Courses of Strategic Decision and Risk Management (SDRM) @ Stanford University: Course Descriptions




	Home
	Program Overview
	Course Descriptions
	Course Previews
	Faculty
	Educators' Emphasis
	Schedule
	Registration & Pricing
	Application Form
	SDRM Brochure
	Other Programs
	FAQ
	Partners
	Contact Us
	"This is a fascinating and valuable discipline that should be employed by most organizations." -- Doug Caldwell, Visa

Stanford Certificate Program

Strategic Decision and Risk Management

Stanford Campus, June 2008

Course Descriptions

Core Courses
Decision Quality in Organizations
Decision Analysis

Elective Courses
Advanced Decision Analysis
Behavioral Challenges in Decision-Making
Converting Strategy Into Action
Decision Leadership
Enterprise Risk Management
Modeling for Strategic Insight
Strategic Decision and Risk Management Practicum
Strategic Innovation
Strategic Portfolio Decisions

Educators’ Courses
Decision Quality for Educators
Teaching Decision Skills in Humanities

Core Courses

Decision Quality in Organizations Course Syllabus

This course provides an overview of the best practices for making smarter, faster, and more creative long-term decisions. It introduces the cornerstones of making better decisions:

Decision quality – the framework that defines the requirements of a good decision
Dialogue decision process – an efficient, collaborative approach to addressing organizationally and analytically complex issues to reach quality decisions
Decision analysis – the concepts and quantitative tools that produce clarity about the best choice in an uncertain and dynamic business environment with diverse value metrics.

Senior decision-makers, decision team leaders, and those who provide information to support strategic decision-making will find this program an excellent introduction to how this approach would benefit their organization, how it works, and the roles that make the process effective.

The course blends presentations, group discussions, and learning by doing. Participants work in teams on a complex decision, and an experienced decision consultant coaches each team. Topics include:

Framing a decision appropriately
Generating creative alternatives
Contributing to model building
Quantifying uncertainty using probability
Structuring and evaluating decision trees to determine the best alternative
Communicating evaluation results
Building decision competency into an organization.

Decision Analysis Course Syllabus

Course Preview #1
Course Preview #2

This course presents the philosophy and analytic tools of decision analysis, the analytic foundation for all the courses in the Strategic Decision and Risk Management program. The course is taught by Stanford’s Professor Ron Howard, who coined the name, developed the discipline, and pioneered its application to all types of decisions. This course provides a rare opportunity to study with the founder of this important field. You will learn to:

Analyze the personal and professional decisions that shape lives and organizations
Follow a decision approach that scales to treat decisions at all levels of importance
Use the concepts that clarify thinking and choice
Avoid the pitfalls of intuitive decision-making.

The course is taught by the Socratic method – guided, but unfettered, by an instruction plan. Important concepts are introduced when they arise in the discourse and therefore at the peak of interest. The open format allows pursuit of a topic to an appropriately satisfying conclusion rather than cutting off discussion summarily at the end of a class.

Elective Courses

Advanced Decision Analysis

Building on the core Decision Analysis course, explore the considerations and tools necessary to assist people and organizations in decision-making. Topics include assessing and applying corporate risk tolerance, risk sharing and scaling, common decision methods and their limitations, and Bayesian learning.

Behavioral Challenges in Decision-Making Course Syllabus

As human beings, we are prone to error. In this course, we introduce a framework for understanding how natural behavioral processes can produce biases, distortions, and mistakes in decision-making. We will demonstrate many of these phenomena firsthand through individual and class exercises. Topics will include:

Biases in perception
Fallacies in reasoning
Motivational biases
Personality differences
Group dynamics.

We will offer preventive measures and techniques that can help decision-makers avoid potential traps and pitfalls, improve individual decisions, and enrich group and organizational decisions.

Those who participate in strategic decision-making will find this program an excellent introduction to the decision-making problems and pitfalls inherent to human nature.

Converting Strategy into Action Course Syllabus

Learn a comprehensive organizational mastery model that includes proven approaches and emerging concepts for aligning your organization’s project and program initiatives with its strategic decisions.

Decision Leadership Sample Course Syllabus

This course builds on the concepts of Decision Quality and the Dialogue Decision Process, with a focus on the role of the decision leader. Designed for managers who must lead a group to a decision, the course teaches the five essentials of decision leadership:

See the destination – a high-quality decision
Diagnose a decision situation
Design an effective and efficient decision process
Lead the decision process
Assess the level of quality achieved

As part of leading the decision process, decision leaders often facilitate meetings among those who support and provide input to decision making, as well as those who actually make the decision. This course teaches the fundamentals of leading meetings at various stages of the Dialogue Decision Process, with practice in facilitation, managing group dynamics (including conflict), leadership styles, and improving decision quality. Participants have the opportunity to gain insight into their own decision leadership capabilities through in-class exercises and other individual assessments.

Prerequisite: The “Decision Quality in Organizations” course is a prerequisite.

Enterprise Risk Management Course Syllabus

This course is intended to help you better protect and enhance shareholder value through value-focused enterprise risk management (ERM). You will learn to identify excessive risk exposure, develop ways to manage enterprise risk, and delineate clear roles for the board, senior executives, chief risk officers, line executives, and risk management staff.

Value-focused ERM creates a direct line of sight from shareholder value to risk management through an understanding of potential risk factors, decision analytic methods, and best practices.

Combining lectures, case studies, and discussions, this course covers the following topics:

The greatest sources of value destruction over the last decade
The importance of adopting the value protection mind-set in enterprise risk management
How the value protection mind-set differs from a compliance mindset
The most appropriate methods for value protection by type of risk
Quantifying a company’s appetite for taking risks
Risk management tools and how they are used.

Modeling for Strategic Insight Course Syllabus

This course gives participants both the understanding and skills needed to build useful models in strategic decision situations and to use them to draw powerful insights into the decision. The course topics range from conceptual, such as how to define the goodness of a model, to practical, such as best practices in laying out the structure of a model in Microsoft® Excel.

The course consists of the following sequence of lessons:

Introduction to decision modeling
Planning the model structure
Review of Excel skills
Best practices in decision modeling
Case exercise in creating a decision model
Debugging models
Software tools for probabilistic analysis
Drawing and communicating insights.

In this highly interactive course, many of the lessons include hands-on experience for the participants to cement their grasp of new skills. In the case exercise, participants build a complete decision model under the guidance of instructors. Each participant is expected to have a laptop computer with Excel installed. Some of the software tools used in the course are given to participants, and demonstration versions of other software packages are downloaded to their computers for use during the course.

Because this workshop builds on the core courses Decision Quality in Organizations and Decision Analysis, we strongly encourage participants either to have completed them or have passed the exam for each course. In addition, participants are expected to be familiar with but not necessarily expert in using Excel.

Strategic Decision and Risk Management Practicum
Course Syllabus

This workshop integrates the concepts, tools, and skills learned in the three other required courses. A comprehensive case exercise provides a realistic setting, giving participants the experience of working on a moderately complex decision problem from start to finish.

Students work on the case in teams of up to six members, coached by an experienced decision consultant, in a high-feedback environment. Specific tasks include:

Framing a moderately complex problem
Generating creative alternatives and discovering hybrid strategies through analysis
Assessing information using probabilities and ranges
Conducting analyses to produce tornado diagrams, waterfall diagrams, and probability distributions
Drawing insights from the analyses and synthesizing them to form a clear understanding of the best strategy
Planning and conducting a decision dialogue to communicate with decision-makers.

Because this workshop builds on the courses below, we require that participants either have completed them or have passed the exam for each course:

Decision Quality in Organizations
Decision Analysis
Modeling for Strategic Insight.

This course must be taken at the Stanford Campus.

Strategic Innovation Course Syllabus

Course Preview #1
Course Preview #2
Course Preview #3

This course gives participants a new set of tools for and experience in finding and developing innovative alternatives for addressing strategic business problems. You will explore creativity from individual and team perspectives and identify innovation opportunities and roadblocks in organizational settings. Exercises and a real-time case study enable hands-on learning, and guest speakers from well-known innovators in industry share their experience with the class. You will survey various creativity methodologies and identify prospects for increasing the level of innovation in your business.

Learn how to:

Develop a broad range of high-value alternatives
Identify and work through conceptual blocks in idea generation
Utilize both top-down and bottom-up tools to frame business problems
Use customer experience as a driver of insightful alternative generation
Cycle between qualitative iteration and evaluation to improve strategic options
Explore and communicate ideas with a broad set of tools
Review different creativity methodologies and models and select those that are appropriate for your business needs
Identify hurdles in your organization's innovation.

Strategic Portfolio Decisions *new course

Portfolio management decisions rely on the same foundations of decision quality, the dialogue decision process, and decision analysis -- but the context of optimal resource allocation across many assets is significantly different from strategy or single-decision problems. To many casual observers, portfolio and strategy decisions "just don't look the same." The objective of the course is to introduce participants to a Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) process. Topics Include:

The value proposition and motivation for an SPM process
Language and basic methodology as it pertains to SPM
Portfolio roll-up and evaluation
Interpretation of results

Participants would work through a case exercise to conduct a small-scale asset valuation and portfolio analysis work with each of the major tools involved in SPM, and use the language and principles of SPM. They would gain understanding that the process or its elements may be applied in different contexts, e.g, "portfolio sweep" to understand value, asset strategy for a subset of the portfolio, corporate strategy to fill gaps, and due diligence for acquisitions.

Decision Quality for Educators

Learn the framework and process for reaching quality decisions. Explore how to apply the framework to a variety of decision situations and to educate youth in these skills. Topics Include

Framing a decision appropriately
Generating creative alternatives
Decision skills lesson planning
Educator specific case studies

Teaching Decision Skills in Humanities

Examine ways to integrate the teaching of decision skills into an existing English and History/Social Studies curriculum. Topics Include:

Examining successful lesson plans and classroom materials
Generating creative alternatives
Decision skills lesson planning
Educator specific case studiesv