INFORMS teaching prize for MCI professor Johannes Siebert

At the INFORMS Annual Meeting in San Francisco, MCI professor Johannes Siebert received the INFORMS Prize for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice on 1 November.  INFORMS is the world's largest professional society for operations research and management science and publishes six of the journals on the Financial Times' FT50 list. The prize has been awarded since 1998 and now goes to a faculty member at a European  institution for the first time.

A prize for training practitioners

In its citation, the prize committee recognises Siebert for rigorous, practice-oriented teaching of decision analysis that prepares students to apply Value-Focused Thinking and multiattribute utility theory to real decisions, with lasting impact on their professional practice. “Beyond his own teaching, he has advanced the way decision analysis is taught, developing innovative approaches that have enriched the field,” the citation reads.

The nomination process reflects this focus: it requires statements from former students now working in practice.

Siebert's courses at MCI are built around the complete workflow of professional decision analysis, from framing the decision to a defensible recommendation. Students do not go through this workflow on a textbook example, but on a real decision that they or their organisation actually face. Over the past seven years this has produced more than 200 fully documented decision models by student teams.

Teaching grounded in research

Siebert also studies decision-making competence empirically. His research on proactive decision-making – actively seeking out and shaping decisions rather than waiting for them – has appeared in four articles in the European Journal of Operational Research, including evidence that it can be increased through training. A study he co-authored on a decision-analytical intervention for secondary school students received the Best Research Paper Award 2023 of the Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education.

Nominated by the originator of the methodology

Siebert was nominated by Ralph L. Keeney (Duke University), the originator of Value-Focused Thinking, with whom Siebert has published in the journal Operations Research. “I know of no better courses in the world focusing on guiding and improving decision-making through the rigorous application of OR/MS methods,” Keeney writes in his nomination letter.

In a letter supporting the nomination, Mark Seidler, CEO of Strategic Decisions Group, confirmed that the methods taught meet professional standards. The company was co-founded in 1981 by Ronald A. Howard (Stanford University), one of the pioneers of modern decision analysis and the inaugural recipient of this award in 1998. The decision-support software used by students at MCI – Entscheidungsnavi, which Siebert helped initiate – has  been applied by numerous companies to support strategic and portfolio decisions. Siebert and Seidler are also co-authors of a case study examining its application at Bayer, published in Decision Analysis in 2022.

“The prize recognises what matters most: whether  someone can actually structure a difficult decision after the course – even when nobody is grading it any more,” says Siebert.

MCI Rector Andreas Altmann congratulates Siebert: “We are delighted that this prize goes to a teacher in Europe for the first time. We are even more pleased by what it recognises: the difference graduates make in practice years after their studies. That is the core of what MCI stands for. Johannes Siebert has put MCI on the international map in decision sciences.”

Overview of previous award winners

¹ Institution at the time of the award; the INFORMS list of recipients shows the current affiliation.