Teaching Professional Judgment and Decision Making

A course on Professional Judgment and Decision Making is offered by the Harvard Kennedy School. It states that:“Professionals who work in government, business, the legal system, medicine, and many other settings make critically important decisions every day. Whom should our organization hire? How much financial risk can we tolerate? How should we structure accountability systems? Taking this course will help you to make such decisions in a less biased and more systematic way. It will also help you understand the underlying psychology of the mind. More specifically, it will help you understand when and why humans depart from standards of accuracy and rationality in judgment and decision making.”

The course topics include (a) basic mental processes in perception, memory and context dependence; (b) how questions affect answers; (c) models of decision making; (d) heuristics and biases; (e) social and group influences; (f) common traps; and (g) debiasing techniques. It also discusses emotion. The lectures and discussions are coordinated to complement weekly readings, which draw from primarily from psychology, as well as behavioral economics and neuroscience.

Throughout the course, the overarching goals are to: (1) Learn about the academic field of judgment and decision making, its major theories, results and debates. (2) Become a critical consumer of research findings, learning: (a) how to identify behavioral science studies on a given topic and (b) the methodological standards for evaluating the soundness of such studies. (3) Develop the ability to effectively write and speak about behavioral science theories, results and debates. (4) Acquire practical skills for improving your own judgments and decisions. (5) Acquire knowledge of which biases individuals can fix with training/knowledge and which biases individuals cannot fix unless managers engage in institutional design. (6) Develop a capstone project in which you apply the material in a way that will improve professional decision-making processes. Possible selections include legal process, government institutions, medical settings and other areas where high stakes decisions are made regarding policy.

To learn more, refer to previous posts on Teaching Professional Judgment and Decision Making.

Summary of the KPMG Professional Judgment Framework

KPMG LLP, one of the four largest international public accounting firms, launched an initiative in 2009 to enhance the professional judgment and professional skepticism of its people and teams. KPMG collaborated with two professors at Brigham Young University, Professors Steve Glover and Doug Prawitt, to emphasize these skills in its training. The result of this effort is refreshed professional judgment content throughout KPMG's audit training curriculum for all levels of audit professionals.

KPMG took the additional step of sharing and leveraging its professional judgment training content to create, again in collaboration with Brigham Young University Professors Glover and Prawitt, a monograph to help students accelerate the development of their professional judgment while still in college. The previously-posted monograph is titled Elevating Professional Judgment in Auditing and Accounting: The KPMG Professional Judgment Framework.

The monograph is only available in electronic form, with live Internet links and audio files embedded. In addition, there are video files and an instructor’s manual available separately to professors who register on KPMG University Connection. To learn more, see the 2013 Summary of the KPMG Professional Judgment Framework— Understanding and DevelopingProfessional Judgment in Auditing and Accounting, available online.