Events
Effective Decision-Making in Government & Business
Monday, 01.12.2025 | 11:00 am – Wednesday, 03.12.2025 | 4:00 pm (CET)
The ability to make effective decisions, design comprehensible decision processes and to understand and manage risk on issues in business and policy fields such as health, education, energy, infrastructure and others is a crucial skill for managers, civil servants and public managers.
More than forty years of applications in decision and risk analysis have shown that building up decision capability enables you to:
- Establish strategic priorities in programs and make more effective use of resources,
- Better deal with conflicting objectives,
- Effectively combine rational thinking and gut feeling in your decision-making, manage risk and uncertainty effectively,
- Gain commitment to the effective implementation of decisions by including internal and external stakeholders systematically in the decision process and
- Communicate more effectively with stakeholders about decisions and risks.
This course cuts across several of the most important decision areas which managers in the private and public sector face: allocate scarce program or project budgets in different business units or policy areas; make trade-offs between financial/economic, ecological and social objectives; evaluate strategic options taking into account conflicting objectives; decide when confronted with uncertainties.
This seminar is offered as part of the Executive MPA programme and in the open enrolment programme.
On-site event
Scenario-Building & Foresight
Thursday, 04.12.2025 | 9:00 am – Friday, 05.12.2025 | 6:00 pm (CET)
Decision-making in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world can quickly become a costly and risky endeavor – especially in the realm of foreign and security affairs. To lower risks in decision-making, to widen decision makers’ perspectives and to provide them with policy options, Foresight Analysis is one of the most powerful analytic methods in an analyst’s quiver. Foresight Analysis helps analysts and political advisors to undertake estimative analysis, which involves thinking systematically about the various ways the future is likely to unfold and what is most likely to determine the eventual outcome. The objective of Foresight Analysis is not to predict the future, but to generate a solid set of scenarios that can bound the range of plausible alternative futures. Foresight Analysis is most useful when a situation is complex and the outcomes too uncertain to trust a single prediction. It has proven highly effective in helping analysts, decision makers, and policymakers contemplate multiple futures, challenge their assumptions, and anticipate surprise developments by identifying “unknown unknowns” – i.e., factors, forces, or players that one did not realize were important or influential before commencing the exercise.
This seminar is offered as part of the Executive MPA programme and in the open enrolment programme.
On-site event
Power & Influence: Leadership in Action
Monday, 08.12.2025 | 11:00 am – Wednesday, 10.12.2025 | 4:00 pm (CET)
In a world in which most organizations, communities, and societies face enormous challenges, leadership is critical. This course gets to the core of leadership and getting things done. Power and Influence is a course for those of you who want to make things happen, despite the obstacles that might stand in your way. It is about understanding power dynamics and learning to use them as effective tools for analyzing your surroundings and achieving your goals. During the course, we intend to unearth your implicit theories and feelings about power and influence. These have a profound impact on how you perceive problems and opportunities, and subsequently, how you decide upon particular courses of action.
This seminar is offered as part of the Executive MPA programme and in the open enrolment programme.
On-site event