Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

by Chet Richards

Klein and his company demonstrated that firefighters and other people who must act quickly in rapidly changing situations with imperfect information do best when their intuition immediately gives them an acceptable course of action. This intuition, of course, is the product of years of experience. Junior military officers beginning their careers were able to make “recognition-primed” decisions (intuition and constructing simple mental models) slightly over 40% of the time. Senior battlefield commanders, on the other hand, were able to rely on recognition-primed faculties in upwards of 95% of their decisions. Formal decision making, of the type typically taught in business schools, is required only when experience is inadequate.124 Intuitive knowledge is so important in shaping the real world that Klein labeled it as one of the primary “sources of power.”