You are invited to attend:
Faculty of Law Twilight Seminar
Leaders’ practice of strategic decision making
Dr. Richard O’Quinn
Date: Monday, 21 July 2025
Time: 5.00pm-6.30pm (AEST)
Venue: BLD04_3_41 (Faculty of Law)
Given its centrality in organizations, strategic decision-making (SDM) is one of the most researched topics in leadership and is considered a key function of strategic leadership (Samimi et al., 2022). Existing theories typically investigate SDM in terms of the behavior of individuals. In this study we suggest a shift in focus: from regarding SDM as strictly an individual behavior to regarding it as an individual performance of a social practice. We applied a practice-theoretical perspective to investigate SDM across a range of industries, using a two-phased design, consisting of an interview-based study of strategic leaders and a real-time ethnographic study of SDM. Based on the findings we propose a theory which shows that: (a) strategic leaders’ practice of SDM is not uniform but made up of three interrelated ways of performing SDM – as driving, discovering, and designing; (b) each way of performing SDM consists of four major activities – framing the situation, researching options, planning outcomes, and executing the decision; which (c) are enacted differently in each way of performing SDM and, thus, may generate significantly different outcomes. The proposed theory advances existing SDM theories in important ways by offering an original and considerably broader conceptualization of SDM, which opens new lines of inquiry on what makes up SDM and how it may be improved as a key function of strategic leadership.
The seminar will commence at 5.30pm with light refreshments being offered from 5pm (vegan, gluten-free, and dairy-free options available).
Please register your attendance by 5pm on Friday, 11 July.
Dr Richard O’Quinn
Dr. Richard O’Quinn teaches courses on leadership, strategic decision-making, and strategic human resource management in the graduate, MBA, Executive Education, and online education programs at The Business School, University of Queensland. Richard's research interests include leadership, strategic decision-making, and organization studies using practice and process perspectives.
His interest in these fields stems from his previous 23-year career as a commissioned officer in the US Army Special Operations Forces. Richard routinely advises leaders and organizations in leadership, strategy, and organization improvement.