Walter Barndt
Thursday 12:00 – 2:00 PM
January 12 through March 2, 2006
D.O.C. House
This seminar course of eight two-hour sessions is designated to improve your awareness, understanding and ability to think differently about the assumptions and judgments that you make. It is intended to enable you to more clearly anticipate, recognize and assess the transparent and less obvious signs, signals and messages that you can’t or don’t want to acknowledge or see. These are Blindspots. They create errors or difficulties in our problem solving and decision processes. Blindspots encourage sloppy thinking. This leads to faulty assumptions, judgments and decisions. And this leads to unintended consequences that create additional problems rather than good solutions. This happens because there is a tendency to think less about how we make judgments and decisions than about the judgments and decisions themselves - a common fallibility. Blindspots are caused by fallibilities that lie in our habits of thought; easy to see in others, but not in ourselves.
To facilitate learning about Blindspots and to address these fallibilities, the course will be structured around a full range of learning opportunities: articles, reports, case studies, and in-class exercises. Class discussion of the course materials will provide you with the opportunity to test, hone and improve your thinking, reasoning and decision-making skills. Careful preparation for and participation in the class sessions will strengthen the learning value of your study group experience.
WALTER D. BARNDT is Professor of Management (retired), Lally Graduate School of Management, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is the author of two books and twelve professional journal articles in the field of competitive intelligence and profiling. He had a government, consulting and teaching assignments in Australia, England, France, Germany, Guyana, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Venezuela and the United States. He is a former member (and Director) of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals and of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. He was Commander (retired), United States Navy and Associate Fellow, Jonathan Edwards College, Yale University. He is a five-time Boston Marathon runner.
