Olivier Sibony

Why organisations work with Olivier Sibony

• He co-authored Noise with Daniel Kahneman and Cass Sunstein, which means a board hears the original behavioural science argument from one of the people who built it, not a secondhand interpretation.
• Twenty-five years at McKinsey, including running the Global Corporate Strategy Practice, gives him a working vocabulary for the actual decisions executive committees argue about: portfolio bets, M&A, market entry, capital allocation.
• His framework converts cognitive bias from an interesting concept into a procurement question: what does your decision architecture look like, and which specific traps does it fail to catch.
• He is one of a small group who can sit in a HEC Paris and Saïd Business School classroom and a CEO’s strategy offsite in the same week, and translate without losing either audience.

Biography highlights

• Co-author of Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment with Daniel Kahneman and Cass R. Sunstein, New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller
• Author of You’re About to Make a Terrible Mistake!, winner of the 2019 Manpower Foundation Grand Prize for best management book
• Professor of Strategy at HEC Paris and Associate Fellow at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
• Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company for 25 years, leading the firm’s Corporate Strategy Practice globally
• Co-author with Daniel Kahneman and Dan Lovallo of “Before You Make That Big Decision,” selected for HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Making Smart Decisions
• Knight in the French Legion of Honour and recipient of the Vernimmen Teaching Award at HEC Paris

Biography

Most strategic mistakes do not come from missing information. They come from the way executives process the information they already have. Behavioural strategy is the discipline of catching those errors before they reach the board paper, and Olivier Sibony has spent two decades building the case for treating it as a serious management practice rather than a curiosity.

His credentials sit on both sides of the divide that usually separates academics from operators. He spent 25 years at McKinsey & Company, eventually as Senior Partner running the firm’s Global Corporate Strategy Practice and a European leader of the Consumer sector. In 2015 he moved full time into teaching, joining HEC Paris as a Professor of Strategy and taking up an Associate Fellowship at Oxford’s Saïd Business School.

The intellectual work shows up most clearly in the books. Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, co-authored with Daniel Kahneman and Cass R. Sunstein, became a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller and reframed an entire category of judgment error that bias literature had ignored. You’re About to Make a Terrible Mistake! won the Manpower Foundation Grand Prize and turned the academic case into 40 specific techniques executives can use. Earlier, his Harvard Business Review article with Kahneman and Dan Lovallo, “Before You Make That Big Decision,” was selected for HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Making Smart Decisions.

What makes him useful in a room full of operators is the McKinsey vocabulary underneath the behavioural science. He talks about decision architecture the way other people talk about org design: as something you build deliberately, audit regularly, and rebuild when it stops catching the errors it was meant to catch.

Key speaking topics

• Behavioural strategy and decision quality
• Cognitive bias in executive judgment
• Noise and inconsistency in organisational decisions
• Decision architecture in senior teams
• Strategic choice under uncertainty
• Algorithms, AI, and the limits of human intuition
• Diversity and personnel decision-making

Ideal for

• CEOs, executive committees, and boards reviewing how major capital allocation and strategy decisions get made
• Chief Strategy Officers and corporate development teams running M&A, portfolio, and market-entry processes
• CHROs and senior HR leaders responsible for hiring, performance review, and promotion systems where noise quietly distorts outcomes
• Investment committees and risk leadership teams whose decisions repeat under uncertainty

Audience outcomes

• A clearer view of where their own decision processes are most exposed to bias and noise
• A vocabulary to challenge confident recommendations without attacking the people making them
• Specific techniques for building dissent, structured disagreement, and pre-mortems into existing governance
• A framework for deciding when to trust judgment, when to trust data, and when to trust an algorithm
• A sharper sense of which decisions deserve the heaviest process and which do not