In this class, we examine why leaders and organizations make poor choices, digging deep into cognitive psychology, group dynamics, and theories of organizational culture and systems to help us understand why well-intentioned, capable people blunder. Moreover, we examine the techniques and behaviors that leaders can employ to improve decision making in their organization. We focus on how leaders can design decision-making processes that marshal the collective intellect in their organizations, bringing together the diverse expertise, perspectives, and talents to determine the best course of action.

The class uses case studies to examine decision making at three levels: individual, group, and organizational. 

To begin, we examine how individuals make choices. We show that most individuals do not examine every possible alternative or collect mountains of information and data when making choices. Instead, most of us draw on our experience, apply rules of thumb, and use other heuristics when making decisions. Sometimes, that leads us into trouble. As it turns out, most individuals are susceptible to what psychologists call cognitive biases—decision traps that cause us to make certain systematic mistakes when making choices. From there, we examine the intuitive process in great depth, showing that intuition is more than a gut instinct. Intuition represents a powerful pattern-recognition capability that individuals have, drawing from their wealth of past experience. However, intuition can lead us astray, and this course explains how and why that can happen, particularly when we reason by analogy.

In the second major part of the class, we examine how teams make decisions, recognizing that most of us do not make all our choices on our own. Instead, we often work in groups to make complex choices. We begin by asking the question, are groups “smarter” than individuals? We see that they can be, but in many cases, teams do not actually employ the diverse talents and knowledge of the members effectively. Thus, teams may experience a lack of synergy among the members. We show the problems that typically arise, such as groupthink—that is, the tendency for groups to experience powerful pressures for conformity, which suppress dissenting views and lead to clouded judgments. In our section on group decision making, we also examine why teams often find themselves riddled with indecision. Most importantly, though, we examine how groups can stimulate constructive
conflict, as well as achieve consensus and timely closure, so that they can overcome these problems and make better decisions.


Week of November 6  LECTURE 1 Making High-Stakes Decisions 
Week of November 13 LECTURE 2 Cognitive Biases
Week of November 20 LECTURE 3 Avoiding Decision-Making Traps
Week of November 27 LECTURE 4 Framing—Risk or Opportunity?
Week of December 4 LECTURE 5 Intuition—Recognizing Patterns
Week of December 11 LECTURE 6 Reasoning by Analogy 
Week of December 18 LECTURE 7 Making Sense of Ambiguous Situations 
Week of January 8 LECTURE 8 The Wisdom of Crowds?
Week of January 15 LECTURE 9 Groupthink—Thinking or Conforming?
Week of January 24 LECTURE 10 Deciding How to Decide
Week of February 5 LECTURE 11 Stimulating Conflict and Debate 
Week of February 12 LECTURE 12 Keeping Conflict Constructive 
Week of February 19 LECTURE 13 Creativity and Brainstorming 
Week of February 26 LECTURE 14 The Curious Inability to Decide
Week of March 4 LECTURE 15 Procedural Justice
Week of March 11 LECTURE 16 Achieving Closure through Small Wins
Week of March 18 LECTURE 17 Normal Accident Theory
Week of March 25 LECTURE 18 Normalizing Deviance
Week of April 1 LECTURE 19 Allison’s Model—Three Lenses 
Week of Apri  8 LECTURE 20 Practical Drift
Week of Apri 15 LECTURE 21 Ambiguous Threats and the Recovery Window
Week of Apri 25 LECTURE 22 Connecting the Dots
Week of May 6 LECTURE 23 Seeking Out Problems
Week of May 13 LECTURE 24 Asking the Right Questions

While the basic format for this class is LECTURE - the student should understand this class as a great opportunity to ask questions and should be prepared to participate in discussion based upon the topic presented. 

Strategic Study Skills Series #1  - The Art of Critical Decisionmaking