Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions (The MIT Press)

by Gary Klein

My specialty was how to develop expertise, a real problem for the research team I belonged to in 1974 as we set guidelines for Air Force flight simulators.

Thus, when I started to investigate decision making in the early 1980s, my perspective was on developing expertise—not on calculating probabilities or determining which of several options was optimal.

Our research method was to study critical incidents in which people made difficult decisions under time pressure and uncertainty.

It explained the mystery of how people were able to make tough decisions under time pressure and uncertainty.

a naturalistic decision-making (NDM) approach that investigated experienced decision makers performing realistic tasks, rather than novices performing artificial tasks in a laboratory.

Actually, the RPD model posits a two-stage process, starting with intuition, as decision makers recognize how they need to respond, followed by deliberate evaluation as they mentally simulate a possible response to see if it will work. A blend of intuition and analysis, not just gut feelings.

Data are necessary to convince people, but stories are what they carry with them. Even in an era of Big Data, stories have a unique potential for conveying understanding.

Here I document human strengths and capabilities that typically have been downplayed or even ignored.

Instead of trying to show how people do not measure up to ideal strategies for performing tasks, we have been motivated by curiosity about how people do so well under difficult conditions.

This example shows decision making at a very high level. Lieutenant M handled many decision points yet spent little time on any one of them.

The power of storytelling helps us consolidate our experiences to make them available in the future, either to ourselves or to others.

It also describes how research can be done outside the laboratory setting by studying realistic tasks and experienced people working under typical conditions.

We like to study people under time pressure.

Naturalistic decision making is concerned with high stakes.

We are interested in experienced decision makers since only those who know something about the domain would usually be making high-stakes choices. Furthermore, we see experience as a basis for the sources of power we want to understand.

We want to know how people carry on even when faced with uncertainty because of inadequate information that may be missing, ambiguous, or unreliable—

We are interested in tasks where the goals are unclear. Most of the time when we have to make difficult choices, we do not fully understand what we want to accomplish.

In contrast, laboratory studies concentrate on tasks with well-defined goals, since the achievement of a well-defined goal is easy to measure. With an ill-defined goal, you are never sure if the decision was right.

Brainstorm: When thinks suck, disrupting the equilibrium is often effective. In other words, "Don't just stand there; do something!"

Naturalistic decision making is concerned with poorly defined procedures.

Cue learning refers to the need to perceive patterns and make distinctions.

For a task with ambiguous stimuli, consider a skilled racetrack handicapper, who notices that one of the horses in a race does better in the mud, examines the track that is slightly moist from an early morning drizzle, and tries to judge if the track is sufficiently moist to make a difference.

Dynamic conditions (that is, a changing situation) are an important feature of naturalistic decision making. New information may be received, or old information invalidated, and the goals can become radically transformed. In our research with fireground commanders, we estimated that the situation changed an average of five times per incident.

Some were major, requiring a shift in the way the commanders understood the situation.

intelligence.Lenat used the term sources of power to designate the analytical abilities of breaking a problem down into elements and performing basic operations on these elements as a way of solving a problem.

5. Zakay and Wooler (1984) have found that even when subjects are trained to use analytical decision strategies, they do not apply these strategies when they have a minute or less to make a decision.

Topic Description: Commanders, intelligence analysts, and others are often required to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty and severe time stress. Uncertainties may be associated with missing, incomplete, or ambiguous information, or with future outcomes that are unknown. Research is needed to: (1) better understand the cognitive processes (e.g., memory, judgment, or problem solving) of the decisionmaker under such conditions, and (2) suggest approaches for supporting the cognitive processes so that the overall quality of timeliness of decisions made under uncertainty and time stress are enhanced.

The experiments did not shed much light on how to train a new lieutenant to make effective decisions in controlling his tank platoon. The army has doctrine about how decisions should be made, but it seemed that soldiers usually did not follow the doctrine.

Observers. We planned to train college undergraduates as observers and put them in firehouses or in radio communication with the fire dispatchers, so they could quickly get to the scene of new fires and observe the decision making on the spot.

Exceptional cases. We thought that the most interesting decisions to examine would be the most difficult ones, such as whether to try to extinguish a fire or to give up and make sure it does not spread, rather than the routine ones, such as where to park the trucks.

Two-option hypothesis. We hypothesized that under time pressure, the commanders could not think of lots and lots of options. Instead, they would have to consider only two options: one that was intuitively the favorite, and the other to serve as a comparison to show why the favorite was better.

Soelberg studied the decision strategies his students used to perform a natural task: selecting their jobs as they finished their degrees. He assumed that they would rely on the rational choice strategy. He was wrong. His students showed little inclination toward systematic thinking. Instead they would make a gut choice.

Soelberg had trained his students to use rational methods, yet when it was time for them to make a rational and important choice, they would not do it.

They were not actually making a decision; they were constructing a justification.

The commanders did not consider two. In fact, they did not seem to be comparing any options at all.

“I don't make decisions,” he announced to his startled listeners. “I don't remember when I've ever made a decision.”

He agreed that there were options, yet it was usually obvious what to do in any given situation. We soon realized that he was defining the making of a decision in the same way as Soelberg’s students—generating a set of options and evaluating them to find the best one. We call this strategy of examining two or more options at the same time, usually by comparing the strengths and weaknesses of each, comparative evaluation. He insisted that he never did it. There just was no time. The structure would burn down by the time he finished listing all the options, let alone evaluating them.

When I'm looking for a quote in my highlights file, I'm generally looking for justification for how I feel. Just for fun, I'll search for justification now. COnfirmation bias was better. Each scholar suffers from the confirmation bias—the tendency to search vigorously for evidence that confirms what one already believes.36 One of the most brilliant features of universities is that, when they are working properly, they are communities of scholars who cancel out one another’s confirmation biases. Lukianoff, Greg. The Coddling of the American Mind (p. 109). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

People who are good at what they do relish the chance to explain it to an appreciative audience.

He still knows just what to do in this changed situation. He never seems to decide anything. He is not comparing a favorite option to another option, as the two-option hypothesis suggests. He is not comparing anything.

We still had a problem: the data would not conform to the hypothesis. I wanted the incidents to show how the commanders used the two-option strategy. I wanted the incidents to show analogical reasoning. I wanted the incidents to show us how people wrestled with choices. None of these things had happened. We still had to figure out just what those commanders were doing.

It was not that the commanders were refusing to compare options; rather, they did not have to compare options. I had been so fixated on what they were not doing that I had missed the real finding: that the commanders could come up with a good course of action from the start.

The commanders’ secret was that their experience let them see a situation, even a nonroutine one, as an example of a prototype, so they knew the typical course of action right away. Their experience let them identify a reasonable reaction as the first one they considered, so they did not bother thinking of others. They were not being perverse. They were being skillful. We now call this strategy recognition-primed decision making.

3 He thought of the options one at a time, evaluated in each turn, rejected it, and turned to the next most typical rescue technique. We can call this strategy a singular evaluation approach, to distinguish it from comparative evaluation. Singular evaluation means evaluating each option on its own merits, even if we cycle through several possibilities.

In contrast, if you are in an unfamiliar neighborhood and you notice your car is low on gasoline, you start searching for service stations and stop at the first reasonable place you find. You do not need the best service station in town.

Simon (1957) identified a decision strategy he calls satisficing: selecting the first option that works. Satisficing is different from optimizing, which means trying to come up with the best strategy. Optimizing is hard, and it takes a long time. Satisficing is more efficient. The singular evaluation strategy is based on satisficing.

option. If the commanders did not compare options, how did they know that a course of action was any good?

Now it seemed that it was the experts who could generate a single course of action, while novices needed to compare different approaches.

By recognizing a situation as typical, they also recognize a course of action likely to succeed.

If we made it clear that we wanted data to support the one-option hypothesis, some of the people we interviewed might have given us such data. Therefore, because we probed for evidence of the two-option hypothesis, which included concurrent evaluation, the demand characteristics worked against the recognitional strategy, giving us more confidence in our findings.

Intuition depends on the use of experience to recognize key patterns that indicate the dynamics of the situation.

The whole pattern did not fit right. His expectations were violated, and he realized he did not quite know what was going on. That was why he ordered his men out of the building.