Part One
CHAPTER 1. THE LAWYER AND POLICYMAKER AS PROBLEM SOLVER AND
DECISIONMAKER: THE ROLES OF DELIBERATION, INTUITION, AND EXPERTISE
Getting it right and wrong
This course is a mixture of prescriptive materials on how to make good decisions and materials
describing systematic ways that people make poor decisions. The former are drawn from
common sense, statistics and decision science. The latter come from social psychology, the
psychology of judgment and decision making (JDM), and the emerging field of behavioral
economics. We hope that students’ understanding of decision making errors will result in better
decisions for themselves, their clients, constituents, and other stakeholders. In any event, the
insights from these disciplines are a useful aspect of professional students’ repertoire of
knowledge.
Slide. Layout of the book.
Slide. Terminology. As we mention in the preface, the terms problem-solving, decision making,
and judgment have different, though often overlapping, meanings. You might think of them as
three overlapping circles in a Venn diagram. We often use “decision making” as a shorthand
for all three.

Problem solving: We describe three sorts of problems. Two are deviations from the
way things should be: something has already gone wrong or might go wrong in the
future if we don’t take preventative measures. Here, problem-solving requires
understanding what caused or will cause the undesirable situation and determining
alternative solutions in terms of the interests and objectives at stake. A third sort of
problem solving involves moving the world in the direction you desire even if nothing
has gone or will go wrong.
2 Slides. Problem Space, Navigating the Problem Space

Decision making. If the core of problem solving is sizing up the situation in terms of
the interests and objectives at stake and mapping out possible solutions, then decision
making involves identifying the tradeoffs among solutions and choosing the best
alternative. Most important decisions implicate several values, interests, or attributes
(e.g., cost, quality, and safety for many consumer decisions). Sometimes one alternative
will dominate others in all respects, but usually the decisionmaker must make tradeoffs.
(More of this in Chapter 4 and 12.)

In its JDM sense, judgment involves empirical perception and analysis; it is “sizing up”
the external physical or social world—as distinguished from the internal interests or
psychology of the decision maker. In its broader sense, it is wisdom or discernment
involving internal as well as external matters.
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Chapter 1 introduces two different methods of problem solving/decision making: (1)
deliberative and (2) intuitive or schematic. The book approaches these differently.
Deliberative decision making is an analytic discipline, the foundations of which can be learned
through repetitive exercises. We accompany Part I of the book with a number of exercises of
this sort.
By contrast, our approach to intuitive or schematic decision making is descriptive—descriptive
of the underlying psychological processes and of how one develops expertise. For the most
part, intuitive decision making must be learned on the job, or perhaps through simulated
clinical exercises—in either case, through reflective practice. Perhaps becoming better at
deliberative decision making can improve intuitive decision making as well. In Chapter 20, we
quote Constantin Stanislavski's description of an actor's preparation:
One cannot always create subconsciously and with inspiration. No such genius exists in
the world. Therefore our art teaches us first of all to create consciously and rightly,
because that will best prepare the way for the blossoming of the subconscious, which is
inspiration. The more you have of conscious creative moments in your role, the more
chance you will have of a flow of inspiration.
Slide. Deliberative Decision Making. Our particular version of the multiple steps of
deliberative decision making is pretty generic. Students are strongly tempted (as are we all) to
skip steps and head toward what they see as an obvious solution. The Terra Nueva, Newport
Records, Trampoline, Shark Attack, and other problems1 provide opportunities to walk through
most of the steps and show the potential dangers of skipping some.
2 Slides. Evers v. Newport Records. In Newport Records, Anna defines the problem as how to
get summary judgment. Although it leads to some repetition of material in the book, we ask
students in class to describe Evers’ plausible interests:
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Case resolved; closure
Favorable judgment
Money now (for new venture)
avoid litigation costs
We ask students to generate a range of plausible solutions or alternative courses of action:
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do nothing (get the money for his new venture elsewhere)
seek summary judgment
Go to trial
make a settlement offer
1
Color-coded problems are included in the Problems section of the web site. Those that are not
color-coded appear in the text itself.
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And we ask them to predict the consequences of the courses of action and assess their impact
on the relevant interests or objectives. (Chapter 15 uses Newport Records’ litigate/settle
decision to introduce decision trees.)
Although Newport Records doesn’t call for diagnosing causes and dealing with major
uncertainties, Christine Lamm’s analysis of Terra Nueva in Chapter 2 does that explicitly.
Trampoline problem
The trampoline problem is a good way to get students to go through the steps of the
deliberative process. It creates expectations that this is a “legal” problem, but most of the
analysis and plausible solutions don’t involve the law at all. Here and for many of the other
problems in this book you can, for example:
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Ask students to send responses by email
Ask students to work on the problem in class, individually or in groups
In either case, then discuss the problem in the full class
Here, from a recent class, is a student-generated list of the client’s possible interests.
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Reduce risk of liability
Keep the baby sitter
Ensure all children’s safety
Help her children make friends
Help compensate for her children’s shyness
Maintain a good reputation with other parents
Maintain children’s custody
Understand good practices for using trampoline
Here is a student-generated list of uncertainties to be resolved:
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What are the risks?
Was the baby sitter following the instructions/good practices?
What were the conditions when the neighboring child was injured?
Who is liable for the injury, and under what circumstances?
Why can’t the kids make friends?
What are the benefits of the trampoline in terms the child’s interests, as compared to
other activities?
How can safety be improved?
What are other peoples’ views (besides Ms. Trisolini’s) of the situation?
Only after students have gone through these two steps, ask them to suggest possible alternative
solutions. (If you make this part of the initial exercise, quite a few students may define the
problem and interests in terms of the solution.)
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As a segue into intuitive decisionmaking, ask: Why can’t all DM be deliberative?
 All problem solving begins with series of hunches or hypotheses (intuitive).
 If we had limitless cognitive power and time, we could deal with all problems
deliberatively.
 But bounded rationality—in effect cognitive transaction costs—require satisficing
(mostly intuitive).
Intuitive decision making
What are schemas? How do they work?
Imagine perceiving the world without any knowledge structures or schemas. I would look
around the room and not be able to identify discrete objects—people, chairs, tables. Just a lot
of incomprehensible data.
In fact, we place every perception into a pre-existing knowledge structure or schema in our
memory.
 We’re right 99% of the time.
 Occasionally we’re surprised or disappointed: Walking into the store, we thought we
saw a person but it was a manikin.
 Sometimes we retain a belief in the schematic perception even in the face of evidence
to the contrary. Cf. optical illusions.
Schemas are also important for understanding complex social/organizational phenomena.
Developing competence/expertise in a field requires learning sound schemas and pattern
recognition.
Examples of using schemas in everyday life.
 Solving crossword and other puzzles
 Listening to a piece of music and identifying the composer or singer
 Reading a crumpled or torn piece of paper where not all the words are legible
 Skimming a book or article
Examples from book.
 Christine Lamm’s dead computer. Why does she assume it’s the plug? How did she
learn this?
 Anna (new lawyer): hearsay, summary judgment schemas
 Klein: firefighters
 Neonatal nurses
 Soldier suspecting IED
Q: examples from your experience?
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Scripts. How to behave in a courtroom, in a classroom, subway, restaurant. Navigating a
crowd in a busy airport.
The mix of intuitive and deliberative
Slide. Convergent/divergent. The basic point is that problem solving always starts with
intuitions about the nature of the problem and solutions. The question is how and when one
tests these intuitions deliberatively
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Divergent: framing, identifying objectives
Both divergent and convergent: identifying causes
Convergent: evaluating and selecting alternatives
Some of your students may have read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, and drawn the conclusion
that intuitive decision making usually trumps deliberation. But there are many examples in
Blink where this is not the case. And when it is, it’s usually decision making by experts, who
have acquired expertise through lots of deliberation as well as feedback from practice. (More
about this later.)
Affect often plays a role in schematic processing: when you see a lion or snake you run, and in
many social situations you have a gut feeling, long before there is any conscious cognition.
Negative affect narrows range of deliberative DM decision making by taking some choices off
the table.
This is a good place to discuss expertise. Can you recall developing competence/expertise in
something, and what it felt like to be competent/expert? What does it mean to be an expert? To
have know-how in a field? How does an expert approach differently from someone without
know-how?
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Knows more about the substantive (procedural) subject
Knows geography and extent of domain
In some cases, physical skills (sports, music, surgery)
Organization of knowledge in terms of schemas
o Recognition of patterns (Darlene the nurse)
“flow”
Slide. What’s unusual about this hand? The downsides of schematic processing. After
introducing schematic processing (as foundational to intuitive decision making), we show
students the Bruner and Postman hand of cards. Many students don’t see what’s wrong because
of their expectations.
Slide. Two systems. This is where we introduce the two-systems view of decision making that
pervades the book and which is one of the cornerstones of JDM research. Here, or later, one
can say a few words about the origins and intellectual history of JDM research. While they
didn’t start on a blank slate, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman are the founders. Tversky
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died in 1996. Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in Economics , in 2002, essentially for both
of their work. The new field of behavioral economics grows out of the JDM research.
(Chapters 14-18 deal with aspects of behavioral economics.) Although the two-systems
approach precedes fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), the imaging work indicates
that affective responses (System 1) and cognitive work (System 2) may take place in different
parts of the brain.
You can also introduce the idea of heuristics, though the book doesn’t focus on this until Part
Two.
Slide. Bat and ball.
Slide. Heuristics.
We end by tying the discussion of expertise with the students’ own aspirations. Where /how
did Anna, Luis, and Christina learn what they know? What jobs do you imagine having, and
what skills and knowledge will you need? What do you hope to get from professional school
and from this course?
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CHAPTER 2. FRAMING PROBLEMS AND IDENTIFYING OBJECTIVES AND
IDENTIFYING PROBLEM CAUSES
The main point about the decision context is that it limits the solutions that a particular
decisionmaker can pursue.
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Some students find the trampoline problem troubling because they believe that the
lawyer-client decision context does not encompass the personal or psychological
counseling that may be the best approach to Ms. Trisolini’s problem.
Like Keeney’s public utility charged with reducing radiation danger, Christine Lamm
has limited authority to deal with the Terra Nueva problem: she can engage in rulemaking, but she does not have the power to require tenants to evacuate the premises.
Problem definitions and frames. The trampoline case comes packaged as a legal problem, but
(notwithstanding the comments about decision contexts) a good lawyer would not be limited
by legal frameworks. A savvy problem solver challenges each proposed objective with a
“why” until she runs out of “becauses.” But you can’t do this relentlessly for all problems,
because probing further into the nature of the problem in order to arrive at the right solution
can be time consuming and costly. There is a tension between going deeper and deeper about
objectives and establishing a workable scope for the problem.
Symptoms vs. problems. It is important to ask: what triggered this problem? Why am I even
considering it? But the trigger may be a symptom rather than the core of the problem
itself.
Frames are inevitable. A frame is an instantiation of a particular schema. It comes with a
host of expectations and constraints for interpreting and analyzing the world.
An initiative by the Hewlett Foundation to “reduce the need for abortion” provides an
interesting example of framing designed (with reasonable success) to appeal to people on both
sides of the abortion debate. The idea is to help young adults reduce unintended pregnancies by
using contraceptives. Most social conservatives, including evangelicals, do not object to
contraception, and many regard providing contraception for people engaged in sex outside of
marriage as a lesser evil than abortion. No one on the pro-choice side regards abortion as a
desirable method of birth control. Note that the characterization of a position as “pro-choice”
or “pro-life” itself has a parallel framing effect. In designing this initiative, the Foundation
learned that evangelicals and other social conservatives had very different reactions to
“unwanted,” “unplanned,” and “unintended” pregnancies.
An important aspect of persuading others is to get them to accept your frames. In any event, be
wary when someone else frames a problem—especially as a limited choice.
Part of expertise is having a perspective that does not inevitably accept a client’s or
stakeholder’s framing of a problem. But experts have their own (narrow) frames, which may
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prevent them from registering and incorporating aspects of the story that are salient from
another's perspective.
Values, interests, and objectives get at essentially the same thing, but in descending levels of
generality.
Slide. Stakeholder analysis consists of looking at problem from different people’s points of
view. This isn’t necessarily altruistic, but rather a way of understanding all of one’s own or
client’s or constituents’ interests.
The book walks through a stakeholder analysis from Serrano’s point of view. You might ask
students in class to do the same from Lamm’s perspective.
Causal analysis. This is a completely different subject from objectives. In principle, it might
have a chapter of its own, but we put it here to avoid overly short chapters.
Cause is about counterfactuals: the putative cause made something “go wrong” that wouldn’t
have gone wrong absent the occurrence of the cause. The Kepner-Tregoe method (which, like
our list of the steps of deliberative decision making, is just one of a number of systematizations
of causal analysis) focuses on distinctions between what happened and did not happen.
We teach causal analysis through
 Slide. Christine Lamm’s discussion of the causes of the illnesses at Terra Nueva, and
 Slide. Perrin Stryker’s classic, Can You Analyze this Problem?, which can be ordered
and downloaded online from the Harvard Business School. We don’t give the students
the accompanying How to Analyze this Problem, which you can treat as a teacher’s
guide. The case study misleads most students to focus only on the personnel issue, but
it turns out that the problem can be analyzed and “solved” in technical terms. In
outline:2
1. Defining the problem:
Immediate: deviation from desired norm
reject-rate of burred panels on lines 1, 2 & 4
Longer term: personnel-labor management problem with Farrell and Valenti and
upcoming contract negotiations
2. Specifying the problem’s “what,” “where,” “when,” and “extent”
Relevance of different extents? Could be random variation.
If any correlation with problem, though, we would expect Farrell’s line #2 to
have higher > lower rejects because that’s Farrell’s line
3. Spotting distinctions and identifying changes responsible for the distinction
 Lines 1,2,4 but not 3
 Line 3: one stack, Cheetah
2
The following makes sense only if you have read the problem.
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
Stacks of old blanks used up before new Zenith blank
o Explains why line 4 took longest
o Line 3 shortest, but Cheetah
The main hint that the students are given is buried in this colloquy:
PETERS: It’s hard to say what might be causing it. We’ve been checking the
sheets from Zenith Metals we started using this morning, and they looked
perfect going through the blanker. Besides, it’s only on lines #1 and #2 that
we’re getting burrs, so maybe we’ve got trouble with those presses.
…
COGGIN: What about that man who got hurt last night on overtime while
unloading those sheets?
PATELLA: He’s been on the job for a couple of months, but he tells me he
wasn’t familiar with the method of blocking that Zenith Metals uses. He’s not
hurt bad, but he’ll get workmen’s compensation OK.
Of course, there may remain underlying personnel problems:in any event, students who were
originally invested in this analysis tend to believe so. We ask students to submit a brief analysis
by email, then discuss the problem in small groups in class, giving them a blank form to fill
out, and then have a class-wide discussion.
Strategic planning
Terra Nueva and the Stryker case study involve gone-wrong problems. Strategic planning,
whether done by a state or local government, or a nonprofit organization, is paradigmatic of
forward-looking problem solving. The chapter ends with an example of strategic planning for
the Hewlett Foundation’s Environment program’s work in the American West.
This may be challenging to teach for someone not familiar with philanthropy. You can get a
better sense of the underlying approach from Doing good today and better tomorrow: A
roadmap to high impact philanthropy through outcome-focused grantmaking,
http://www.hewlett.org/news/doing-good-today-and-better-tomorrow.
As background, these are the basic tenets of the sort of “strategic,” or “outcome-focused,”
philanthropy practiced by the Hewlett Foundation. They are different from, but essentially
congruent with, the deliberative decision making steps.
1. Clear goals
2. Targets for those goals
3. A logical strategy for how one's efforts can help achieve those goals, based on …
4. A sound analysis of the problem and an evidence-based theory of change
5. Good information about individuals and entities that can address the problem (i.e.
thorough due diligence);
6. Sufficient resources, whether individual or aggregated with others’, applied to
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achieving the goal, over a sufficient period of time
7. Measuring progress and results and making changes accordingly
8. An “expected-return attitude” that takes appropriate account of benefits and risks.
Although we include the expected return analysis here to make the example complete, it
anticipates the formal discussion of expected utility theory and cost benefit analysis in Chapter
12.
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CHAPTER 3. GENERATING ALTERNATIVES:
CREATIVITY IN LEGAL AND POLICY PROBLEM SOLVING
As our discussion of expertise in Chapters 1 and 2 describes, many of the benefits of
expertise (e.g., expedited problem recognition and framing, enhanced ability to distinguish
diagnostic or predictive information from non-diagnostic or non-predictive information, and
rapid identification of promising alternative solution strategies) can also blind experts to new
ways of approaching problems. Expertise can, for this and other reasons, inhibit innovation.
This Chapter is designed to illustrate the important role that “out-of-the-box” thinking can play
in problem solving and decision making, and to help loosen students up a bit, so that they can
freely experiment with and experience the benefits of divergent thinking and the obstacles that
constrain it.
In exploring creativity, Chapter 3 focuses on topics and perspectives grounded in
theoretical and empirical research. The Chapter is therefore short on some of the most “braincatching” creativity-enhancement exercises and tools one finds in the popular and on websites
and blogs. However, we recognize that teaching the material on creativity will work better if
students can be engaged, challenged, and generally loosened up by vivid illustrations of some of
the Chapter’s core ideas. So, in this section, we provide some of these exercises, tools, and
illustrations, and we point you to places where you can find more.
A.
On “Pickers,” “Choosers” and the Paradoxes of Schematized Thinking
Here are some possible illustrations of the benefits and shortcomings of schematized
thinking, discussed at pp. 61- 63 and alluded to throughout the chapter.
Benefits of Expertise: Finding Patterns in Perceptual Chaos
In Conceptual Blockbusting (pp. 21-22), Stanford engineering professor, James L. Adams
uses the following exercise to illustrate the role that experience plays in our ability to find
patterns in the midst of perceptual chaos.
Have students look at this picture, and ask them what they see (warn those who have
done this before not to reveal what they know).
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Now show students this second image, from which they will readily see the cow they
could not see in the first:
After seeing the whole pattern, students will find it virtually impossible not to see the cow head
in the first image.
This exercise illustrates an important point: the kind of expertise we gain through
exposure and experience enables us to recognize patterns in the midst of perceptual chaos.
Lawyers, for example, can hear a complex, sometimes emotionally overwhelming story about
harmful events and from that story “hear” one or more legally cognizable claims. In the public
policy realm, using perceptual tools unavailable to untrained laypersons, epidemiologists,
demographers, and civil engineers can “see” patterns that provide important information to
public policy makers about the existence, extent, nature, causes or effects of important
phenomena.
Drawbacks of Expertise: Path Dependence and Norm Following
The flipside of these advantages, though, are embodied in what some sociologists call
path dependence: the habit of seeing one problem or solution so automatically that you can no
longer see others. These habits can assume normative dimensions. Becoming part of an expert
community entails learning and following the explicit and implicit norms that structure the field.
Path dependence and norm following, along with other barriers to innovation, are covered in
more depth at the end of Chapter 3, but it is useful at the outset to confront students with their
own vulnerability to them in the generation of alternative problem solutions. The Nine Dot
Problem (p. 67) provides an effective starting point:
Here is the “classic” solution to the Nine Dot Problem. Start drawing the line at 0, return
to the origin at 3, and end at 4.
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Of course, even an “out-of-the-box” solution like this can become habituated and
normative, so you might ask students to generate others, lest they bask overlong in the selfsatisfied glow of Gnostic, Nine-Dot Initiation. Here are some the more wicked solutions to the
Nine Dot Problem found in Jim Adams’ collection (Conceptual Blockbusting, pp. 30, 31):
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Different Kinds of Options: Some Illustrative Exercises
At pages 61-66, Chapter 3 describes the potential benefits of information-buying and
time-buying alternatives. It would be easy for students to fly by this material and miss its
significance, so it may be beneficial to pause and emphazise it to increase its salience and
memorability.
In Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step, Edward deBono explains how the
generation of alternative solutions is affected by the sequence in which information arrives
during a multi-stage problem solving process. He illustrates this phenomenon with an exercise
in which participants are presented with pieces of thin plastic or cardboard, and are directed to
arrange them, as they are presented, into a shape that would be easy to describe. In the first five
steps in the sequence, the shapes are easily arranged into a series of expanding rectangles.
However, the last piece presented, a parallelogram, can not be integrated into the shape. The
following graphic, found in Lateral Thinking at p. 32, illustrates the problem:
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If, however, problem solvers know about the parellelogram (piece #6) at the beginning of
the problem solving sequence, the problem becomes easier to solve, as the following graphic
(Lateral Thinking, p. 34) illustrates:
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This exercise may be useful to illustrate the point that commiting to a course of action
before having as much information as one can gather may prove disadvantageous over time.
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Legal Professional Ambivalence Toward Creativity
At pages 67-68, and elsewere in Chapter 3, we highlight the ambivalence toward
creativity in the legal profession. Here are some additional sources teachers might draw on to
illustrate or amplify upon this ambivalence:
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Tresa Baldas, Considering the Alternatives: With Prison Costs Skyrocketing, Creative
Sentencing Takes Off, NATIONAL LAW JOURNAL, News, p. 18, Column 1 (November 5,
2004)(describing innovative ideas in sentencing and the many rhetorical and
constitutional challenges to them);
ADA Solutions Require ‘Creativity:’ Inconvenience Held Not Enough to Reject Proposal
by Disabled, NATIONAL LAW JOURNAL, Business, p. A18, Column 1 (July 23,
2001)(notice the scare quotes in the title);
Rees W. Morrison, Law Departments and Firms Should Nurture Creativity, THE TEXAS
LAWYER, Section: In-House Texas (February 5, 2007)(The article’s opening sentence is,
“What’s so scary about creativity?”)
Rees W. Morrison, The Rewards of Creativity: Useful Creativity Increases Productivity
and Effectiveness, NEW JERSEY LAW JOURNAL, Law Office and Trust Account
Management (March 5, 2007)(stating in its first paragraph, “Neither law departments nor
the law firms they retain appear to be comfortable with creativity. They talk about the
value of doing things differently -- and better -- but the truth is that creativity is unusual
and mistrusted. Both sides are ambivalent: law departments favor step-by-step, wellunderstood services, even as their lawyers claim that they welcome breakthrough
thinking; law firms boast of their cutting-edge abilities but find little actual reward in
innovation.”)
To highlight the tensions presented by innovation’s polarized upside and downside risk
profiles, public policy professors might want to consider using as supplemental reading
Maximillian Martin, Balancing Creativity and Control, an online pamplet available at
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1322402.
Case Studies on Creativity and Legal Innovation -- Potential Resources
At pages 71-72, and again at pp. 78-79, Chapter 3 describes various innovations in legal
theory, doctrine, and policy that could reasonably be characterized as creative. Additional
examples can be found in law review article and legal periodicals. For instructors who want
to steer students in this direction, here are some additional sources to explore:
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Robert F. Blomquist, Thinking About Law and Creativity: On the 100 Most Creative
Moments in American Law (Draft available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1133631).
Frank Newton, Creativity Leads to a New Way to Fund Pro Bono, TEXAS LAWYER, April
29, 2002.
Maria Vogel-Short, N.Y. Chief Judge: Creativity Key to Luring More to Pro Bono Work,
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New Jersey Lawyer: The Weekly Newspaper, (November 11, 2002).
Constraints on Creativity, And How to Overcome Them
Much of Chapter 3 reviews the literature on constraints on creativity. On of the best ways to
help students understand how cognitive, social, practical, and personal factors can exercise these
constraining effects is to give them a chance to experience the constraints themselves in the
classroom context. There are numerous popular books and websites, many of the latter free, that
provide creativity exercises instructors might find valuable for these purposes. Although we
have way to know, empirically, whether exercises like these actually improve divergent thinking
in law or public policy domains, they are useful for many purposes, particularly for:
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Showing students how much more comfortable they feel critiquing ideas than
generating, articulating, or building on them;
How powerfully the professional norms they have already assimilated during school
constrain the types of alternatives they can imagine, let alone articulate;
What their own strengths and weaknesses are in relation to different types of framebreaking cognitive activities (visual, analogical, etc…); and
How information overload and the high velocity pace at which we live and work
powerfully constrains how much time we are able or willing to spend idle, a factor
that has been empirically demonstrated to constrain innovation.
There are numerous popular books and websites that contain ideas for what we might call
“creativity warm-ups.” Here are some books that contain useful exercises:
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James Adams, CONCEPTUAL BLOCKBUSTING (4th Ed. 2001)
James Adams, THE CARE AND FEEDING OF IDEAS: A GUIDE TO ENCOURAGING
CREATIVITY (1986);
Robert Bookstrom, DEVELOPING CREATIVE AND CRITICAL THINKING: AN INTEGRATED
APPROACH (1992)
Edward deBono, CREATIVITY STEP BY STEP (1973);
Paul Sloane, THE LEADER’S GUIDE TO LATERAL THINKING SKILLS (2nd Ed. 2006); and
Anthony Weston, CREATIVITY FOR CRITICAL THINKERS (2007).
Scores of websites and blogs contain creativity exercises of various types, along with
information about the uses of and procedures for brainstorming sessions. Many of these are
thinly veiled advertising tools or are inappropriate for professional students. However, we have
found the following two particularly useful as a source of ideas and in-class exercises, including
brainstorming sessions:

http://blog.creativethink.com (This is a website run by Roger Van Oech, author of
such popular creativity books as A WHACK ON THE SIDE OF THE HEAD. It features
ideas and instructions for bisociation exercises, exercises using humor to generate
creative alternatives, and brainstorming sessions.)
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
http://www.glencoe.com/sec/busadmin/entre/teacher/creative/stimulate/index.htm
(This website, run by McGraw Hill, is specifically designed for educational
professionals teaching in entrepreneurship-related programs)
Scenario planning: Creativity in long-term
With its eye on long-term planning, the material on scenario planning parallels the
section on strategic planning in Chapter 2. Like other creativity-enhancing techniques, scenario
planning is intended to liberate decisionmakers from well-worn cognitive ruts down which much
strategic planning proceeds. Scenario planning has been used by multinational corporations and
by governments in thinking about national security. The book gives examples of scenario
planning by nonprofit organizations.
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CHAPTER 4
CHOOSING AMONG ALTERNATIVES
Slide. This materials in this chapter fit logically with much of Chapter 12 (Choices,
Consequences, and Tradeoffs), but it rounds out Part One’s once-over-lightly introduction to
decision making.
It is useful to remind students about deliberative and (slide) non deliberative approaches to
decision making, and (slide) compensatory and noncompensatory processes. You might ask
them to provide examples of the “spectrum of decision making processes,” discussing when
these approaches are useful, and their benefits and downsides.
Slide. The subjective linear model is a very simple value-based (as distinguished from reasonbased) multi-attribute decision model, useful for decisions that have many alternatives, many
attributes (i.e., criteria or goals), and that present somewhat difficult tradeoffs.
In teaching the wastewater treatment plant siting problem, we walk students through the
charts, and also ask with respect to the attributes involved in the decision:
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
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Whose values does Christine take into account?
Slide. How did the staff develop their own objectives?
Slide. Where do the community objectives come from, and what should Christine do
with heterogeneous interests? What if Christine disagrees with their values? What if she
thinks a community is wrong about an objective fact (e.g., whether the plant will
smell)? Are you satisfied that she has identified the right attributes for the decision?
How could she have done better?
Slide. Map of Edenville
Slide. Christine’s Criteria
Slide. Map of Edenville
Slide. Site Analysis
Slide. Qualitative Assessments
Slide. Quantitative Assessments
Slide. Site Comparisons
Slide. Possible Weightings
Slide. Values X Weightings
Slide. Weighted Site Comparisons
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Problem: Applying the subjective linear model to your own problem. We accompany the
reading by asking students to bring do the following exercise to class and discuss it in class in
small groups.
Chapter 4 describes an approach to making a decision with tradeoffs—a compensatory
model—using the example of siting a solid waste disposal plant. Please apply this
approach to an example from personal experience (e.g., choosing what class to take,
what summer job to take, what apartment to rent, where to take a vacation). It would
be ideal, but not necessary, if you used a decision you are actually facing – but if an
actual decision does not come to mind, or if you don’t feel comfortable describing an
actual problem, feel free to use a hypothetical case. The decision ought to involve three
or more alternatives and three or more attributes. Show how you would analyze the
problem, step by step, to arrive at a decision Please actually work through the decision
process rather than just describe how you might do it.
Where have students actually used (an approximation of) this method? When might it be
useful? When might it be useful for policy decisions?
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