By Ralph Ranalli
Brad DeWees PhD 2019, a major in the Air Force, says the best leaders are the ones who can best shape the decision making environment.
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The popular notion of a good leader is that of a person who makes the right decisions. Brad DeWees PhD 2019 believes the best leaders are the ones who ensure decisions are made the right way.
“Leaders aren’t just visionaries, they aren’t just motivators—they’re decision architects,” says DeWees, who studies the science of judgment and decision making under uncertainty, especially in the context of national security. “That means they implicitly or explicitly shape the decision environment for the people that work underneath them. It’s about focusing on the process people use to get to a decision—whether that process is rigorous and whether it’s based on objective, quantifiable data—rather than just on the outcome of a decision and whether it turned out well.”
Due to the stakes involved in military judgments, decision science is an area of great interest to the armed forces, says DeWees, a U.S. Air Force major who came to Harvard Kennedy School as part of a program that sends a select group of high-achieving young officers to earn doctorates at leading universities.
“The Air Force has recognized that the environment we operate in is incredibly complex, and getting more complex every day,” he says. “And the things that have worked in the past aren’t necessarily going to be the things that work in the future.”
DeWees was drawn to the Kennedy School by the opportunity to study under top researchers in the field—his advisors were Jennifer Lerner, the Thornton Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy, Decision Science, and Management and Assistant Professor of Public Policy Julia Minson.
“I just fell in love with the work. Lerner has done a lot of work on the role of emotion in decision making, and the idea that specific emotions like anger, fear, and sadness have predictable effects on the way we perceive the world and the decisions that we ultimately make,” he says. “It just struck me as incredibly interesting from a knowledge perspective alone. The inner nerd in me was really blown away.”
"The Air Force has recognized that the environment we operate in is incredibly complex, and getting more complex every day. And the things that have worked in the past aren’t necessarily going to be the things that work in the future."
In one study, Lerner and DeWees uncovered an important nuance in the way that accountability—the expectation that a person will have to justify their choice—makes decision makers more averse to ambiguous situations. Previous studies had shown a general correlation between accountability and increased aversion to ambiguity. But DeWees and Lerner found that in situations where decision makers have a high degree of knowledge about the subject matter, accountability actually made them less averse to ambiguity. This research was awarded the Howard Raiffa Dissertation Prize by the Harvard-MIT Program on Negotiation for best paper of the year on the topics of competitive decision making, strategic interaction, and negotiation.
And Minson and DeWees co-authored a study on the social implications of utilizing the wisdom of crowds. Studies have shown that the successful combination of multiple, independent judgments is often more accurate than even an expert’s individual judgment, but that independent judgments come with a social catch. Making a judgment of one’s own before evaluating another leads people to think less of other’s contributions and ideas. In an article for Harvard Business Review, Minson and DeWees outlined a number of strategies for avoiding this social cost while combining multiple judgments, including appointing an impartial aggregator who had not yet formed a personal opinion on the issue.