Arnaud Chevallier
Most strategic failures are diagnosed too late and in the wrong place. By the time an organisation recognises it has been solving the wrong problem, the cost is already embedded in the decision. Leaders under pressure default to pattern recognition – reaching for familiar solutions before they have clearly defined the actual challenge. Speed and confidence are rewarded; rigorous diagnosis is not.
Misframed problems are the most expensive kind; Arnaud Chevallier, Professor of Strategy at IMD Business School, gives executives a structured discipline – grounded in engineering logic and behavioural science – for defining the right challenge and deciding well under uncertainty.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Arnaud Chevallier
- His “Frame, Explore, Decide” process – the core of Solvable (Pearson, 2022) – gives leadership teams a shared language for problem diagnosis that reduces the organisational cost of premature solution-jumping; this is a named, teachable framework, not a consulting philosophy.
- His research on the five types of strategic questions – published in Harvard Business Review (May-June 2024) and selected for HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2026 – gives executives a tool they can apply immediately to ambiguous, high-stakes discussions.
- His PhD in nonlinear stochastic mechanics, combined with strategy consulting at Accenture, produces frameworks that are simultaneously more rigorous in their evidence base and more usable in practice than most management academic alternatives.
- He has worked on genuinely complex, high-ambiguity problem-solving with the International Committee of the Red Cross, Gavi (the Vaccine Alliance), and Tetra Pak – organisations whose decision environments require structured diagnosis, not generic strategy advice.
- As director of IMD’s Global Management Foundations program and its Complex Problem Solving program, he brings institutional proof that serious executive audiences return to his frameworks at multiple career stages.
Biography highlights
- Professor of Strategy, IMD Business School; joined in 2018
- Author, Strategic Thinking in Complex Problem Solving (Oxford University Press, 2016)
- Co-author, Solvable: A Simple Solution to Complex Problems (Pearson FT, 2022), with Albrecht Enders
- Contributor to Harvard Business Review; “The Art of Asking Smarter Questions” (May-June 2024) selected for HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2026
- Director, IMD Global Management Foundations program; Director, MSc Sustainable Management and Technology (IMD/EPFL/University of Lausanne); Co-Director, IMD Complex Problem Solving program
- Former Accenture strategist (Houston and London); former Associate Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, Rice University; former graduate dean, University of Monterrey
- PhD in mechanical engineering, Rice University; engineering degrees, Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines
Biography
Arnaud Chevallier began teaching strategic thinking to engineers at Rice University – a combination that turned out to be revealing. Technically sophisticated minds, trained in rigorous analysis, still defaulted to the same error: they solved problems they had never properly defined. That observation has driven his work at IMD Business School, where he is now Professor of Strategy.
His two books – Strategic Thinking in Complex Problem Solving (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Solvable (Pearson FT, 2022, co-authored with Albrecht Enders) – give executives a cross-disciplinary framework for navigating complexity: Frame, Explore, Decide. Both make the same foundational argument. Most strategic failures are framing failures. Organisations commit to solutions before the actual problem is understood.
His research on decision quality extends to the questions executives ask. His article “The Art of Asking Smarter Questions,” published in Harvard Business Review in May-June 2024 and co-authored with Frédéric Dalsace and Jean-Louis Barsoux, identifies five types of strategic inquiry that consistently improve decision outcomes. The piece was selected for HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2026 – an editorial signal that the question of how leaders think has moved to the centre of the management agenda.
At IMD, Chevallier directs the Global Management Foundations and Complex Problem Solving programs. His consulting work includes Shell, the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and Gavi (the Vaccine Alliance) – organisations whose challenges require structured diagnosis before any solution can be considered. Before entering academia, he worked in Accenture’s Strategy and Business Architecture practice across Houston and London, a background that grounds the frameworks in the reality of high-pressure institutional decisions.
Key speaking topics
- Complex problem-solving frameworks
- Strategic decision-making under uncertainty
- Problem framing and diagnosis
- Cognitive bias and de-biasing in executive decisions
- Structured questioning for strategic clarity
- T-shaped thinking and cross-disciplinary problem-solving
- Evidence-based reasoning in organisations
Ideal for
- Chief Strategy Officers and senior leadership teams navigating high-ambiguity decisions
- Transformation leads and strategy functions working through complex, multi-stakeholder challenges
- Engineering and technical leaders transitioning into general management or executive roles
- Executive MBA cohorts and senior leadership development programmes
Audience outcomes
- A named, deployable framework – Frame, Explore, Decide – for structuring complex, ill-defined problems in real organisational contexts
- Practical tools for identifying problem misframing before resources and credibility are committed to the wrong solution
- A working method for recognising and reducing cognitive bias in high-stakes group decisions
- The five types of strategic question to apply in ambiguous, politically charged, or time-pressured discussions
- Sharper habits of structured reasoning that can be applied independently after the session