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The aim of this paper is to look at some important educational aspects of complexity decision making in a multidisciplinary manner from the perspective of General Systems Theory (GST). First, the major issues involved in complexity management and decision making are summarized as they are viewed in literature, and a review of GST and Systems Thinking is given. The discussion in the paper is developed within the context of GST in general, but concentrated on decision making in the three trends of GST: Operations Research, Cybernetics, and Managerial Cybernetics. Here, the role of Cybernetics in complexity decision making is particularly emphasized. The discussion is then extended to the latest developments in complexity decision making in Science of Complexity and Soft Systems Thinking. The study also includes a framework which is expected to guide instructors who are planning to offer contemporary courses on decision making. The framework provides some clues for assessing the level of complexity for a given situation and selecting the appropriate methodology for solution development.

Decision making in most universities is taught within the conventional OR/MS (Operations Research/Management Science) paradigm.  This paradigm is known to be “hard” since it is consisted of mathematical tools, and normally suitable for solving structured problems. In complex situations the conventional OR/MS paradigm proves to be inadequate; decisions must be based on systems thinking which provides the decision maker(s) the opportunity to address the problematic situation in its full system context. The aim here is to develop a framework and a new course to teach “decision making through systems thinking” to industrial engineering students. The new course is to be taken after the existing course which covers the traditional OR/MS paradigm. It is believed that such an “extended” framework will help students to improve their skills in handling complex decision situations.

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The aim of this paper is to provide a critical view of the educational issues related to teaching decision making in management studies and to provide a general framework is proposed that will serve as a basis designing new courses, covering some methodologies for handling complexity in decision making. At present, the widely spread approach to teaching the subject matter is mostly restricted to the traditional OR/MS (Operations Research/Management Science) paradigm. This paradigm is based on a set of mathematical tools and suitable for solving well defined decision making problems; it fails in "messy" or complex situations. Systems-based approaches are more promising in complex situations since they provide the decision maker(s) the opportunity to address the problematic situation in its full system context. The framework proposed in the study attempts to complement the traditional OR/MS paradigm rather than replacing it.

Yurtseven, Murat Kudret (Dogus Author) -- Conference full title: PICMET '01 : Portland International Conference on Management of Engineering and Technology : proceedingsThe model presented in this study has been adopted from the control engineering field. Its purpose is to allow system designers or engineers to view a complex production process in an abstract and a compact form so that they can easily assess the effect of introducing new technologies and organizational forms into productio