SCENARIOS OF CHOICE: USING SOFTWARE TO TEACH NARRATIVE DECISION MAKING

One of the key elements of business practice is decision making. In the domain of commerce, persons who have been managing business organizations are called upon to make both tactical and strategic decisions that determine the course of their enterprises through the maze of modern economic life. Given the importance of decision making, the teaching of these practices and their implementation is of paramount importance for the training of future professionals in business schools. As with all pedagogical endeavors (in this case that of business education) salient theories and methods that should be conveyed to students need to be identified. One of the principal theoretical approaches to decision making are decision trees. These are sequential graphs that display alternate paths through a particular "space" in which selected courses of action are made. Decision trees, according to Lee Roy Beach and others, also can embody a narrative structure defined by the temporal series of choices made by a decision maker. Decision making therefore embraces the use of scenarios that a decision maker should follow. As a first step towards incorporating the use of narrative decision making into business education, "practical minded" students must be motivated to consider the importance of storytelling. As researchers in the tradition of contextual cognition have observed, an effective way for students to be motivated is to place them in a situation where they need to construct an environment or virtual world. Fortunately for instructors who wish to teach narratives by having students produce them, there exists a software tool known as "Twine". Twine allows a storyteller to develop a scenario by creating a linked series of HTML pages that can, in the case of business, represent a decision tree based process. To test whether the use of Twine enhances a business student's appreciation and understanding of the role of narrative in decision making, a study was performed using a control and an experimental group of graduate level business students. In the control group, students were taught decision making methods without exposure to the Twine program, while the experimental group did an assignment using Twine. After completing questionnaires, it was found that the experimental group significantly appreciated incorporating narrative into the decision making process more than the control group. These initial empirical results suggest that software tools that allow students to develop their own decision making scenarios can be fruitfully incorporated into business education. These tools can also allow students, as well as faculty, to empirically investigate of the use of narrative structures in business decision making.