Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions | Gary Klein

Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions | Gary Klein | How decisions are really made

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Sources of Power: ...

	Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions Gary Klein The MIT Press, 1999 - 348 pages average customer review:based on 25 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

4.5 Stars-Intuition comes from experience

Gary Klein has written a very good book on decision making in the real world that I recommend be purchased.His major point is that the vast majority of decisions people make are not based on the deductive rationality model of neoclassical economics.Such a decision making approach requires far too much relevant,reliable information and far,far too much time.The neoclassical model can't satisfy the time and information constraints that are operational in real world decision making processes.Klein argues persuasively that ,based on the empirical and experimental evidence carried out by many psychologists over the last 35 years,most decisions are based on pattern recognition:"This is one basis for what we call intuition:recognizing things without knowing how we do the recognizing...My claim in this chapter is that intuition grows out of experience...we can say that at least some aspects of intuition come from the ability to use experience to recognize situations and know how to handle them..."(Klein,pp.33-34).The reason I did not give this book five stars is that Klein appears to be completely ignorant of the nearly identical definition of intuition ,and its role in decision making, emphasized by J M Keynes in his 1921 " A Treatise on Probability "and his 1936 " The General Theory....".Keynes's understanding of the importance of intuition in decision making has been badly butchered by economists like R.O'Donnell,Bradley Bateman,and Roger Backhouse ,who identify Keynes's views on intuition with either (a) a priori thinking,(b)the "grey,woolly,fuzzy,monster" in one's head or (c)metaphysical vision.Keynes's seminal understanding of the importance of inductive reasoning ,argument from analogy,and pattern recognition are reproduced more effectively in Klein's book.Klein also recognizes that intuition may lead to the wrong answer.However,it is a self correcting process over time.Keynes would have agreed completely.Familiarity with the literature surrounding D.Ellsberg's concept of ambiguity would have also strengthened Klein's conclusions because an intuitive approach works better in decision contexts where the information and knowledge base is incomplete, unclear and ambiguous.The rational-deductive approach works,then,in the limit in the case of information that is not complex and is total,complete, and clear.

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Not what I was looking for

I was interested in the topic of decision making, both for professional and personal motives. And I decided to settle for this book. Unfortunately it turned out not to be what I was looking for. It is not that the book is not well written, it is just that the scope of the book is limited mostly to, shall we say, "quick" decisions.

The author outlines his model explaining such decisions, arguing that this is quite different from other traditional models. But even if he does a good job at explaining it, some of his findings seem rather obvious, at least to me.

Though it was interesting reading (that's why it gets 3 stars), definitely I wished I had chosen a different decision-making book more suitable to my interests.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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