Dr. J. Frank Yates

Difficult Decisions Done Right

PublishedJuly 29, 2021
CategoryPsychology
Reading time8 min read
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Intro

Dr. J. Frank Yates was a professor, lecturer, researcher, diversity advocate, and pioneer of decision-making science. Yates’ decision management research made him one of the first academics in the field of decision science to apply multidisciplinary discoveries to important decisions in the real world. An author of over 100 scientific publications, Yates’ contributions to the field are far-reaching and immense.

Yates was a pioneer in forwarding diversity in academia, as he established some of the first institutions designed to aid marginalized scholars. For his brilliant mind, commitment to the social good, and his desire to apply decision science to the hardest problems, Dr. J. Frank Yates is a manifestation of everything we strive for at The Decision Lab.

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Decision theory is very rarely wrong about a decision, but it’s often silent on difficult questions.


- Dr. J. Frank Yates

About the Authors

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Dan Pilat

Managing Director

Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.

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Dr. Sekoul Krastev

Managing Director & Co-Founder

Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.

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