ADLP 7500 Leading Thinking for Executive Decision-making

Successful leadership can be viewed through many lenses. Common to all lenses is the acknowledgment of the ability of leaders to think and make decisions. Such decision-making typically confronts highly complex environments and uncertainty about the present as well as the future. How then do learners hone the skill of making good leadership decisions by employing theories that they generate? This course is built on the premise that leaders implicitly and explicitly develop, refine, and replace theories that guide decision-making under complexity and uncertainty. Consequently, this course explores the definition of a theory; offers methods for leaders to create context-specific and practical theories to guide decision-making; highlights indicators for when leaders should consider updating their theories, which involves considerations of when to create new theories to supplant existing ones. Central to theory building is a toolset to help leaders comprehensively find, frame, and formulate challenges in complex and uncertain environments.