MN3400 Critical Thinking for Strategic Leadership

This course is about thinking critically and its importance for national security. It will help students better understand how to use critical thinking as a tool for strategic leadership. The course will show why critical and strategic thinking is important, and how it can be used to understand competitive situations and trends in the strategic environment; and help better formulate and analyze ideas about complex problems (in both business and defense-oriented organizations), and the examination of cases of leaders, leadership and critical and strategic thinkers in the past and present. The topic and the approach meets a timely need identified most recently in the Education for Sea-power Study which calls for (much) greater attention to educating for strategic and critical thinking and strategic leadership. Open to both resident and DL students.

Cross Listed Courses

Prerequisite

Corequisite

Lecture Hours

Course Learning Outcomes

Students will be able to think through complex problems using critical thinking approaches and competencies such as problem formulation and elimination of biases and faulty reasoning.
Students will be able to think through complex (business and defense) problems from different, sometimes contradictory, perspectives; understand differences between symptoms and causes underlying; and understand the importance of reformulating problems in order to frame a variety of possible solutions.
Students will be able to identify and strategize to overcome various individual and organizational biases that can obscure problems/solutions and be barriers to strategic change (including stability bias; confirmation bias; etc.).
Students will be able to use knowledge of critical thinking processes to help guide strategic leadership in organizations in ways that minimizes biases and resistances by effectively sharing the problem framing processes.