Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions

by Gary Klein

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.

Before we did this study, we believed that novices impulsively jumped at the first option they could think of, whereas experts carefully deliberated about the merits of different courses of action. Now it seemed that it was the experts who could generate a single course of action, while novices needed to compare different approaches.

They understand what types of goals make sense (so the priorities are set), which cues are important (so there is not an overload of information), what to expect next (so they can prepare themselves and notice surprises), and the typical ways of responding in a given situation.

Another training strategy is to compile stories of difficult cases and make these the training materials.

Because of memory limitations, people usually construct mental simulations using around three variables and around six transitions.

It takes a fair amount of experience to construct a useful mental simulation.

Mental simulation serves several functions in nonroutine decision making. It helps us to explain the cues and information we have received so that we can figure out how to interpret a situation and diagnose a problem. It helps us to generate expectancies by providing a preview of events as they might unfold and by letting us run through a course of action in our minds so we can prepare for it. And it lets us evaluate a course of action by searching for pitfalls so we can decide whether to adopt it, change it, or look further.

By checking whether the expectancies are satisfied, the decision maker can judge the adequacy of the mental simulation.

we will be more likely to compare options when faced with unfamiliar situations. The reason is that a lack of experience will prevent us from generating reasonable options, or will at least reduce our confidence in the options we do generate. If time pressure is low, the conditions are fairly stable, and the goals arc clear, then we should expect to find the highest level of option comparisons.

the rigorous, analytical approach cannot be used in most natural settings.

There is no reason to teach someone to follow the RPD model, since the model is descriptive. It shows what experienced decision makers already do.

Experts seem to have a larger stock of procedures that they can think of to use as starting points in building a new plan or strategy. These can serve as holds to get the process moving, or in combination with other fragmentary actions. Novices, in contrast, are often at a loss about where to begin.

Most of the studies of problem solving and decision making have centered on well-defined goals—solving mathematical equations, physics problems, or syllogisms in deductive logic, for example.

The appeal of these well-defined problems is that researchers can perform carefully designed experiments manipulating different variables to see if the manipulations change the proportion of correct answers. Because all the problems have correct answers, there is no ambiguity in these studies. Therefore, the field of problem solving has concentrated on tasks with well-defined goals.

we must accept the limitations of our ability to make plans for complex situations.

Most problems are ill defined. Most studies of problem solving use well-defined goals.

The accumulation of experience does not weigh people down; it lightens them up. Experts see the world differently. They see things the rest of us cannot. Often experts do not realize that the rest of us are unable to detect what seems obvious to them.

There are many things experts can see that are invisible to everyone else: Patterns that novices do not notice. Anomalies—events that did not happen and other violations of expectancies. The big picture (situation awareness). The way things work. Opportunities and improvisations. Events that either already happened (the past) or are going to happen (the future). Differences that are too small for novices to detect. Their own limitations.

To date, the field of technical training has been dominated by efforts to teach rules, facts, and procedures. Technical training had been unexamined and unstructured through the 1960s, and many technical training programs from those years were poorly organized and conducted.

These methods treated the skills and knowledge to be imparted during training as a set of procedures and rules that could be decomposed and systematically taught. This strategy makes sense for simple, procedural tasks. Especially in high-turnover jobs, with minimally educated workers, the strategy allows for efficient instructional programs.

Presenting the procedures to trainees gives them a false sense of progress. This confidence dissipates when novices realize that applying the procedures depends on context and that no one can tell them what context is. Judgment and decision tasks in natural settings are rarely straightforward.

Experts can perceive things that are invisible to novices: fine discriminations, patterns, alternate perspectives, missing events, the past and the future, and the process of managing decision-making activities.

The more complexity and subtlety, the more there is to be learned.

One of the most common uses of stories is to understand.

Just as the story form helps us probe for the expertise, the story also helps to communicate the expertise.

Stories can be used to extract and communicate subtle aspects of expertise.

When team members understand the intent and reasoning behind a task, they will be better able to improvise.

The communication of intent is critical for teamwork. No one can anticipate every contingency. Therefore intent is used to improvise and adjust.

Hyperrationality is a mental disturbance in which the victim attempts to handle all decisions and problems on a purely rational basis, relying on only logical and analytical forms of reasoning.

People with greater expertise can see the world differently. They have a larger storehouse of procedures to apply. They notice problems more quickly. They have richer mental simulations to use in diagnosing problems and in evaluating courses of action. They have more analogies to draw upon. Expertise can also get us in trouble. It can lead us to view problems in stereotyped ways. The sense of typicality can be so strong that we miss subtle signs of trouble.

Experience does not translate directly into expertise if the domain is dynamic, feedback is inadequate, and the number and variety of experiences is too small.

Expertise depends on perceptual skills. You rarely get someone to jump a skill level by teaching more facts and rules.