Effective Decision Making

This course is a part of Leadership Essentials for Engineers, a 3-course Professional Certificate series from edX.

As an engineer in a leadership position, you will be faced with new responsibilities and tasks. These may include developing a business (unit) strategy and a business plan or being involved in strategic planning. Your success in dealing with these new responsibilities will largely depend on your ability to have a helicopter view of a situation and to make sound decisions.

In order to make decisions to move organizations forward, leaders will need to ensure that business goals are achievable and well-balanced while also taking into account the uncertainty of future developments. In a complex business environment, a sound strategy is the result of applying an analytical mindset and using a systematic approach to decision making.

This course will help you to build and apply an analytical toolkit including:

stakeholder goal trees to develop a clear set of measurable goals,

scenarios to prepare for future situations that may be different from what you expect,

multi-criteria analysis to assess which decisions can help you reach your goals.

The focus of the course will be on utilizing your analytical skills in a business context, allowing you to unravel complex situations requiring decisions.

Upon completion of this course, you will have been introduced to an analytical mindset and toolkit, and you will have used these in order to write a managerial summary of a business situation analysis to inform an effective decision for your business strategy.

What you'll learn

• How to use a systematic approach to successfully deal with complex decision situations
• How to develop stakeholder goal trees, draw up scenarios, and conduct a multi-criteria analysis
• How to employ an analytical mindset through writing a managerial summary of a business situation analysis that helps your organization move in the desired direction