Description of qualifications

Vision is the most essential ingredient of leadership. This course illustrates how visions arise out of collective decision-making, naturally leading to socially accepted leadership.

Visions are based on business narratives that provide a coherent interpretation of the past pointing towards a direction for the future. This course understands the emergence of business narratives with the aid of established decision theories from economics, sociology, group psychoanalysis, management and cognitive science.

Learning objectives

• Understanding otherwise puzzling organizational decisions as manifestations of invariant patterns of human decision making;
• Understanding the reasons behind successful and unsuccessful business narratives;
• Understanding leadership as arising from the collective process of creating a vision for the future;
• Eradicating the idea that leading amounts to issuing orders that others will blindly execute;
• Suggesting tools for leading organizations where decision-making is distributed across multiple actors.

Contents

This course covers the following topics:

• Alternative theories of collective decision-making from economics, sociology, group psychoanalysis, management and cognitive science: Rational decision-making, group and social pressures, instinct-based decision-making, bounded rationality.
• The Garbage Can Model of organizational choice. A computer-based simulation showing unexpected organizational outcomes of individual behavior.
• Decision-making as coherence-seeking. Arranging available evidence into networks of causal relations in order to arrive at shared decisions.
• Visions and narratives. Constructing coherent interpretations of the past that provide orientation for the future. Positive and negative organizational narratives.
• Leadership based on a shared vision. Collective foundations of individual leadership. Leadership, organizational identity and pride.

Further information:
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Late registration possible if places will be still available.