Speaker

Dieter van de Scheur is Managing Director Netherlands at TWS Partners and works in sourcing, contracting, and negotiation strategy. His professional lens focuses on applying game theory in complex, high-stakes project environments, translating academic negotiation theory into tools that senior leaders can apply directly to live deals. He advises organizations across industries from automotive to healthcare on high-stakes negotiations, ranging from strategic bilateral deals to complex, multi-party settings involving billions in spend, and previously led Contract & Negotiation Excellence at Philips. He also lectures at universities and executive MBA programs on negotiation strategy. His work with Jaguar Land Rover won the "Best Collaborative Teamwork Project" award at the 2025 CIPS Excellence in Procurement & Supply Awards.

 

Creating Clarity Under Complexity: Truth Telling by Design through Game Theory Step into the strategic side of project delivery with Dieter van de Scheur as he unveils how game theory can bring clarity to complexity in his session, "Creating Clarity Under Complexity: Truth Telling by Design through Game Theory". This practical, eye-opening session explores how strategic interactions between stakeholders shape project outcomes on every level (individual, project, and organizational), offering fresh perspectives and actionable insights to navigate volatile, multi-stakeholder programme environments. The session is structured around three key moves: Understand the Game, Play the Game, and Shape the Game, each addressing a different stage of turning strategic insight into delivery reliability. Drawing on real-world examples from large industrial programmes, Dieter shows how rules, incentives, and KPIs shape decision-making in unintended and counter-intuitive ways, and uses simplified negotiation and decision games to demonstrate how backward induction and incentive design can shift stakeholders from reacting to behaviour toward actively designing environments that reward transparency and truth-telling. Participants leave with practical tools for structuring governance, incentives, and negotiation strategies that increase delivery reliability under uncertainty.

 

Learning goals summary:

• Understand that it's not just about having the right methods or data – it's about the strategic interactions, incentives, and information asymmetries that actually shape project outcomes.
• Empower project professionals to see conflicting stakeholder incentives not as an obstacle but as a game to understand, play, and shape.
• Learn how to use backward induction to anticipate stakeholder behaviour before it happens.
• Discover how to design incentive-compatible KPIs and rules that steer motivation and encourage truth-telling.