Dr Lawrence Phillips is a Visiting Professor of Operational Research at the London School of Economics and a Director of Facilitations Limited and Catalyze Limited.

After completing an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering at Cornell University, he served for three years in the US Navy where he became interested in the interaction between people and machines. To pursue this, he took up post-graduate study in engineering psychology, human learning and decision making at the University of Michigan, where he studied under Professor Ward Edwards, the founder of the field of behavioural decision making. Post-doctoral research on how people in other countries take risks brought him to England, and led to an appointment at Brunel University in the newly created School of Social Sciences. There he taught Bayesian statistics, social and personality psychology, decision theory and behaviour in organisations (with Elliott Jaques). He trained in observation and group processes at the Tavistock Clinic and Institute of Human Relations and is a qualified practitioner of the Team Management Systems.

His early research focused on how individuals deal with risk and uncertainty. One of his discoveries, with Ward Edwards, was that people fail to become as certain as they could when faced with objective data. In the mid-1970s, he discovered, with George Wright, substantial East/West differences in the way people deal with uncertainty. Research then shifted to how groups of people form preferences, consider uncertainty, make judgements and take decisions, with particular emphasis on how a group can outperform even its best member.

Larry created the Decision Analysis Unit at Brunel in 1974 as a self-funding research unit, which moved to the London School of Economics in 1982. At the DAU he developed decision conferencing, a process for helping groups of key players to find solutions to complex issues of concern to their organisation. At the LSE, he teaches behavioural decision theory and decision analysis to undergraduates and post-graduates.

He has authored more than 80 publications spanning organisation theory, behavioural decision theory, decision and risk analysis, Bayesian statistics, group processes and cultural differences in dealing with uncertainty. He has served on the editorial boards of Acta Psychologica and the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, and is currently an editor of the Journal of Forecasting and the new Journal of Decision Analysis.