Critical Thinking
High-stakes calls, no longer left to instinct.
How one of the nation’s largest integrated health systems gave thousands of leaders a shared, repeatable way to make complex, high-stakes decisions.
High-stakes calls, made on instinct.
Across a $5B health system spanning 150+ care locations and roughly 30,000 employees, leaders at every level make consequential decisions daily — clinical, operational, and financial. Yet the system had no common language or method for how those decisions got made, leaving complex problems to be resolved on instinct, under time pressure.
The organization wanted to make rigorous critical thinking a leadership foundation — consistent from frontline managers to executives — and to preserve deliberate human judgment as automation and AI took on more of the routine work. The need: one disciplined, repeatable decision method that could scale across thousands of leaders without diluting quality.
A structured, teachable way to decide.
The system adopted Critical Thinking & Decision Making™, a live, cohort-based program built on the DECIDER™ model — a seven-step framework that turns critical thinking into a structured process: define the real problem, establish and weight criteria, choose priorities, identify options, decide, execute, and review.
Leaders learned in cross-functional cohorts on real scenarios, personalized their growth through the DECIDERindex™ psychometric assessment with peer feedback, and kept a full year of platform access — so the model was applied to live decisions, not left in the room. Every participant left with a committed action plan.
A tool leaders keep coming back to.
Participants rated the experience 8.4 out of 10, with 8.9 for facilitation and 8.7 for commitment to their action plan — a Net Promoter Score of 62. Asked what they valued most, leaders named the structured, repeatable model first, followed by the cross-functional problem-solving it created and the practice on real scenarios.
The decision-making model — and the ability to keep going back to the tool for future complex decisions.
The program is built to deploy across every layer of leadership — frontline managers, managers of managers, and the executive team — a shared language that compounds as more of the organization adopts it. Participants themselves pushed to bring it to their full teams and executive peers.
One repeatable method, from the frontline to the C-suite — so high-stakes calls stop depending on who happens to be in the room.
Every result, in one place.
What this means for you
Give your leaders one way to decide.
Critical Thinking & Decision Making™ turns critical thinking into a structured, repeatable method — with a psychometric assessment so each leader’s growth is personal and measured.