At Brzyski & Partners most engagements are advisory and workshop work for Polish companies. Every so often, though, a project comes along that takes me outside the country: corporate training in English, for people from different industries, different regulatory systems and completely different ways of working.
This time we were asked to run a three-day Risk-Based Decision-Making Strategies programme. It is a workshop about making decisions where certainty is missing, the data is thin and the consequences can be serious. I do not start with theory. I start with how specific companies made specific decisions, and ask what follows from that for us.
A decision workshop where the “obvious” stops being obvious
We work on stories you can name. The Boeing 737 MAX shows what happens when competitive pressure pushes the formal decision process to the margin. Silicon Valley Bank is a lesson about a risk appetite that looked excellent on paper and did not exist in practice. Toyota is the opposite example: a company that, after one crisis, managed to prepare for the next one a whole decade later.
We devote a separate block to artificial intelligence. We talk about predictive models, generative models and agentic systems. One question interests me throughout: where does AI actually improve decisions, and where does it create a new category of risk that you have to learn to recognise.
Real case studies
We work on stories you can name. The Boeing 737 MAX shows what happens when competitive pressure pushes the formal decision process to the margin. Silicon Valley Bank is a lesson about a risk appetite that looked excellent on paper and did not exist in practice. Toyota is the opposite example: a company that, after one crisis, managed to prepare for the next one a whole decade later.
We devote a separate block to artificial intelligence. We talk about predictive models, generative models and agentic systems. One question interests me throughout: where does AI actually improve decisions, and where does it create a new category of risk that you have to learn to recognise.
There are no lectures here. There is case analysis, discussion and simulation. The programme closes with a two-hour exercise in which teams have to prepare a management recommendation and bring together everything we practised over three days.
An international group changes the workshop itself
This one surprises me every time. The same case looks different when the people around the table come from different regulatory systems, different sectors and a different relationship with hierarchy. What is obvious to one person, another asks you to justify. And that is exactly when the discussion gets genuinely interesting, because you have to explain that “obviousness”.
For me, as a consultant and trainer, that is the best part of projects like this. Participants take away knowledge not only from the material, but above all from each other.
Let’s talk
If your organisation faces high-risk decisions and is looking for a way to make them more deliberately, I would be glad to describe what a programme like this could look like for you.
About the author
Łukasz Brzyski runs Brzyski & Partners Management Consulting. He advises on the sale and purchase of companies valued between PLN 10 and 50 million, and sold two companies he co-founded before he started advising others. More about the author