Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions

by Gary Klein

Pattern matching provides us with a sense of reasonable goals and their attributes. It gives a basis for detecting anomalies and treating them with appropriate seriousness. It helps us to notice opportunities and leverage points, discover relevant analogues, and get a sense of how solvable a problem is.

The judgment of solvability is also responsible for letting us recognize when we are unlikely to make more progress and that it is time to stop.

Mental simulation is the engine for diagnosing the causes of the problem, along with their trends. It plays a role in coalescing fragmentary actions to find a way to put them together. An...

Even brainstorming, a method that has been around for decades, seems primarily a social activity. If the participants generate their ideas individually, the resulting set of suggestions is usually longer and more varied than when everyone works together.

Mullen, Johnson, and Salas (1991) have documented the finding that brainstorming reduces productivity.

Sometimes planners engage in lengthy, detailed preparations that quickly become obsolete, yet they continue with the same process, again and again; it appears that the function is to help them all learn more about the situation and to calibrate their understanding, rather than to produce plans that will be carried out more successfully.

Complexity can be a sign of sophistication—or a sign that the plan is likely to break down.

A stable environment permitted more precise and complex plans. A rapidly changing environment favored modular plans because these permitted rapid improvisation. A resource-limited environment favored integrated plans that were more efficient. Time pressure and uncertainty made it more difficult to construct integrated plans.

Goals were not being disseminated because the planning team was distributed, consisting of experienced members who shaped the priorities, and less experienced members who compiled the detailed orders. The experienced planning cell did not want to communicate the rationale for priorities because they did not want the compilers to interpret the goals. As a result, leverage points were not being identified. This might have reduced efficiency, but the planners were not concerned with efficiency.

This system resulted in modular rather than integrated plans.

To solve an ill-defined problem, we have to clarify the goal even as we are trying to achieve it, rather than keeping the goal constant.

Experience is needed to make a variety of judgments, ranging from identifying opportunities to gauging the solvability of a problem.

Experienced problem solvers can distinguish genuine anomalies from transients. Artificial tasks give the problem to subjects, thereby ignoring the process of problem finding.

Structuring a problem is using a barrier or leverage point to construct a course of action, not organizing a problem into a space that can be searched efficiently.

Problem solving is a constructive process. Computational approaches to problem solving rely on procedures, such as searching through problem spaces, that have little psychological reality.

Pattern matching (intuition) refers to the ability of the expert to detect typicality and to notice events that did not happen and other anomalies that violate the pattern.

Mental simulation covers the ability to see events that happened previously and events that are likely to happen in the future.

One critical type of cue that surprises experts, but not novices, is the absence of a key event. Since novices do not know what is supposed to happen, they are slow to appreciate the significance of something’s not happening. Experts pick this up right away.

Whereas novices may be confused by all the data elements, experts see the big picture, and they appear to be less likely to fall victim to information overload.

The mental model of the team coordination lets the expert anticipate what the other team members will need and will be doing.

Jacobs and Jaques have suggested that as people move up the organizational ladder in industry, they need to look further ahead.

The appropriate time horizon depends on the reaction time of the system at different levels.

The ability to see the past and the future rests on an understanding of the primary causes in a domain and the ability to apply these causes to run mental simulations.

Another aspect of mental simulation is to be able to decenter, to see the world through the eyes of others.

"turn the map around" see through the enemys perspective

Four components of metacognition seem most important: memory limitations, having the big picture, self-critiques, and strategy selection.

The point of this exercise is to show how much perceptual experience is needed to carry out tasks that may seem simple because they can be reduced to rules and procedures. We are often fooled into thinking that the procedures are going to be carried out easily. In fact, procedures often take much experience to interpret. Rules tell you that when a certain condition occurs, initiate a certain action. The trick is knowing when the first condition has occurred.

This first experiment was successful in showing that skilled decision makers can perform at very high levels despite time pressure. The second chess experiment (Klein, Wolf, Militello, & Zsambok, 1995) examined a more detailed question, designed to test the RPD model itself.

The data confirmed the prediction made by the RPD model: skilled decision makers generate feasible options as the first ones they think of. Therefore, there is little to be gained by generating and then evaluating lots of options.

In chess, it is important to find the best move, not just a good one, so players do continue to search for the best options. Yet we also found that for the most part, they settled on the first option they had thought of, even after considering some others.

Experienced people have an impressive ability to withstand time pressure and generate plausible options so they do not have to waste effort and attention by comparing lots of options.

The most important application is to train people to achieve expertise more quickly.

In organizations, much of the knowledge is held within the heads of the workers and is never shared. This is tacit knowledge. In most organizations, the culture seems to ignore the expertise that already exists, to take it for granted.

If a skilled worker retired after thirty years on the job and tried to leave with a favorite personal computer, some programs, or a set of tools, he or she would be stopped. The organization knows the value of the equipment. But the organization lets the worker walk out with all of that expertise, which is worth far more than some minor equipment, and never says a word, never even notices the loss.

The first step is to identify sources of expertise. People who have been in an organization for a while will have accumulated some experiences worth capturing. We usually find that there is not one expert. Rather, different people know worthwhile things in different areas. The job of cognitive task analysis is to focus on the expertise, not the experts.

Step 2 is to assay the knowledge. Cognitive task analysis takes time and effort. No one would start such a project if there was not a compelling need or benefit in the first place. Once we have identified the sources of expertise, we can again evaluate the value of the project.

The third step is to extract the knowledge. Cognitive task analysis methods have been developed for getting inside the heads of experts.16 These methods include structured interviews, interviews about actual events that were challenging, interviews about the concepts experts use to think about a task, and simulated tasks that require the expert to think aloud during performance or respond to interview questions after completion.

Step 4 is to codify the knowledge. We have seen and used many different ways to represent the knowledge elicited.

It is often useful to identify the decision requirements (the key decisions and how they are made) of the task. For each decision requirement, we show why it is difficult, and the cues and strategies that experts use to get around the difficulty. These decision requirements can be crossreferenced to actual incidents.

The final step is to apply the knowledge. We have already covered a range of examples of how cognitive task analysis can be applied. The stories, diagrams, tables, and lists of critical cues have all played a role in one project or another. They have been used to identify key cues for diagnoses of sepsis, to train nurses to recognize these cues, to provide cognitive modeling17 of the troubleshooting strategies of expert programmers, and to show system designers what essential decisions have to be supported by interfaces.

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.

Skilled chess players show high-quality moves, even under extreme time pressure, and high-quality moves as the first ones they consider.

Training to high-skill levels should emphasize perceptual skills, along with...

Major John Schmitt, of the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves, has pointed out that the RPD model asserts that people tend to choose the first reasonable action they consider. Yet in dealing with an adversary who might anticipate your tendencies, this strategy can get you in trouble. It leads you to take typical, and therefore predictable, actions.

success.After the exercise, Schmitt discussed his tactics with the leader of the defensive forces, an officer for whom Schmitt did not have high regard. The man admitted he had been caught by surprise. He had not even tried to anticipate what Schmitt might do. Apparently Schmitt’s strategy was predictable only against an adversary who was actively trying to make predictions, and this adversary was not looking ahead.

One of the hallmarks of experts is their ability to project current states into the future.Schmitt’s dilemma is that most officers will not put themselves in the position of their adversary, but if you are unlucky to come across one who does, a Hannibal or a Robert E. Lee, then your recognitional decision making may get you in trouble.

In other words, the RPD strategy is still an accurate description of what people do, but it has this drawback in adversarial situations that call for dec...

My own suspicion is that skilled commanders have developed an ability to recognize when their courses of action are too obvious, just as Schmitt did. During the evaluation of a plan by mental simulation, the skilled commanders will use a sense of predictability to notice that the adversary ca...

But if you can get them to tell you about tough cases, nonroutine events where their skills made the difference, then you have a pathway into their perspective, into the way they are seeing the world. We call this the critical decision method, because it focuses attention on the key judgments and decisions that were made during the incident being described.

In her project with the neonatal intensive care unit, Beth Crandall had asked the experienced nurses how they detected the early signs of sepsis. They told her it was experience and intuition. They did not know what they knew, because what they knew was perceptual—how to see. The only way Beth was going to find out anything useful was to have the nurses tell their stories of specific instances, each tied to a different set of perceptual cues. At the end of the interviews, Beth could draw all the stories together and compile a master list of cues to sepsis.

First, we try to find a good story, one with lots of expertise, perceptual skills, and judgment.