Public Affairs 6055: Judgment in Managerial Decision-Making

Upon completion of the course, students should understand:

• The theoretical assumptions about human decision-making underlying public policy and management practices
• Learn that decision-making is an iterative process and it takes persistence to continually refine your understanding of a problem and how to solve it
• Understand the importance of working with others as you go through the problem-solving approach
• What a complex problem is and how simulations are designed to deal with complex problems

Upon completion of the course, students will develop decision-making skills that include:

• Learning the PrOACT approach to decision-making that is applicable to a wide variety of managerial problems and contexts
• Developing a lifelong skill at being reflective about how decisions are made
• Managing “up” in working with your superior
• How to manage meetings better
• How to create a stakeholder or citizen engagement plan

A textbook may be required for this course. Please consult your instructor's syllabus for detail. 

Course Warm-Up, 15 points
Workplace Journals, 115 points
Application Assignments, 60 points
Final Project, 160 points
Course Reflection, 50 points

Total: 400 Points

These assignments are low stakes, warm-up exercises that allow me and the rest of the class to get to know you and your professional goals. I will be closely monitoring my email and course website to make sure to quickly respond to any questions you might have in this first week.

Please upload a video introduction so that we get to know you and to have some fun.  If you do not have a video, we provide instruction on how to do that on Carmen from your computer. There is a quick low stakes quiz to make sure that you have read through the syllabus. There is a short survey to get to you know and what you would like to gain from this course.

The largest assignment in the course is your final project. Your project requires that you analyze a decision, (organization, another organization, or for yourself) and then make a recommendation based on your analysis. The final project will be the PrOACT analysis and a video in which you make a short elevator speech that is giving a “heads up” for those who will be reviewing your PrOACT analysis.

Each week, you will cumulatively build the final project by applying what you learn in the class to a set of structured questions in the workplace journal and from the asynchronous conversations you will have with your peers.

You will submit rough drafts of your work in Week 5 of the course and then revise your drafts based on peer and instructor feedback and turn in your final analysis at the end of the course. The first draft is a low stakes assignment, but beware that it will be rigorously graded, so that if all of the comments are attended to, you should be in good shape for getting an “A” grade on the final project.

To help you build up to your final project, there is a set of questions for Weeks 1-4 of the course that will help you appraise, reflect upon, and analyze how decisions are made - and how they could be made differently - in your organization.

1. Quick Overview of Decision
2. Problem and Objectives
3. Alternatives and Consequences
4. Tradeoffs

Given the pace of covering material in a short course and the vagaries of summer time schedules, you are encouraged to work ahead of schedule on the individual assignments.

This course is largely about developing your decision-making skills. While we strongly encourage you to collaborate on the main project of this course, the decision-making project, we also have individual application assignments.  No conversation, idea-sharing, or sharing about your applications assignments is allowed. Feel free to ask me clarifying questions.

(There are a few practice quizzes on heuristics, but these merely allow you to test your understanding of these concepts. There are no grades involved.)

One we get off to a good start for the semester, we have three application assignments. For the group-decision-making module in Week 3, we are also going to ask you to observe a meeting using some structured questions to help you understand the dynamics of meetings with an eye towards improving their efficacy and efficiency. The meeting could be one of the many meetings that you regularly attend, or any other meeting, in which decisions are made. In Week 4, the ‘public decision-making’ assignment applies what we know about engaging the public in a public decision.  Designing a good process is key to successful public and stakeholder engagement, and this exercise will ask you to design an appropriate process.  We will begin preparing for Week 5 Complex Decision-Making at the end of Week 4.  Everyone will need to do some individual analysis before you join your group for the synchronous session in Week 5 where the class will play a game on how to deal with climate change using simulation.

We complete the cycle of learning by reflecting on what you have learned. By reflecting on the course, you deepen your knowledge of these skills and concepts by weaving them into a coherent understanding of how it all fits together. This gives more meaning to the material and also predicts the material will stay with you longer. This course reflection not only looks back help you internalize to make it your own, so that you can apply these skills in the future. You will also be asked what you would like to learn next. The course reflection should be 500-700 words in length. Specific prompts are provided in the assignment.