System Thinking and Managerial Decision Tools

Catalog description

The primary responsibility of all managers is to make decisions in situations in which there are multiple competing objectives. This course introduces students to a set of tools that can be applied to scenarios in a variety of business environments. It also introduces and addresses the challenges of making decisions within the context of complex business systems with multiple stakeholders and short- and long-term social, environmental, and economic consequences. Specifically, this set of tools will include data summarization, data visualization, optimization methods, Monte Carlo simulation, multi-criteria decision analysis, decision trees, and causal loop diagrams. The analysis will be conducted using Excel, various Excel add-ins for advanced analytics, and causal loop diagramming software. These analytical tools will be applied to scenarios that include social, environmental, and economic considerations. Subsequent courses in the program will utilize these analytical methods within their specific decision environments.