Summary/Review of the book

[Indy]

Background

The buzz around Blink by Malcolm Gladwell is now long gone, left in the dust of his following books, Outliers and What the Dog Saw. You may remember it made a splash by suggesting that intuitive decision-making could rival more structured methods. Numerous critiques of Gladwell’s writing and referencing rigour were made, but the core of the book referred to serious work by the researcher Gary Klein.

Klein’s first book Sources of Power documents his work with fire fighters and other professionals to discover the roots of their ability to make good decisions under split-second pressure. Klein’s latest book “Streetlights and Shadows” was published in 2009 and will be reviewed here later on. In between these he wrote The Power of Intuition as a practical guide to help people improve their own intuitive decision making – which seems like the most useful place to start with his work.


Intuitive Decision Making

Klein introduces the book with a bit of history. He began his research in the decision-making field looking at fire fighters using the existing frameworks, which emphasised analytical methods for judgement and decision-making. However, he found that analytic methods could not explain how successful fire officers made their decisions. He came to the conclusion that traditional analytics were not always practical and that intuitive decision-making must be explored.

Klein isn’t a zealot, he begins the first chapter with the statement: “We shouldn’t simply follow our intuitions, as they can be unreliable and need to be monitored. Yet we shouldn’t suppress our intuitions either, because they are essential to our decision making and can’t be replaced by analyses or procedures.” Thus, he says, our only option is to work on improving our intuitions so that when we need them, they are more accurate.

Klein defines intuition as “the way we translate our experience into action.” It is obvious that we can transfer parts of our experience into analytic forms, but he makes the case that we rarely have the resources to do this for more than a small part of our experience. This, Klein notes, partly explains why studies show that replacing intuitive decision making with analytics rarely creates the improvement that many would expect.

Improving our Intuitions

If we cannot replace analysis (though he believes analysis can supplement intuition) Klein suggest that our only choice is to improve the quality of our intuitions. Klein divides his book into three sections to help us achieve it:

Section I – Intuition: Ways to Build It (Chapters 2-5) – concentrates on understanding what intuition is, building it and finding ways to blend it with analysis.

Section II – Intuition: Ways to Apply It (Chapters 6-12) – looks at applying intuition in the workplace, tools for using intuition in spotting problems, managing uncertainty, inventing new approaches, etc.

Section III – Intuition: Ways to Safeguard It (Chapters 13-17) – how to communicate intuitive decisions to others, how to make good use of metrics and quantitative data and how to avoid overuse of computer-based technologies that implicitly place analytical methods above intuitive decision-making.


Section 1

This section begins in Chapter 2 with a story that Gladwell repeated in Blink, about nurses in a neo-natal intensive care unit that powerfully illustrates the relationship between experience and intuition and (naturally enough, given the setting) highlights just how critical developing intuition can be.

Chapter 3 lays out the pattern-recognition process behind intuitive decision-making and mentions that analysis can in particular support the process of recognizing cues. To the charge that “Of course – isn’t that obvious? People use their experience to recognize what to do” Klein highlights that formal decision analysis is still held up as the ideal in most business and engineering schools. He also introduces the detail that Mental Simulation, using mental models, is a key element of turning experience into intuitive decisions. Klein documents that developing good mental models is key, but often neglected in the modern workplace.

Chapter 4 gets into the meat of improving one’s own intuition, using the schema that Klein uses in training engagements with organizations around the world. Perhaps ironically, it is quite an analytical process: a feedback cycle between 3 elements: Identify and Understand the Decision Requirements of Your Job; Practice the Difficult Decisions in Context; Review Your Decision-making Experiences.

Chapter 5 take on the question of using analysis to support intuitive decision-making. Klein candidly explains the limits of intuition, but warns against the overreaction he sees around the world which rejects intuition out of hand – for analysis too has drawbacks, as he explains. For Klein, the main benefit of analysis is to explore the issues at stake and discover more of what to take into account before making a decision.

Section 2

Section 2 begins in Chapter 6, a short chapter, which makes the case that intuition has a strong role with tough choices, especially where analysis doesn’t create options with much distinction. (Klein calls this the Zone of Indifference.)

Chapter 7 opens with another of the decision-making exercises peppered throughout the book. Like the rest it is a thought provoking case and if you follow through on all of them it feels like it will change the way your choices are made. This particular exercise is an example of The PreMortem Exercise, which Klein provides as a useful one to spot potential problems, alongside some information from research about the Problem Detection Process. He identifies Expertise, Stance and Organisational Barriers as key starting factors in that process.

Managing Uncertainty is the theme of Chapter 8 and key to Klein’s case that we need to move beyond mechanical analysis. In daily business decisions, many factors are unknown, or too expensive to measure closely. Fortunately, Klein’s work with the US Marine Corps have focused extensively on uncertainty which helped him identify the 3 areas of uncertainty which intuition can help with most: the source of the uncertainty, the tactics available for handling the uncertainty and the decision maker’s personal tolerance for ambiguity. He then outlines a healthy number of tactics for dealing with each factor.

Storybuilding as the basis for sensemaking is the centre of Chapter 9, complemented by an exercise designed to highlight how signals are present in every situation, but easily missed. Stories allow several possible patterns to be examined and tested for the presence of further signals. The downsides of sensemaking are mentioned, particularly the capacity of the human mind to fit incoming signals to an existing model. Klein assembles some techniques to make sure that you re not becoming fixated on an interpretation of events that does not fit reality.

This leads naturally to Chapters 10 and 11 which focus on Creativity and Improvising/Adapting Plans – critical components of bringing intuition into workplaces which contain many existing plans, procedures and ways of thinking – any of which can be an obstacle to perceiving the signals that indicate change in an ambiguous situation. Chapter 12 rounds out Section 2 with a case study that helps the reader envision what the use of intuition in the workplace looks like.


Section 3

How to communicate your intuitions is the heading for Chapter 13, possibly the most important part of the whole book. After all, one of the greatest values of analytical decision making is that it’s very easy to gain support for your results if the audience trusts your decision-making method. To this end, Klein formulates Karl Weick’s “script for giving directions” into an acronym, STICC: situation, task, intent, concerns, calibration. This formula helps separate the intent (reason for action – intended goal) from the description of the action (task) and description of events (situation). This aids in marshalling both intuitive and analytic reasoning in persuading someone to undertake a course of events.

However, overall, as the most important chapter I think Chapter 13 does not in the end solve the problem, indeed there’s a sense in which it just avoids the problem, suggesting that if you can’t communicate your intuition successfully then perhaps you should turn to Chapter 14 and consider how to coach others in being more intuitive?

Chapter 15 considers the problems that metrics can cause. Metrics remain essential because intuitions can be misleading – as we’ve seen earlier the methods for improving intuition rather depend on analytic reflection processes. Klein outlines a whole host of areas where metrics can be useful, including setting goals, “tripwires” to warn of changes, spotting trends, ensuring compliance and making comparisons. However, he warns that metrics can often result in a “loss of history” where decisions are guided by a snapshot disconnected from context. He suggests that stories are a good way to synthesise metrics an intuition into a persuasive and useful whole.

Chapter 16 continues in a “warning” vein, addressing how reliance on analytic technologies can make us less intuitive and less successful as decision makers. The first potential problem is that the information technology system may make it hard for us to find the information needed for the problem at hand. This is something we’ve all struggled with when dealing with a poorly designed IT system, but Klein warns that the greatest danger is where the design of the system throws out anomalies automatically. In this case we may never see the information that may intuitively warned us of problems to come – he calls this disabling the expertise of the skilled. The second issue is that the mediation of data by the system can slow the process of people developing the experience and expertise that would allow them to make useful intuitive decisions. Finally, it can teach dysfunctional skills – reliance on features of the technology that fail in unexpected ways.

Summary

Chapter 17 closes the book with a top ten tips for harnessing your intuition, some answers to frequently asked questions and a plea to the reader not to see the book (despite the defensive tone) as exalting intuition in every situation. Overall, I’d definitely recommend this book to anyone whose work or life involves decisions that are “not just routine.” Intuition isn’t everything, it needs to be carefully blended with analytic processes, but it’s clear to me that every day we take decisions on things that analysis cannot decide for us – because we live inside complex systems where immutable facts are often scarce on the ground.