Decision Making for Leaders (BUSA90515)

Senior Managers today have to make decisions that lead to outstanding performance in a complex dynamic environment. Information Technology seems to provide so much data that answers to organisational problems are often obscured rather than highlighted. Important decisions cannot be left to intuition alone. We need to evaluate different courses of action, make recommendations and communicate the structure of our reasoning. We often have to defend our choices and make presentations that show we have done a thorough analysis. We also need to make sense out of various sources of data and organise the inputs of experts and colleagues.

This unit will address the descriptive part of decision-making. This science is grounded in psychology. Specifically, we will present the many heuristics and biases that people have while making judgements, a research programme for which Daniel Khaneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for joint work with Amos Tversky. Complementary to this, we will also discuss the prescriptive part of decision-making, which discusses how people should make decisions. This science is grounded in mathematics and statistics. We will develop your personal effectiveness skill at making decisions, moving on to increasing your effectiveness of leading groups towards effective decision-making.