The Art of Critical Decision Making

First off, my memory is crap anymore. I _swear_ I posted this before (or I was going to and stopped?) Perhaps this was deleted because it is promoting a commercial product? If you need to delete, please do so and PM me.

I'm about halfway through this course called The Art of Critical Decision Making:
http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/coursedesclong2.aspx?cid=5932

I had taken a course this summer called Emergency Management Leadership and Organizational Theory and have become more interested in organizational theory and decision making. I'm not sure how useful this course would be to an individual, but the first part of the course discusses individual decisions. I've listened to the CD version in the car and the presentation is not boring. It covers a lot of different topics and has lots of examples of poor decisions and why they were made.

Their courses go on sale a lot, so you might be able to get this at a price over 50% off.

I had a little trouble following that. You first mention the Critical Decision course, but then immediately mention the Emergency Management course. So I couldn't tell what course you were talking about in your second paragraph. Which one are you not sure would be useful and which one were you listening to on CD?

I'd like to hear more about why you took the 2 courses, what you've gotten out of them, and how they could be useful in prep planning.

Maybe I should take the course on "Effective Writing"...

I'm pursing a Master's degree in Emergency Management. I took the "Emergency Management Leadership and Organizational Theory" as an elective. It was an interesting course and increased my interest in organization theory and leadership. A portion of this field is decision making.

What I have gotten out of it is that when making these critical decisions, you need to step back. Gather as much information as you can, think it through, and the decision kind of appears. I think listening to the case studies will help an individual know when they are about to encounter a pitfall in making a critical decision.

For planning itself, it may not be that useful. For response, very. You'll end up planning on how you'll make these decisions, but essentially you're trying to develop a new habit to make sure that decisions are made with all of the information.

The uses case studies and examples as support, and does give recommendations on how to avoid some of these problems. I think this would be useful to anyone in probably nearly any life situation.

I have taught Critical Thinking to a couple University of Phoenix classes. That course reminds us that perception of the truth is tricky and that first impressions may be wrong. It also shows that logic is a tool that can be flawed without the wisdom of experience to guide it. So if you do not have the wisdom you are better off gathering some from wide-ranging research - including talking with others - before making a decision.

It is not, however, a leadership course. It does not address the fact that it is rare that you will have all the information or wisdom you would like at the time you must make the call. Nor does it teach you to decide, evaluate, adjust, and decide again - scientific method stuff. Neither does it teach you to forgive yourself for mistakes - psychology stuff.

I have taken courses from NOLS and the AMC on Outdoor Leadership, and they both work through the concepts of decision making under adverse conditions, with less information that what you really want. They throw in weather issues, medical emergencies, expedition behavior, navigation, and mutiny to make it interesting. (May you live in interesting times...)

I have read a great deal about the subject, but, always seem to learn more by doing. If you're placed in situations where you have to actually make some decisions, and then live with the consequences... well, I'll just say that reality is a great teacher, if you listen. These courses are taught in the wild over a period of a week or more. I would highly recommend them if you're interested in the topic, but, it's an investment in time and money for sure.

http://www.nols.edu/courses

http://www.outdoors.org/education/index.cfm

thanks all for the info. that helps to give me a better sense of what these courses are. I'm a long way off from the point of considering them, but it's good to know about them meanwhile.

LOL.

There's an excellent monograph that addresses this, "The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis." (link below) Something that comes up in information analysis is that 'more isn't necessarily better.'

"Once an experienced analyst has the minimum information necessary to make an informed judgment, obtaining additional information generally does not improve the accuracy of his or her estimates. Additional information does, however, lead the analyst to become more confident in the judgment, to the point of overconfidence.

Experienced analysts have an imperfect understanding of what information they actually use in making judgments. They are unaware of the extent to which their judgments are determined by a few dominant factors, rather than by the systematic integration of all available information. Analysts actually use much less of the available information than they think they do."

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-t...ysis/index.html

I've noticed this when I'm evaluating a prospect: I can spend a week on the ground and come up with a conceptual model, then come back several years later, spend several months doing more detailed work (and spend more money) only to change the model little if any.

A friend who's a medic uses a similar concept: "Is the patient breathing? If not, fix it. Worry about the other stuff later."

That is available as a PDF! Yay!!!! Here is the link for everyone: Pyschology of Intelligence Analysis

ki4buc,

Excellent find! Thanks for putting that up.

-Blast

Some stuff that might be of interest here too.
http://changingminds.org/

It might help you evaluate information if you understand a bit about the methods of persuasion.