"The most dangerous decision-making fallacy is that informed decision-makers will naturally make better, more objective decisions. Making consistently timely, effective, informed decisions takes hard work. Trust me – it’s worth it. Effective decision-making is the essential common ingredient behind every successful step, initiative, and strategy that people, organizations, and national governments undertake."
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Practice areas
Disruptions, Tech and Strategy
DISRUPTIONS are deadly to incumbents and profitable to disruptors. We work with clients to help them discern, respond, and exploit disruptive change.
Digital Transformation
TRANSFORMING for the digital age is indispesable to effective competition. Our services build on experience, research and scholarship.
Artificial Intelligence
AI IS REINVENTING business. Our services focus on AI's impacts on strategy, business models, operations and human capital.
Decision - Making
Data and information are increasingly driving decisions and encroaching on once exclusively human domains. We help you exploit decision-support technologies without sacrificing your human capital.
Why you benefit from our original research
Innovative technologies are commonly praised and blamed for causing competitive disruptions. They are not alone as drivers of change, however. Geopolitical events can similarly trigger disruptions in the global economy. Disruptors include changes in trade policies, national, regional and global political instability, and military conflicts. Companies operating and trading in the larger global economy are susceptible to geopolitical disruptions. While we focus on technology, our research and analysis consider broader disruptive forces, including geopolitical events, high-stake decisions, and decision-makers.
The following books were authored by OPR founder, Ozzie Paez, to apply and test analytical methods to geopolitical events. Ozzie’s approach intentionally side-stepped traditional analytical approaches common to historians, policy wonks, and foreign policy scholars. It applied a benchmark approach common to engineering, along with decision-making analysis and the psychology of biases in decision-making.
“My books will help you understand and overcome poor assumptions, barriers, biases, and fallacies in decision-making. They offer leaders novel approaches for coping with uncertainty, managing risks and thriving amid disruptions.” Ozzie Paez
Book Reviews
Praise for Decision Making in a Nuclear Middle East
Ozzie's analysis of the nuclear Middle East is based on a novel application of "benchmarking"- a technique used in business to compare best practices. Dissecting the Soviet-US Cold War nuclear deterrence history with great clarity, Ozzie Paez shows how fickle and unreliable mutual deterrence can be in the Middle East context. This is one of the most, if not THE most insightful, concise, clear-eyed analysis I've read about the Middle East fragile balance of power. I started reading this short book as a believer in mutual deterrence. I ended up absolutely convinced Paez is right, and Washington (surprise!) is blind as bat...
Read the full review of Decision Making in a Nuclear Middle East on Amazon
Praise for Going Nuclear
Author Ozzie Paez has done his homework and it shows. The book is based on numerous papers, articles, and interviews, that were integrated into a coherent read. Mr. Paez's passion saves us from the dry and tough experience that usually accompanies such fact-packed books. However, his personal experience as US Air Force veteran and researcher into safety and security don't surface as much as the interested reader may want it to.
The essence of the book is twofold. Not only does it shed light on current crises and political instability, but it also shows the detrimental effects of hindsight bias on decision-making. The book is more than just a history lesson, it harbors many useful insights for any decision-maker. A few of the best are: "Hindsight doesn't produce foresight" and its emergence is "a process, not an event'...
See B.L. van Veen's full review of Going Nuclear on Amazon
