Curriculum

Participants have the flexibility of taking individual courses within the program or earning the Stanford Strategic Decision and Risk Management Certificate by completing six courses electives.
Courses may be taken in any order and via online learning mode.

Decision Quality in Organizations
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.

Decision Analysis
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.

Behavioral Challenges in Decision-Making
The course is taught by the Socratic method, 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.

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.

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
This introductory course provides the conceptual framework for all of the other courses in the program, introducing proven approaches and emerging concepts for aligning an organization's project and program initiatives with its strategic objectives. Students will learn why traditional "project management as usual" practices don't work in today's complex, fast-paced business environments, and then acquire a comprehensive organizational mastery model that does. Students will emerge with a firm grasp of what it takes for an organization to be focused and successful with projects and programs that consistently execute business strategies.

Topics Include
• Align project initiatives with strategic objectives
• Select, prioritize, and manage a portfolio of projects in a product development or other fast-paced business environment
• Complete projects faster, with more efficient resource deployment
• Use new tools to support planning and execution, thereby shrinking time to market
• Address "crisis mentality" and use time more effectively
• Champion advanced project management with both co-located and virtual teams
• Close the gap between knowing and doing
• Customize a best-practices based organizational mastery model for direct application in your organization
• Build a stronger project-based matrix organization that is capable of consistently high performance