Prior to his work at IMD, Arnaud Chevallier served in the provost office at Rice University from 2011 to 2018 and as the graduate dean of the University of Monterrey from 2003 to 2010. Before joining academia, Arnaud worked in Accenture’s strategy and business architecture division out of London.

A French and US citizen, Arnaud has lived and worked in France, Mexico, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. He holds a BS and ME in mechanical engineering from the Université de Versailles and a MS and a PhD in mechanical engineering from Rice University.

Arnaud’s work prepares executives to manage the strategic challenges that organizations face in today’s dynamic global marketplace by integrating empirical findings from various disciplines into concrete tools to improve decision-making and problem solving.

His current research focus includes:

Adapting decision-making processes to risk and uncertainty, Integrating decision-making in broader complex problem solving, Using questions to enhance decision making, and Using Bayesian inference and probabilistic thinking into decision-making.

Arnaud’s latest book, Solvable, co-wrote with Albrecht Enders provides concrete ideas to manage complex challenges. His research has appeared in various journals, including MIT Sloan Management Review and Harvard Business Review.

Advances in AI have caused a seismic shift from a world in which answers were crucial to one in which questions are. The big differentiator is the ability to craft smart prompts.

With organizations of all sorts facing increased urgency and unpredictability, being able to ask smart questions has become key. Most of us are not formally trained on what kinds of questions to ask when approaching a problem. We learn on the go.

In his research and consulting, Arnaud Chevallier's research reveals that strategic questions can be grouped into five domains: investigative, speculative, productive, interpretive, and subjective. Each unlocks a different aspect of the decision-making process. He also found that leaders tend to have a bias towards certain types of questions and omit others.

The questions that get leaders and teams into trouble are often the ones they fail to ask. These are questions that don’t come spontaneously; they require prompting and conscious effort. They may run counter to your and your team’s individual or collective habits, preoccupations, and patterns of interaction. By attending to each, leaders and teams can become more likely to cover all the areas that need to be explored, and they’ll surface information and options they might otherwise have missed.

A couple of weeks before this session we are going to give you the opportunity to analyse your question mix using the self-assessment that Arnaud uses with executives and their teams at IMD.