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Providing LEADERSHIP
in Guiding Complex Problem-Solving
and Decision-Making
Processes :
Issues of internal and
external leadership that
every public-sector
manager must deal with . . .
A 3-&-1/2-Day Management
Course, offered as In-House seminar at a time and location of your
choosing . . .or as an
Open course in Monterey, CA each December*
What is this course about?
This course is for
Public-Sector Professionals with Leadership Responsibilities.
This course does not deal with the technical issues of those disciplines.
This course deals with the leadership issues that all project
managers earlier or later have to deal with; issues that can trip up,
even destroy, many a technically qualified manager’s career.
Look at this 3-&-1/2-day course as a Crash-Course in Decision-Theory;
it exposes managers to all the major concepts that underlie leadership.
The leadership that professionals provide – as opposed to political
policy-makers whose job it is to lead on policy issues – has to
do with leading . . . i.e. pointing the way (rather than blindly following)
. . . at every step of the way as a project makes its way through a
rigorous thought-process that gets to the bottom of:
· What the problem/opportunity at hand really is, . . . rather
than just deal with its symptoms,
· What all the relevant cause-and-effect relations are that are
behind the problem and its possible solutions,
· What all the consequences are – intended and unintended,
direct and indirect, discreet and aggregate – for each of the
possible solutions,
· Etc., etc.
Leadership Issues covered in this course
include:
How do you learn an exercise in "good judgment?"
They say that "good" judgment comes from experience.
. . And, they say that "experience" comes from "bad"
judgment. There is, however, another way: You
can familiarize yourself with the several fundamental concepts that
are at the root of problem-solving and decision-making. These concepts
can - when you're under the pressure of time, inadequate information,
and conflicting opinions - help you develop a track record of making
good judgment calls. This 3-1/2-day course is a Decision-Theory crash-course.
It is a Leadership boot-camp designed to do just that: familiarize you
with virtually all of the fundamental concepts of Problem-Solving and
Decision-Making. They include:
- The Augmentation / Meta-Process:
- This is a practical, yet comprehensive, strategy for figuring
out what to do next . . . especially when everything goes wrong,
. . . as you guide your team through both the technical Problem-Solving
and the political Decision-Making process. The Augmentation / Meta-Process
is the backbone of the whole Leadership course. It gives you the
wherewithal to make sure your planning is rigorous, so it will stand
up to even the most critical scrutiny. It does this by immunizing
you, your team, your agency, and your project against the many possible
mistakes that make their way into decision-making efforts. (As an
aside: the Augmentation / Meta-Process is what my 1972 Ph.D. dissertation
at MIT was all about.)
- Crisis Management Strategies:
- There are two aspects to Crisis Management: 1.) Managing your
project, your team, and your agency in the midst of a crisis, and
2.) Managing the crisis itself. Most management processes –
even good management processes – break down during a crisis;
they simply don’t function. The acid test for any management
process is to see how it performs in a crisis. Because a good way
to make sure your project-management process won’t just hold
up during good times – but will hold up when a crisis hits
– is to make sure you incorporate the fundamentals of crisis
management in the way you operate.
- The SDIC / CPO Consent-Building Strategy:
- This is an abbreviated overview of Systematic Development of Informed
Consent and Citizen Participation-by-Objectives . . . for attendees
who have not had the SDIC/CPO training.
- Fundamentals of Communicating:
- Effective communication is integral to effective leadership; after
all, how are you going to “lead” if you’re not
understood? . . . It’s actually rare that we are really, really
understood! And, it’s just as rare that we really, really
understand others! This is about how to get through to people. Key
elements: the role of Credibility, . . . how to nurture it and how
to lose it; . . . sharing data versus using data to persuade; .
. . DOs and DON’Ts of dealing with the media, . . . how to
use the mass media to create an informed public.
- Using - and Defending Against - Strategies of Conflict:
- We’ll give you an introduction to Game Theory, . . . the
science of developing winning strategies . . . Zero-Sum Games vs.
Non-Zero-Sum Games (i.e. the world of Thomas Schelling, Henry Kissinger,
Machiavelli, and others) We’ll concentrate on the contribution
of Thomas Schelling (2006 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics)
and its ramifications for public officials who have to deal with
the unavoidable fact that there will always be some special interests
who will get hurt by what it is your duty to propose.
- Negotiations, Mediation, and Conflict Resolution:
- This is one of the most important elements. It, all by itself,
deserves a couple of years of graduate study! We’ll cover
the concepts of Constructive vs. Non-Constructive conflict, Alternative
Dispute Resolution, and Distributive vs. Integrative Negotiation.
We’ll explore how you can put these concepts to work, not
just in overt negotiations situations but in your day-to-day functioning.
- Dealing with Extremist Opponents including Domestic Terrorists:
- While most managers should not have need for the tactics we cover
in this element, some of our clients do have honest-to-goodness
domestic terrorists among their potentially affected interests.
Holy smoke! . . . Thank God, there are things you can do —
that you must do — to get these folks back on a more rational
track. As a minimum, you’ll want to make sure you won’t
ever contribute to creating such extremist opponents for your agency.
Extremist opponents often are created by government agencies who
– inadvertently – violate some people’s Process-Values
and Meat-Values. We will give you very practical DOs and DON’Ts
for fulfilling, rather than violating . . . those values . . . tactics
that you can use as preventive – and healing – tactics
for extremist opponents. (We do not try to deal with the phenomenon
of foreign terrorism.)
- Professional Ethics and You:
- When it comes to Professional Ethics, an ounce of Prevention is
worth a ton of Cures. Making one single mistake — after years
of distinguished public service — can ruin your entire career.
The trouble is: the rules of Professional Ethics are not necessarily
written rules; people tell you the rules after you have violated
them. And, it’s not as if it’s a game; society generally
can’t tell you the rules before. The people who – retroactively
– enforce ethics rules on you don’t know what those
rules are themselves . . . until they see them violated. It’s
your violation of one of those unwritten rules that makes people
realize that they do have a rule about that specific behavior .
. . But, you don’t have to become a victim of this situation.
In our module on Professional Ethics, we’ll show you that
while society doesn’t seem to be able to tell you what their
unwritten rules are in advance, we can. It’s complex but not
rocket science! As a leader you owe it to yourself, and to the professionals
you supervise, to learn how you can anticipate ethics issues that
are inherent in your particular profession, role, or position .
. . And – most important – you’ll learn how to
immunize yourself – and your colleagues -- against making
bad judgment calls on Ethics issues that can be career terminators.
- Commission / Staff Relations:
- In this country we tend to elect Boards and Commissions; some
of these elected bodies in turn can -- and do – appoint other
Boards and Commissions. The role of Board and Commissions is to
make policy; they are decision-makers. They hire a staff of experts
who do the necessary legwork to develop policy and to put those
policies – once adopted -- into effect. That’s how we
construct organizations, not only in the public sector but even
in the private sector. Board members tend to be lay people; their
staffs are – and/or use -- experts. One duty of the staff
leader (the highest ranking staff member . . . that professional
who doesn’t report to another professional but to the political
policy-makers) is to design and manage the Commission / Staff relationship.
How well you do this, can make or break the organization. In fact,
there is no other duty that is more important as an organizational
leader than the design and management of this interface. If you
do it well, you can go goofing off the rest of the time (we’re
not recommending you do that!), and still be a great leader. You
do it poorly, and you can work 24 / 7 and still be a walking disaster
of a leader!
- Managing for Excellence and Productivity:
- One of your greatest Leadership Challenges of every supervisor
is to be a great supervisor, . . . one who motivates your people,
. . . one who brings out the best in your people. Getting Extraordinary
Performance from Ordinary people is what phenomenally good leaders
do . . . consistently! . . . You don’t have to be a motivational
genius; just learn – and then use – their methods!
- Assessing Risk and Dealing with Uncertainty:
- Decisions invariably involve uncertainty. No matter how much analysis
your team does as it develops solutions to problems, you don’t
have a crystal ball; you can’t foresee the future with certainty.
That’s why you’re forced to stick your neck out and
accept risks every time you make a decision or recommend a decision.
We all learn to deal with this challenge . . . we manage to choose
a college, a career, a spouse, a recommended medical procedure,
an investment, . . . or whatever. In our everyday lives, we do most
of this risk analysis by the seat-of-the-pants. But, there actually
are clever – even brilliant – mechanisms to take the
various degrees of uncertainty into account . . . Yes, we know,
mastering these tools can fill an entire graduate curriculum . .
. But, as a leader of teams of professionals who do problem-solving
and decision-making for a living, you owe it to them, to yourself,
and to your employer to at least familiarize yourself with these
tools . . . Here’s what we’ll cover: Event-Trees, Probability
Theory in Decision-Making, Quantification of Risk, Risk Aversion,
Expected Value (its uses and its abuses), Expected Utility and its
uses, Quantification of Qualitatively Different Outcomes, and Decision-trees
(how to construct them and how to analyze them).
- Elementary Concepts in Applied Maximizing:
- Decision-making is about making choices. It always has to do with
trying to figure out what to do . . . which of two or more alternative
courses of action to choose . . . figuring out how to bring about
the best possible outcome. But, things aren’t always what
they appear to be. Unless you know when to apply – and when
not to apply – the following concepts, you’ll be fooled
into making some terrible decisions: Maxi-Mining, Mini-Maxing, Optimizing,
Indexing, Discounting, Benefit/Cost Analysis, Marginal Benefit/Cost
Analysis, Cost-Effectiveness, Satisficing, Minimizing Regret, and
how to use “Process Cost” to prevent “Paralysis-by-Analysis.”
- The Role of Values
- The Nature of Values
- Why Values are so important to all of us
- The Values most relevant to Personal Relationships
- The Values most relevant to Providing Leadership
- Individual and Corporate Decision-Making vs. Community Decision-Making:
- The central role of values in Decision-Making
- The ubiquitous Algorithm for Decision-Making
- The absolutely key role of Higher Values in Community Decision-Making,
Consent-Building, Negotiations, Mediation, Conflict-Resolution,
and Conflict Prevention
This course constitutes a virtual leadership boot-camp
for people who are in positions – or are aspiring to positions –
where they are responsible for making judgment calls. What differentiates
“good” leadership from disasterous leadership
is the how good or bad the judgment calls are that are made. Professionals
in senior management positions cannot escape making judgment calls; the
only question is how good – or how bad -- their judgment calls will
look after the dust has settled . . . after history has played out . .
. after the media investigations and the Congressional inquiries are over
. . .
If you’re a project manger, you will have to make judgment calls
-- under time-pressure . . . without adequate information . . . in the
face of conflicting advice from your lawyers, your technical experts,
and your policy-makers -- about what to do next, as your project makes
its way through the Problem-Solving and Decision-Making process, from
initial head-scratching . . . through all the analytical steps . . .
to the execution and implementation of your plan.
The course is designed to help managers develop their judgment-making
skills. The course does this by preparing them to anticipate most of
the challenging issues that will confront them in their leadership positions.
When people say: “We need leadership.”, what
they really mean is that we neeed good leadership. Let’s
face it; poor leadership happens, and it usually has terrible consequences.
Poor leadership happens when managers make bad judgment calls. It benefits
no-one; everyone loses when professionals responsible for guiding a
planning / decision-making process drop the ball by exercisies poor
judgment. Excellent leadership – which means decision-making
guidance that consistently exercising good judgment –
is what everyone is looking for. That’s what they mean when they
call for “Leadership”.
We are dedicated to make professionals with management
responsiblities – especially public-sector managers -- better
leaders . . . better at accomplishing their missions.
Although it does not lend itself to quick fixes, leadership skills for
professionals in management positions are more learnable than
people think.
Shorter -- or longer -- versions of this
course:
The Open Course version that we hold in Monterey each
December is 3-&-1/2-days long.
Depending on your needs and time constraints, we are prepared
to conduct shorter or longer versions of this course.
It is a crash-course; there is so much material in there, we have to
make short shrift with some of it even in the 3-&-1/2-day format.
For shorter versions, we work with clients to make sure we don’t
cut out elements that are critical for their staff.
 For information on our Open-course Leadership Schedule
 Register For a Course
 Fee Schedule
 For
more information on IPMP and our (Hans and Annemarie Bleiker's ) overall approach
to becoming effective public officials, visit our Citizen
Participation Handbook page.
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IPMP