Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions

by Gary Klein

Lieutenant M handled many decision points yet spent little time on any one of them.

We have found that people draw on a large set of abilities that are sources of power.2 The conventional sources of power include deductive logical thinking, analysis of probabilities, and statistical methods.3 Yet the sources of power that are needed in natural settings are usually not analytical at all—the power of intuition, mental simulation, metaphor, and storytelling.

With an ill-defined goal, you are never sure if the decision was right.

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

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.

Sometimes we may need to use formal methods to look at a wide array of alternatives. Other times we may judge that we should rely on our expertise to look in greater depth at a smaller set of alternatives—maybe the first one considered.

Decision makers usually look for the first workable option they can find, not the best option.

even in complex situations, decision makers rarely report using complex, enumerative decision strategies.

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

This is one basis for what we call intuition: recognizing things without knowing how we do the recognizing.

shows that people do worse at some decision tasks when they are asked to perform analyses of the reasons for their preferences or to evaluate all the attributes of the choices.

The biggest danger of using mental simulation is

that you can imagine any contradictory evidence away. The power of mental simulation can be used against itself.

the garden path fallacy: taking one step that seems very straightforward, and then another, and each step makes so much sense that you do not notice how far you are getting from the main road.

Key Points

!!!!

developing the discipline of reviewing the decision-making processes for each incident can be valuable.

what triggers active problem solving is the ability to recognize when a goal is reachable.

There must be an experiential ability to judge the solvability of problems prior to working on them.

People who are not experts will have trouble detecting typical patterns.

Novices are confused by much that happens to them because they have so much trouble forming expectancies. They keep encountering events they did not anticipate.

The pretenders have mastered many procedures and tricks of the trade; their actions are smooth. They show many of the characteristics of

expertise.

However, if they are pushed outside the standard patterns, th...

They lack a sense of the dynamics of the situation. They have trouble explaining how the current state of affairs came about and how it will play out. They also have trouble mentally simulating how a differen...

despite the fact that the trainees were all officers and college graduates, and some were from West Point. The instructors were enlisted men, none with college degrees. This was not a matter of intelligence. It was a matter of experience.

It takes lots of experience, and lots of variety in that experience, to notice differences.

If you do not trust them, get others or do a better job of training. Just do not fall into the trap of choreographing each of their movements.