Leadership Notes #64
Interview with Deborah Wituski
Dr. Deborah Wituski is the Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan Distinguished Professor of Practice at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced and International Studies. She is a seasoned executive with more than 25 years’ experience leading intelligence analysis and operations in both national security and the private sector. She served as Vice President of Global Engagement at Google & Alphabet from 2023-2025, where she led the Office of the President and Chief Investment Officer, driving global engagements with business and policy leaders and focusing on the interplay of technology, economic growth, and investments.
Dr. Wituski previously served as Vice President for Resilience & Risk Foresight at Google, where she developed and implemented a worldwide program providing critical risk and business resilience analysis. During her tenure, she expanded the substantive and geographic remit of the global intelligence team and reimagined the enterprise business continuity program.
Before joining Google, Dr. Wituski held various senior leadership positions during a 20-year career in the U.S. Intelligence Community, notably as Chief of Staff to the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, advising on key analytic and operational issues and managing enterprise functions, and Chief of Staff to the Deputy Director of CIA. She also served as Deputy Assistant Director of CIA for Counterterrorism, overseeing the strategic direction of global programs and interagency collaboration and held leadership positions in the National Security Branch of the FBI and in the National Counterterrorism Center.
A condensed transcript of PGLF Virtual Leadership Series at CIED, Georgetown
Potolicchio: How do you know when someone can deal with uncertainty? What is something that you do to figure out whether or not people are going to be effective at handling the unknown?
Wituski: I look for people who respond in a structured way, not emotionally to uncertainty. In a moment of crisis, I want people to ask themselves “What do I need to know?” rather than “What do I need to do?" My goal for us is to avoid acting hastily.
I learned this from a person that I worked for in government, and I was his deputy. I went to him and said, “Sir, we have a crisis.” He asked, “Deb, is anybody bleeding out?” I said “No, sir., nobody's bleeding out.” To which he answered, “Then, it's not a crisis.” The important takeaway is understanding what your definition of crisis is. Once you understand what it is, you can actually build a plan around it, and plan for the uncertain.
Potolicchio: You have a PhD in international relations, but particularly given your experience at CIA, you should have a second doctorate in questionology. I asked a cabinet secretary once, what was the thing that he learned from the presidency that he thought was most effective for people's business day to day. The president he worked for was really good at asking a peripheral question to figure out if the cabinet secretaries around him knew what they were talking about, or if they were just reading from the talking points. What he tried to do was develop effective questions that were just on the outside of what was to be discussed at that cabinet meeting, to know whether or not that person would be able to make adjustments about the topic. Do you have something similar in your repertoire when it comes to effective question asking?
Wituski: My first question is always: “So what?” I don't mean that in a flippant way. I want you to actually tell me why the issue should matter to me, to my business or the government we're working for.
I want you to tell me not just an interesting development, but the impact it could potentially have on our people, business operations, property, and ideas.
My analysts at Google used to get tired of me saying “This is a really interesting development you're highlighting. What's the so what for Google?”
It is important because there's so much happening in the world. We do not have the bandwidth to cover all of it. Let's focus on the things that really matter to what we're trying to achieve.
The other thing I would say is open-ended questions elicit more information. Be intentional as you craft your questions for there not to be yes or no answers, because that actually doesn't help you minimize uncertainty.
Potolicchio: Something that I marvel at isn't just the glittering resume that you have, but the longevity at the places that you were at: the CIA, Google. How did you have such effective energy management and stamina?
One of my favorite commencement addresses ever was Roger Federer’s at Dartmouth. He said that “negative energy is wasted energy.” Even though he won over 80% of his matches, he won just about half of his points. He said that his competitive advantage was his ability to wipe the slate clean, stay in the present, and leave in the past what was in the past.
When it comes to dealing with this crunching uncertainty, how were you able to maintain your energy for such a long period of time?
Wituski: I also support the notion of living in the present, as humans. We always want to go back and critically evaluate what we did in the past or anticipate what's coming in the future. You need to focus most of your cognitive energy on the present moment, to deliver the right decisions in the moment. As a first-time firstline supervisor in 2004, I was leading a team of leadership analysts. I was overwhelmed by the amount of information I was being presented with. I developed this little trick for myself that to this day I still use, which is putting all of my tasks for one day on a post-it note, because that seemed manageable to me.
That was a powerful and easy tool to center me on what the priorities that I needed to focus on were.
The other point I would say is know your role. As you move up in leadership, you have developed a strong team that you have empowered to make decisions and take action. Know when you have to engage, as opposed to letting your team shine, because you'd be amazed if you just let them do their thing.
That creates bandwidth for you and allows you to sustain a long-term career.
Potolicchio: Why did you title this session “navigating the unknown?”
Wituski: The short answer is because decisions often hinge on our mastery of uncertainty. We all probably remember in February of 2002, when then-Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, famously described the uncertainty in intelligence with the concepts of “known-knowns, known-unknowns, and unknown-unknowns.” Known-knowns are things we know we know. Known-unknowns are things we know that we don't know, and unknown-unknowns imply recognizing there are things we don't know that we don't know.
Think about Iran.
We know that the Strait of Hormuz is closed to shipping (as of May 20th). The known-unknown might be whether or not the measures that we've taken trying to mitigate the impact of that closure through rerouting supply have been effective. Maybe we don't know that yet, because we don't have the data, but we know that we don't know that. The unknown-unknown would be whether there is potential for other actors to institute trade restrictions that would further constrain our ability to use alternate routes and disrupt our operations.
What I've highlighted is we're going to spend most of our energy in the decision space focused on what we don't know, acknowledging that we know it exists but we don't know the answer, or recognizing that there are things out there that we don't even know that we don't know.
Famously, the one that's always quoted as a historical example, is the US government not knowing that the Shah was sick with cancer when events were unfolding in 1979. If we're going to spend all of our time trying to figure that out when we're making decisions, why not be intentional about it. Why not recognize that we need to be explicit in identifying the gaps and accepting that uncertainty is always going to be part of the equation? We need to treat it as a factor and ensure that we are building it into our mitigation strategy, because that's key to being able to navigate uncertainty.
Potolicchio: There's something Rumsfeld left out, which is the unknown-knowns, the tacit knowledge. This leads me to my next question, how can leaders develop the sensibility to be able to effectively manage risk in this landscape that you discuss?
Wituski: The first thing is, be honest with yourself about your risk appetite. If you were to ask me what my risk appetite is, I wouldn't be able to answer that question without you giving me a little bit more context. My answer would probably be “It depends” because you have to actually array your risk appetite or your tolerance for risk against whether or not it's important to your business operations, to the safety and security of your people, and your reputation.
While “it depends” isn't a great answer, it's the most honest answer. Identifying and being explicit about your risk appetite is the first step in being able to build a strategy to manage it.
The second piece of this is maximizing the decision space. Don't foreclose potential outcomes. As an analyst, I'm always going to go back to the tradecraft of using structured analytic techniques to help provide rigor and structure to qualitative data. Scenario analysis allows you to provide structure to situations where there are multiple outcomes.This is a perfect tool to help you structure the data that you have and create greater decision space for yourself as a leader or for the leaders you support.
The third piece of this puzzle is to take into account, or present to the decision maker for consideration, the risk of inaction. We spend a lot of time thinking about mitigating risk as proactive behavior, but the decision might not yet be ripe for action. You must be sure you're at the inflection point where you need to actually make a call or commit to doing something.
Finally, again, know your role. It is not your role to say no. Your role is to provide options in a way that you can get to yes, that keeps your people and ideas safe, and protects your property and operations.
Potolicchio: You were Chief of Staff to the director of the CIA. You were Chief of Staff to someone who became the director of National Intelligence. You ran the office of the Chief Investment Officer and the President at Google. I was reading the book by Chris Whipple on Chief of Staffs to the President, called “The Gatekeepers”, and he makes this argument that the gatekeeper, the Chief of Staff, controls access to information. My next question is about making sense of this mess of information, particularly as it's increasingly fragmented. Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, talks about how with the wealth of information, you have a poverty of attention. What is a pearl of wisdom that you can give us to deal with risk and be able to synthesize this fragmented information that comes across the principal's desk?
Wituski: Your tolerance for risk is a function of your personal experiences, the company's principles and your business objectives. Even though it may vary based on issues like the ones I discussed earlier, it should be rooted in your goals, ideas and principles. One data point, however sensational or transformational it may appear to be, should not shake that baseline foundation of your perception of risk. What it should do is compel you to look deeper at the information, where you acquired it from, whether or not you can actually corroborate it with other sources, and then ask yourself, what would I need to hear or see that would actually get me to believe what I'm looking at and that would actually disprove this piece of information?
Going back to my government service, I was a leadership analyst on Saddam Hussein, and I have often thought, 20 years later, “What would have been the one piece of information that I could have seen that would have prompted me to change my view that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction?”
To this day, I can't tell you one piece of information that would have been able to do that. It would have required a body of information from a variety of sources that had first-hand access to the information. You need to use that opportunity to vet the information and not question your own assumptions about risk. If you have more data points that are accumulating, we can always reevaluate whether or not we need to change our risk calculation in the face of new information. But in this day and age, where we are flooded with information and have the challenge of really trying to determine what is a known-unknown, what is really a fact, I would say that before you change your views that you have formed over decades and experience, take a look at the information itself and make sure you have, metaphorically, kicked the tires on it, the best that you can, to ensure that you have confidence in it. If you have confidence in the information that you're basing the decision on, that will make you even more confident when you act.
Potolicchio: Let's go back to Chris Whipple. “In times of crisis, the chief of staff is the steady hand at the helm”.
Usually, when a CEO is on a panel, they're always asked: “What's keeping you up at night?” I think of you as someone who needs to be advising these CEOs on how they make these critical decisions. How should leaders think about the issues that keep them up at night?
Wituski: We're all losing sleep because we're thinking about risk. If you're in government, it's the national interest. If you're in the private sector, you're thinking about what's at stake for your business. I'm actually going to ask us to try to reframe how we ask the questions about risk. Since 2020, we've experienced several events: the global pandemic, a land war in Europe, a large-scale terrorist attack against Israel, a US military strike against Iranian nuclear installations. I suspect that each one of us, at one point, had one of these events in the category of “low probability, high impact” scenarios. Rather than focusing on the likelihood of an event happening, let's change the frame and focus on the implications of those unlikely events. We need to think about what happens if all of those things that we once thought were low probability, actually happened. We live in a world where low probability events happen all the time.
Going back to your question about asking good questions, I would say we need to be asking what is the range of effects for decisions that are made today? Get beyond the now and really focus on the longer term effects of the decisions or the potential events that might happen, the second and third order effects of a development.
As businesses, we have to stop thinking about geopolitics as background noise or just the context in which the company operates. We need to intentionally consider the geopolitical developments that we either need to react to as business leaders or that we can actually shape. There are so many decisions that we, as business leaders, make that actually shape the geopolitical environment that we operate in. The business decision of shipping a product in a particular country may have implications for our business globally. Regulatory decisions have an impact on what we can and can't do in particular regions or countries. Geopolitics is one of those factors that we need to intentionally explore and examine what it means for our business decisions. And then, plan.
The power of planning is being able to articulate and define the roles and responsibilities for the players and key stakeholders that are involved in the decision making process by practicing those roles and responsibilities.
Going back to the very first question, about how people react with uncertainty. If you have practiced and planned, and everybody knows their role in the crisis, that reduces uncertainty and the emotional responses, and also improves the chance that you're going to get questions that are seeking more information. Planning gives you the opportunity to be prepared for a range of outcomes, from the low probability, high impact ones that we see happening now, to the usual crises that have a process to manage. Those are the real things that we need to be thinking about.
Potolicchio: Let's talk about general leadership characteristics in the next 10 years. Who are the leaders that are going to be able to stay on top of this VUCA - volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous world? What do they need to have? What's the stuff that they have to have going forward?
Wituski: Agility. We are all facing challenges from different corners that we didn't anticipate. Being able to pivot and apply the skills that you have, to a new substantive domain, is an incredibly powerful skill. We've talked a lot about the importance of asking good questions. I would say instead of good questions, let's talk about asking the right questions. What's the right question for the moment that elicits more information and reduces uncertainty? Because of this flood of information that we get, we are awash in data. The ability to leverage data to help tell your story and be able to present that data in a way, even to non-technical audiences, is an incredibly powerful skill. Critical thinking and the ability to explain a complex analytic argument in written and verbal form are the most powerful tools that we can develop in our leaders. This means that we're actually giving them the chance to sharpen their skills to articulate judgments. I don't want them to recite facts to me or show me how smart they are. I want them to apply those facts to formulate a judgment in a concise and clear way, and marshal data to support that judgment.
What does this mean for all of us who are trying to develop future leaders? We have to kick them out of their comfort zone. Those types of experiences help us develop the leaders of the future. I once had a mentor who told me, “if your stomach doesn't hurt a little bit when you start a new job, you're actually not pushing yourself.”
I don't want anybody to be sick for days, but I do want you to feel a little bit of performance anxiety about starting a new role because I want to stretch you. Apply the skills that you have demonstrated on a domain of knowledge that you're an expert in, somewhere else. Show me that you can replicate it.
Potolicchio: It's like we choreographed it. Our last speaker in the series was a presidential speech coach, and he said, “if you don't have butterflies in your stomach before a speech, you're going to come off as wooden, and you're not going to perform as effectively.” World records aren't broken in practice, they're broken in the Olympics. Lucky leaders, too. I'm stealing this from Tina Seelig at Stanford. She talks about the difference between fortune, chance, and luck, and how we can make our own luck, not just in the sense that the more I practice, the luckier I get, but if you're somebody who can spot and then take opportunities, if you have a general sensibility or intuition about those opportunities, positive expectations about uncertainty, then you have more confidence to approach that unknown. Finally, if you have resilience, when you have an adverse outcome, you keep getting back up and dealing with uncertainty. Can you tell us about the difference between the two types of intelligence, private and public, for leaders making decisions. How do we harness intel taken from these two different vectors?
Wituski: In government, we all know what intelligence looks like. Whether you define it as a process, the intelligence collection cycle; a product, an assessment for policymakers; or an organization, Central Intelligence Agency, there is a Director of National Intelligence, intel has a seat at the table. Policymakers rely on it as one of it is one of many inputs to their decisions. You often don't know whether or not that input is the determining factor on a policy, but you know that it's one of the voices that they hear in the cacophony of all the different sources to which they have access.
In contrast, in the private sector, you don't necessarily have a seat at the table just because you have intelligence in your title. You have to show value to the business and decision maker. You're in a cost center, not producing revenue for the company, and you're not close to the products, so it is incumbent on you, as the intelligence analyst or the intelligence leader, to get close to the business, to understand their priorities, so you can actually provide risk analysis and add value to their process.
One other difference is that your leaders have different levers that they can pull based on the intelligence that you provide. In government, we have military, political, and economic tools that you can leverage against an adversary. In the private sector you can choose to make investments in a particular location, or explore a new market that may be more challenging, or the converse. You have a lever, which is your investment strategy.
Companies also need to have a foreign policy to actually maximize their goals for the business, but also be aware of the risks and understand what the commitment may be, whether it's an investment commitment, that will require five to ten years to realize return, or what it would require in terms of safety and security of your people. The point of executing a foreign policy is an important one for private sector companies to wrap their heads around. You can shape the environment that you operate in.
Regardless if you're in the public sector or the private sector, where leaders are similar is that they are skeptical about information. They ask hard questions and want to ensure that the information they're getting is timely and actionable. Particularly in the private sector, they don't just want you to say, “Here's the risk!”, they want you to say, “Here's the risk and how we're going to mitigate it.”
Potolicchio: How do we deploy technology to deal with these challenges?
Wituski: On technology, we are in a situation where we have a proliferation of tools that are available to help us solve problems. Everybody is thinking about how we can engage in this digital transformation. I would like us all to think about what our intractable problems are and what we are trying to solve. Then, let's talk about the tools that you may already have, or that you may want to augment. The problem should be driving the tool selection. I want us to be thinking about solving the problem at hand and finding the best way to do that. We've been doing that as humans forever. Let's solve our problems by figuring out what's the best tool for us to use, and recognize that maybe not all of them are applicable.
Mara Monoses: One of the paradoxes that I've noticed studying emerging technologies is that sometimes the more data the states possess, the harder it gets to identify what is strategically meaningful. How should we think differently about informational overload in the age of AI?
Wituski: We should use the tools to help us harness the information, to identify patterns and anomalies in the data. They are powerful in helping us categorize and structure the data, and with that, enable us to ask the next question. They are useful in that regard because there is so much information out there. There's power in the patterns of aggregate data, but we need to evaluate it with a clear eye against what we already know, in order to be able to ask that next question.
Tudor Oancea: Do successful leaders change their decision-making style during uncertainty, or is consistency more important?
Wituski: Consistency is really important. As leaders, your team is watching you every day for cues. They know how you react, and they will gauge their reactions based on how you react to new developments or information. A crisis sharpens that focus on you. If you project stress, then they will manifest the stress. It is important to be consistent. That's why I'm a big believer in the planning piece. Again, I want everybody to know what their role is. If I have a team, a crisis hits and the first thing people say to me is, "Hey, what am I actually supposed to be doing?” then, I know I failed as a leader, because everybody should know what their role is and what their responsibility is before we're in a crisis. They're expecting consistency from leaders, and if they don't see that, it will have effects on morale and productivity. Consistency is something that gives them confidence that you know they've got it covered. If you change in a crisis, then they'll wonder, “Were those really principles that she was espousing, until things got really complicated, and then she threw them out the window?”
Chantal Santelices: It's interesting that sometimes, when you make a decision, you think, “What if I had waited a little? What would be different?” What are your thoughts on that?
Wituski: Sometimes, the right decision is no decision, which is really uncomfortable, because we lose control. We feel like if we make a decision, we're controlling the situation, and we're controlling the trajectory. Waiting is uncomfortable and it makes us uneasy. You don't really know until you're immersed in the situation what the right timing is. In some cases, the right thing is to act, other times, it's to hold. Knowing the issue and trusting the information that you're receiving are two powerful indicators to help you determine what the right timing is.
Farah Asgarova: What advice would you give young professionals who want to become resilient leaders in rapidly changing industries?
Wituski: For those who are new to the workforce, first of all, have confidence in yourself. You deserve to be there. It's something I wish somebody would have told me early on in my career. You're there, now demonstrate your brilliance and do that in a way that is authentic to yourself. Continue to expand your skills, get fluent on tools because the companies that you work for will expect that you will have some fluency. Whether they hire you for technical roles or not, they will expect that you will use them to help your productivity. Develop expertise in a body of work or an issue, so people will automatically come to you because you're the best. Find a great mentor who will be candid with you and give you feedback. Continue to think about what blind spots you have and whether closing them would prepare you for the next jobs. People look at my career and say, “she must have had a plan.” I'm here to tell you, there was no plan. I have been blessed with an amazing professional journey, and I took o roles that I knew would fill blind spots, because I knew they would prepare me for the next thing. Always be thinking about building the most well-rounded professional in you. What do you need to do to get there? A mix of training, experiences, and potentially more education.
Stefano Bianchini: We have an inflation of data and you have mentioned critical thinking as a tool for navigating it better. Are political leaders ready to accept this critical thinking?
Wituski: This is the challenge of being an intelligence analyst. There were many times when I provided finished analytic products. You send them downtown and you don't know whether or not they are informing thinking, changing minds, shaping policy approaches, but you know that you're part of the debate. As an intel analyst, you can't live and die on feedback. Feedback is a double-edged sword. You don't want to get seduced by good feedback and demoralized by negative feedback. The most important thing is that you're part of the debate, and you can't control what points of information the policy makers or business leaders pull on to make their decisions. At least, you contributed to those data points that were within the sample that they were pulling from.
I always felt the responsibility to deliver the objective analysis based on the information that we had at the time.
Nathan Jenner: It seems like you're drawn to a lot of Chief of Staff roles. What draws you to it? Why are you personally suited to that, maybe more so than other kinds of leadership roles?
Wituski: I'm drawn to those roles, because I actually think you don't really appreciate how an organization works if you don't operate in the C-suite. If you don't know how the most important people in the organization are spending their time, you don't actually know what the priorities of the business or the agency are. I was really fortunate to have two experiences in government and one in the private sector. I also want to get stuff done, behind the scenes, that makes the organization shine and drives mission. I don't need to be the one who's at the microphone touting the success. I know that the hard work gets done behind the scenes to make that happen.