Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions

by Gary Klein

Perceptual filters. We experience the world through the sensory mechanisms that convert mechanical energy into patterns of neural activity. Similarly, teams do not have direct experience but must depend o...

Learning. Teams need to learn in many ways, such as acquiring new procedures, discarding inefficient behaviors, and figurin...

identified four features of child development to map onto teams: the development of competencies, identity, cognitive skills, and metacognition.

Any evaluation of what to expect from a team must consider the individual levels of skill, particularly if the team members keep changing. Everyone is trying to gauge the level of competency of the other members.

Teams also rely on shared practices and routines. Mature teams are supposed to be automatic in performing their basic procedures.

Similarly, the immature teams we have watched lack a sense of what they control. The team members themselves are still learning how to do their individual jobs. The advanced teams have already worked this out. The team members think of the team’s requirements as much as their own.

Experienced teams have integrated identities; the members identify themselves in relationship to the whole team. Inexperienced teams have fragmentary identities and focus on individual assignments more than team requirements.6

Identity develops slowly. The team members have to learn their own jobs. Then they have to understand something about the jobs their teammates are doing. Then they have to develop more automatic ways of coordinating and working together. Finally, when they have the basics down, they can free up attention to see the challenges facing the team as a whole.

When teams have not developed sufficient identity, they are confused about roles and functions—about who is responsible for what.

A few primary questions can be used to distinguish teams with high and low conceptual levels. The first is, How do the teams describe their goals and intents?

Second, to what degree does the team share an understanding of the situation?

A third category is the time horizon: How much effort does a team make to look ahead and anticipate problems?

Example 14.3, on the reaction time of a crisis management team, shows what happens to those who follow events rather than prepare for them.

Fourth, how does the team manage uncertainty, keeping track of g...

The ability to manage the flow of ideas is one of the central skills that distinguishes immature from experienced teams.

This is the power of the team mind: to create new and unexpected solutions, options, and interpretations, drawing on the experience of all the team members to generate products that are beyond the capabilities of any of the individuals.

Competencies are linked to team cognition because they serve as a limiting factor; as long as the team members are still struggling with basic procedures, they will not be able to pay sufficient attention to larger issues such as situation awareness.

Team training requires a certain process:

Identify a set of functions and processes that teams should master, within a given setting (e.g., how to communicate intent or compensate to help each other out).

Evaluate how well the teams in this setting perform those func...

Identify any areas of...

Provide specific training in the form of exercises tailored to provide experien...

The cognition of a team can be inferred from three sources: the team’s behavior, the contents of the team’s collective consciousness, and the team’s preconscious.

The mind of a team shows some familiar features: it has a limited working memory, it has to store some information permanently, it has a limited attention span, it can process information in parallel, and it relies on filtered information.

The team mind develops basic competencies and routines, forms a clear identity, learns to manage the flow of ideas, and learns to monitor itsel...

The idea of a team mind helps us understand the way individuals think, including the acci...

To think by reckoning, or calculating, we need to do the following things:

Decompose. We have to analyze a task—break the task, idea, or argument into small units, basic elements, so we can perform different calculations on them.

Decontextualize. Since context adds ambiguity, we must try to find units that are independent of context. We want to represent the important parts of context as additional facts and rules and elements.

Calculate. We apply a range of formal procedures on the elements, such as deductive rules of logic and statistical analyses.

Describe. All the analyses and representations should be open to public scrutiny.

Hyperrationality is the attempt to apply deductive and statistical reasoning and analyses to situations where they do not apply.

Hyperrationality runs into difficulty for a number of reasons:

There are no basic ...

Rules are amb...

Setting up the calculations requires subjec...

Formal analyses can degenerate into combinati...

Trying to conduct a formal analysis can interfere with nonrationa...

The features of natural settings usually prevent ...

Consistency is rarely ensured in natu...

Several studies found that decision biases are reduced if the study includes contextual factors and that the heuristics and biases do not occur in experienced decision makers working in natural settings.

the term latent pathogens to refer to all the problems such as poor design, poor training, and poor procedures, that may be undetected until the operator falls into the trap.

I was able to place the errors into three categories. Of the twenty-five, sixteen were due to lack of experience.

A second cause of poor decisions was lack of information.

The third source of poor decisions was due to mental simulation, the de minimus error.

The weakness is that decision makers can easily dismiss evidence that is inconvenient, explaining away the early warning signs. These limitations could prevent decision makers from detecting the early signs of a problem because they might not recognize anomalies or sense the urgency of the problem.

The limitations could lead decision makers to misrepresent the situation, perhaps by explaining away key pieces of information, failing to consider alternate explanations and diagnoses, or leaving decision makers confused by complexity.

Finally, the limitations in experience could make it too hard for decision makers to notice weaknesses in t...

Stressors such as time pressure, noise, and ambiguity, result in the following effects:

The stressors do not give us a chance to gather as much information.