Product Description

Anyone who watches the television news has seen images of firefighters rescuing people from burning buildings and paramedics treating bombing victims. How do these individuals make the split-second decisions that save lives? Most studies of decision making, based on artificial tasks assigned in laboratory settings, view people as biased and unskilled. Gary Klein is one of the developers of the naturalistic decision-making approach, which views people as inherently skilled and experienced.

Since 1985, Klein has conducted fieldwork to find out how people tackle challenges in difficult, nonroutine situations. Sources of Power is based on observations of humans acting under such real-life constraints as time pressure, high stakes, personal responsibility, and shifting conditions. In addition to providing information that can be used by professionals in management, psychology, engineering, and other fields, the book presents an overview of the research approach of naturalistic decision making and expands our knowledge of the strengths people bring to difficult tasks.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16958 in Books
• Published on: 1999-02-26
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 348 pages

Amazon.com
Gary Klein studies decision-making in the field, tagging along with firefighters, standing by in intensive-care units, and watching chess masters play lightning-fast "blitz" games to learn how people make choices with time constraints, limited information, and changing goals. From this research, he and his associates have developed a theory of "naturalistic decision-making."

Sources of Power essentially lends the validity of scientific research to techniques that many of us use every day. There's intuition, which is based not on instantaneous insight but on the rapid (perhaps even subconscious) interpretation of perceptual cues. There's mental simulation, a finely honed method of visualization. There's storytelling and metaphor, which enable decision-makers to devise meaningful frameworks and compare their present situations to previous events. Nobody is born with an inherent mastery of these and other techniques, Klein tells us, but we are all born with the capability to develop, through experience, the skill sets experts call upon to make good decisions.

Review
"Most studies of decision-making treat humans like rats in a laboratory. But Dr. Klein, a cognitive psychologist, spent a decade watching fire commanders, fighter pilots, paramedics, and others making split-second decisions on the job, and this book is a clear and engaging account of his findings."
-- Thomas Petzinger, Jr., The Wall Street Journal

Book Info
Presents an overview of the research approach of naturalistic decision making and expands our knowledge of the strengths people bring to difficult tasks. Softcover. DLC: Decision-making.

Customer Reviews

Staple Fire Service Text
I have taught in a College Fire Science program for nearly eight years and have not found a resource I thought was more fitting to use as an incident commander text. Many Incident Command System (ICS) resources talk about strategies, tactics, resource allocation, and organizational structure but, do not teach the student how understand how these decisions are made in an emergency.

Klein lays out how the mind of an Incident Commander (IC) works and explains why we make decisions the way we do. The students could benefit greatly by knowing what it looks like "back stage" of an IC's mind so as to form reasonable aspirations and expectation of themselves.

pOWERFUL cONCEPT
This book has some very powerful concepts that have yet to be widely taken up. Once you read the first chapter you will be hooked.

How decisions are really made
Who should read this: Psychologists, Cognitive researchers, those looking for information on decision making processes (such as user interface designers)

In a nutshell: instead of long meetings, exhaustive review of options, evaluation and the "correct" approaches Klein makes clear there are two major "sources of power" in his "Recognition-Primed Model" (RPD):

1. Intuition (Pattern Matching)
2. Mental Simulation

This should "bury the lead" for anyone looking for quick fix in making their own decisions. This book is not another management process book full of suggestions and processes to make better decisions.

This book contradicts most of the "expert" approaches commonly presented for making decisions. It goes into deep detail, complete with many examples how people actually make major decisions in the real world providing the psychological basis for why they're used and why they work well (and why sometimes they don't).

For those, like myself, who want to know the details so we can apply them in our work (mine is web interaction design) the book is invaluable. It's full of research that contradicts the "orthodoxy" of how "decision making should be done." It's heavy on the cognitive research of effective decision making providing a lot of basic information that can be applied though not directly.

Klein reports the results from many of his own and others' studies of real time decision making, usually under pressure. The main subjects in those studies are firefighters, military commanders, pilots, medical professionals and chess grandmasters. The examples help underscore the statistical analysis and other analysis making what some of its textbook quality more enjoyable as well as accessible.

The chapter titles give a good sense of the specific topic areas analyzed and discussed in depth.

4. The Power of Intuition (and pattern matching)
5. The Power of Mental Simulation
7. Mental Simulation and Decision Making
8. The Power to Spot Leverage Points
9. Nonlinear Aspects of Problem Solving
10. The Power to See the Invisible (the nature of expertise)
11. The Power of Stories
12. The Power of Metaphors and Analogs
13. The Power to Read Minds (the nature of intent)
14. The Power of the Team Mind
15. The Power of Rational Analysis and the Problem of Hypperationality
16. Why Good People Make Poor Decisions

Example of the book's application:

I was lead to this book from Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think - A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability" where he suggested this book shows how "field observation can reveal the difference between the way we think we do things and the way we actually do them." Having read both, I more fully understand the rationale for Krug's book (and title) since it are all about providing websites that are "intuitive" by using obvious web conventions that are easily recognized patterns that one quickly ignores as part of making decisions.