Discussion Board Week 2

Paper Details:

The objective of this assignment is to ensure that you have practice in observing application of the weekly focus.

Week 2: Analysis

Read chapters 3 & 4 in Judgment in Managerial Decision Making and read “Before You Make That Decision” in HBR’s 10 Must Reads On Making Smart Decisions. Depending on your preferences, watch the lecture videos before (to guide) your reading, or after, it’s up to you. All lecture videos can be found in the Announcements section (Home/Announcements). Also, if you prefer, you may view the lecture notes (attached) prior to reading the text. The lecture notes are the identical set that I will use for my lecture videos.

Chapter 3 Common Biases

Chapter 4 Bounded Awareness

Introduction – Analysis

Leaders are confronted every day with decisions that may have a large impact financially, organizationally, politically, socially, and/or interpersonally.  With this responsibility comes the great need to understand a situation in its entirety, all the individual pieces as well as the whole, to make meaning of the situation and make the best decision possible.

Vignette

As a peer facilitator of the workshop on creating a vision at the annual leadership retreat, Kim was confused as to why the students were not understanding how to create a vision statement after an hour of talking about it. After the retreat, Kim decides to look at the curriculum of the workshop to see whether the method of explaining vision statements was unclear. She determines that the information was spelled out pretty clearly and she presented it straight out of the curriculum. How could they not have gotten it? She then decides to ask the retreat director to share what was covered in the other workshops at the retreat. After looking through the curriculum for these workshops, she finds out that the workshops presenter right before her talk about vision as well but used a different model. No wonder the students were confused; they had just received prior information that wasn’t in alignment with her information. Kim’s ability to look at the entirety, as well as the individual components of the situation, allowed her to uncover why the students were struggling in understanding the content and the importance of finding out in advance the material that will be covered at the retreat so that her information aligns with the rest of the information presented.

Consider

Understanding how to divide information into smaller components for critical examination in an effort to identify causes, factors, features, and impacts of the information as a whole. (Knowledge)

Believing that dividing information into smaller components for critical examination can be helpful in understanding both the individual pieces, as well as, the information as a whole; and may be able to shed light on elements of the information that might not have been readily seen if one had not examined each component separately. (Value)

Being able to divide information into smaller components for critical examination in an effort to identify causes, factors, features, and impacts of the information as a whole. (Ability)

Dividing and examining information in detail to have a more comprehensive understanding of the information as a whole. (Behavior)

(Seemiller, 2014)

Post your responses to the following questions.

1. Using your own words, identify and define the elements of critical analysis. What are some guiding questions that might help us to understand how to effectively analyze information.

2. Reflect on a time that engaging in analysis was personally valuable. How did critically analyzing the situation help you?

3. Share a problem or issue within an organization that you are a part of or are very familiar with. Summarize what are the potential repercussions of this problem going ignored? (This can be the same problem that you plan to use for your class assignment.