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ItalianoA high-ranking recognition has been announced at the Entrepreneurial School® these days: Johannes Siebert, professor at the MCI Department of Business and Management and internationally renowned expert in the study of individual and organisational decision-making behaviour, has been accepted into the top-class advisory board of the renowned Alliance for Decision Education around Nobel Prize winner in Economics Daniel Kahneman. With his expertise, he will contribute to helping children and young people learn to make conscious and well-considered decisions away from the usual "try & error".
The inclusion of Johannes Siebert in the Advisory Council of the Alliance for Decision Education contributes to further increasing the international networking and visibility of the MCI. Workshops on decision-making for students, which Johannes Siebert is developing for Bavaria as part of a research project, are also to be offered in Tyrol and Austria in the medium term.
Decision-making is perceived as a complex task by many individuals and organisations. Reasons for this are (i) that decision-making involves a certain cognitive effort, (ii) the decision-making situations are not fully understood or (iii) simply no methods for solving decision-making problems are known or mastered.
However, only by (pro)actively making decisions is there a possibility to influence what is important. Otherwise, neither an individual decision-maker nor an organisation can successfully implement their visions in the long term. Against this background, it is surprising that many individuals and organisations have only a very limited interest in proactive decision-making and often have only limited skills and competences in making decisions.
As a result, many people and organisations make suboptimal decisions and then have to deal with the consequences. These consequences can be particularly significant for children and young people and can stay with them throughout their lives. For example, the bad decision to get into a car whose driver has drunk alcohol contrary to the agreement can change a person's life permanently for the worse. The same applies in a positive sense. Young people can lay the foundation of their future lives through their decisions. In school, a lot of information relevant to decision-making is taught, but pupils are not shown how decisions are (or should be) made. Therefore, most young people make decisions according to the try-and-error principle.
This is exactly where the Alliance for Decision Education comes in. It is a renowned American non-profit organisation with the vision that better decisions lead to better lives and ultimately to a better society. To this end, they organise various teaching programmes in which children and young people learn to make more conscious decisions. In addition, they interact with political decision-makers at all levels in order to anchor decision-making in the teaching canon in the long term. These projects are strategically accompanied by the so-called Advisory Council, which is staffed with leading experts from the fields of behavioural economics, decision theory, psychology, risk management or child psychiatry. Many students in the fields of business administration and economics, for example, are certainly familiar with the work of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman or Paul Slovic.
Johannes Siebert is a professor at the Department of Economics and Management at MCI | The Entrepreneurial School®. He completed his habilitation in Behavioral Operations Research and Decision Analysis at the University of Bayreuth, where he is also a private lecturer. He is regarded as an internationally recognised expert in the study of individual and organisational decision-making behaviour. He was able to show, for example, that good, proactive decision-making improves life satisfaction. In a current research project, he is investigating the extent to which proactive decision-making can be trained in courses at universities and schools. At the MCI, he teaches the basics of decision theory in five degree programmes. In addition, he leads a research project in Bavaria in which workshops are designed and conducted for students who are facing one of their first major educational decisions ("What will I do after school?"). The pilot workshops, which have been very successful so far, are also to be offered in Tyrol in perspective, with appropriate funding, and throughout Austria in the long term.
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