Course: Applying Cognitive Science to Management

In this course, you examine management and leadership through a cognitive science and psychological lens. You explore how thinking, assumptions, mental models, and cognitive biases shape decision-making, collaboration, and strategic choices within organizations. The course is research-based, closely connected to practice, and fully taught in English.

You participate in short lectures, interactive case discussions, and structured reflection exercises. This approach enables you to connect theoretical insights with real-world examples and the experiences of fellow participants, and to translate them into actionable insights for your own professional context.

• You work in management, lead teams, manage projects, or coordinate initiatives.
• Whether you are a starter, medior, or senior, you will gain actionable insights you can apply immediately.
• Examples: team leaders, project managers, product managers, department heads.
• Recommended prior knowledge: basic management experience or interest in organizational decision-making.

• Skills and knowledge: you gain insights into cognitive processes, mental models, intuitive vs. deliberate decision-making, and collective cognition in organizations.
• Practical application: you can immediately apply these skills to your decisions and team collaboration.
• Recognition: you receive a Certificate of Participation from Utrecht University.
• Professional value: your learning is recognized within managerial and organizational development contexts.

Session 1 - Introduction & Implicit Beliefs

Focus: Understanding how your assumptions shape your thinking.

• You explore implicit beliefs: positivist vs. constructivist, nomothetic vs. idiographic.
• You discover why your assumptions matter for how you interpret information and make sense of situations.
• You reflect on your own thinking patterns and recognize how they influence decisions.
• You will learn about Dual Processing: Type I vs. Type II thinking

Session 2 - Type I Thinking: Intuition and its Traps

Focus: Harnessing intuition while avoiding common pitfalls.

• You learn how heuristics act as shortcuts in decision-making.
• You examine common biases (overconfidence, availability, anchoring, confirmation) and how they affect your judgment.
• Reflection Task: you evaluate the strengths and risks of your intuitive judgments in your own work.

Session 3 - Type II Thinking: Deliberate Reasoning

Focus: Making well-considered decisions through structured reasoning.

• You use mental models as cognitive maps to structure complex problems.
• You see how management frameworks can guide deliberate reasoning.
• Reflection Task: you practice deciding when to rely on intuition versus deliberate analysis.

Session 4 - Teams and Shared Mental Models

Focus: Improving collaboration through shared understanding.

• You learn how individual thinking scales up to team cognition.
• You explore how shared mental models enable coordination and effective collaboration.
• Reflection Task: you reflect on the benefits and challenges of cognitive diversity in your own team or projects.

Session 5 - Collective Cognition and AI

Focus: understanding how AI reshapes shared thinking and decision-making.

• You examine dominant logics as shared cognitive frames within teams, organizations, and industries.
• You examine how challenging existing assumptions can open up new ways of thinking and enable innovation.
• You explore how artificial intelligence might change interpreations, decision-making, and collaboration in organizations.
• Reflection Task: you reflect on how AI may change how your organization thinks, decides, and collaborates, and what this means for your role as a manager.

The content of this course is aligned with the latest research in management and cognitive science. You will work with realistic cases and apply practical examples from your own professional experience as well as your peers’.

The instructors providing professional education from Utrecht University possess strong subject-matter expertise and are actively engaged in relevant, up-to-date research within their fields. They combine academic depth with sharp practical insight, enabling them to fully understand the professional context of the participants.

Our instructors’ excellent teaching skills are specifically tailored to how professionals learn: practice-oriented, interactive, and immediately applicable. Moreover, they place great value on collaboration and create a learning environment where dialogue, knowledge exchange, and co-creation are central.

Thank you for your interest in this course! You can leave your interest via the yellow button on this page and be the first to receive an email when enrollment is possible.