Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions

by Gary Klein

If you ask experts what makes them so good, they are likely to give general answers that do not reveal much. 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.6