is and to-be approach
The minimum useful set of BPMN
Finding bottlenecks and waste, and proposing improvement rather than diagrams
The system context diagram
Functional decomposition
User flows, data objects and business rules
Traceability from requirement to process to solution
Operating inside Agile, Scrum or Waterfall
Working with a backlog and shifting requirements
Change requests and impact analysis
Managing scope, and defending conclusions to both sides
The four types of performance indicator, and why the distinction matters
The characteristics of a metric that works
How indicators connect to goals and strategy
The 10-80-10 rule, and knowing your critical success factors
Cases from companies that did this properly
What a full system looks like, and the four stages of building it
Running a two-day workshop on success factors
Impact mapping to find the factors with the most leverage
The three laws of productivity
The emotional factors that decide whether people accept a metric
Preparing the short version and the full proposal
The eight steps of the promotion process
The common measurement traps
Deciding what genuinely needs measuring
Formulating the metric precisely
Eliminating metrics that cost more than they return
Deriving indicators rather than inventing them
Calculating them
Working through several success factors in practice
Improving reporting using Stephen Few's principles
Best practice in graphical display
Getting more out of software you already own
The reporting hierarchy for staff, managers and executives
The seven fundamental building blocks
Agile methods that raise the chance of success
The specific next steps for the coming five weeks
That tying indicators to pay raises productivity
That more indicators lead to better performance
That every indicator is a KPI, and that monthly tracking improves anything
Why linking measurement to reward is the most expensive myth of all
The 4S model, and how analytics answers a properly framed question
Which data is genuinely useful and which is collected out of habit
Selling the value of analytics to leadership
The ABC model, and how analysis changes a decision
Segmenting on basic characteristics
Visualising the segments
Analysing metrics inside a segment rather than across the whole
Grouping segments, and finding the insight the average was hiding
What lifetime value means and how it is calculated
Calculating return on investment for a workforce
Finding the segments that generate the most value
Making decisions on that number, and raising it deliberately
Visualising a journey map
Collecting the data behind it
Using surveys to manage the map at each stage
Which questionnaire belongs at which point
Reading a funnel properly
What can be measured at each stage
Analysing performance rather than volume
Which conclusions the metrics actually support
ABC analysis
Building the model
Assessing performance with it
Assessing engagement alongside it
The typical mistakes in turnover analysis
Measuring turnover and retention correctly
Measuring loyalty and intent to stay
Understanding why people actually leave
Designing a survey that produces analysable data
Key driver analysis, and selecting the drivers that matter
Visual assessment before calculation
Finding and calculating correlations
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Most companies that call themselves data-driven have a dashboard nobody opens and a set of metrics that were gamed within a quarter.
Why the dashboard did not help
The failure almost never happens at the analysis stage. It happens two steps earlier, when somebody measured a symptom instead of the problem, or built a metric that rewarded the behaviour rather than the outcome. I have introduced metrics that were being worked around inside six weeks, and the analysis behind them was fine. The question was wrong. No amount of regression rescues a question that was badly framed.
What this course actually covers
Five blocks, in the order the work happens. First, thinking: what makes an argument strong, which cognitive biases corrupt a conclusion before you reach the data, how to judge a source, and the decision models for acting under uncertainty. Second, framing: telling a symptom from a problem, eliciting what people actually need, and stating a question as problem, goal, constraint and metric. Third, measurement: designing an indicator, deriving it from critical success factors, displaying it properly, and the six myths that break most systems — starting with tying metrics to pay. Fourth, analysis: segmentation, lifetime value, funnels, correlation, multiple regression, forecasting, and designing an experiment with a control group. Fifth, eight lessons on a company that made all of this its operating system, including how it decides who to hire and how it predicts who will leave.
A note on the data
Eighteen of the thirty-eight lessons work with people data — turnover, engagement, hiring funnels, employee value. The method does not depend on that: segmentation, key driver analysis, multiple regression and experiment design behave the same whatever the rows represent. I am telling you what the examples look like so you can decide before buying rather than in lesson twenty-one.
Who is teaching this
I am Mike Pritula. 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 frameworks: Problem → Goal → Constraint → Metric, impact mapping, the 10-80-10 rule, key driver analysis, regression, experiment design
Real cases, including how Google runs its decisions on data
Where to start
Pick the metric your team reports most often and ask what decision it has changed in the last six months. If the answer is none, that metric is decoration, and this course is about the difference. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.