As seen in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink—the modern, groundbreaking classic on effective decision making. How people really make decisions: by drawing on prior experience and using a combination of intuition and analysis. We have all 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. In this modern classic, Gary A. Klein proposes a naturalistic approach to decision making, which views people as gaining experience that then enables them to use a combination of intuition and analysis to make decisions. To illustrate this approach, Klein tells stories of people—from pilots to chess masters—acting under such real-life constraints as time pressure, high stakes, personal responsibility, and shifting conditions. Since its publication, Sources of Power has been enormously influential. The book has sold more than 50,000 copies, has been translated into six languages, has been cited in professional journals that range from Journal of Marketing Research to Journal of Nursing, and is mentioned by Malcolm Gladwell in Blink. Author Gary Klein has collaborated with Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and served on a team that redesigned the White House Situation Room to support more effective decision making. The model of decision-making Klein proposes in the book has been adopted in many fields, including law enforcement training and petrochemical plant operation.

As seen in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink—the modern, groundbreaking classic on effective decision making. How people really make decisions: by drawing on prior experience and using a combination of intuition and analysis. We have all 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. In this modern classic, Gary A. Klein proposes a naturalistic approach to decision making, which views people as gaining experience that then enables them to use a combination of intuition and analysis to make decisions. To illustrate this approach, Klein tells stories of people—from pilots to chess masters—acting under such real-life constraints as time pressure, high stakes, personal responsibility, and shifting conditions. Since its publication, Sources of Power has been enormously influential. The book has sold more than 50,000 copies, has been translated into six languages, has been cited in professional journals that range from Journal of Marketing Research to Journal of Nursing, and is mentioned by Malcolm Gladwell in Blink. Author Gary Klein has collaborated with Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and served on a team that redesigned the White House Situation Room to support more effective decision making. The model of decision-making Klein proposes in the book has been adopted in many fields, including law enforcement training and petrochemical plant operation.

An overview of naturalistic decision making, which views people as inherently skilled and experienced.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The field of decision making has focused on showing the limitations of decision makers. However, we can still make effective decisions under difficult conditions. We just have to understand how people handle the typical confusions and pressures of their environments. #2 The emergency rescue team was called to a house in a residential neighborhood. The husband had been doing home repairs, and when he pulled his arm out of the glass, he had sliced open an artery. The head of the rescue team, Lieutenant M, had stopped the bleeding and directed his crew to move the man on a stretcher and to the hospital. #3 The sources of power that are needed in natural settings are not analytical at all. They include intuition, mental simulation, metaphor, and storytelling. #4 Naturalistic decision making is concerned with high stakes. When a fireground commander makes a poor decision, lives can be lost. When a design engineer makes a poor decision, hundreds of thousands of dollars can be lost.

An expert explains how the conventional wisdom about decision making can get us into trouble—and why experience can’t be replaced by rules, procedures, or analytical methods In making decisions, when should we go with our gut and when should we try to analyze every option? When should we use our intuition and when should we rely on logic and statistics? Most of us would probably agree that for important decisions, we should follow certain guidelines—gather as much information as possible, compare the options, pin down the goals before getting started. But in practice we make some of our best decisions by adapting to circumstances rather than blindly following procedures. In Streetlights and Shadows, Gary Klein debunks the conventional wisdom about how to make decisions. He takes ten commonly accepted claims about decision making and shows that they are better suited for the laboratory than for life. The standard advice works well when everything is clear, but the tough decisions involve shadowy conditions of complexity and ambiguity. Gathering masses of information, for example, works if the information is accurate and complete—but that doesn't often happen in the real world. (Think about the careful risk calculations that led to the downfall of the Wall Street investment houses.) Klein offers more realistic ideas about how to make decisions in real-life settings. He provides many examples—ranging from airline pilots and weather forecasters to sports announcers and Captain Jack Aubrey in Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander novels—to make his point. All these decision makers saw things that others didn’t. They used their expertise to pick up cues and to discern patterns and trends. We can make better decisions, Klein tells us, if we are prepared for complexity and ambiguity and if we will stop expecting the data to tell us everything. “I know of no one who combines theory and observation—intellectual rigor and painstaking observation of the real world—so brilliantly and gracefully as Gary Klein.” —Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers and Blink

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. It documents human strengths and capabilities that so far have been downplayed or ignored. 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. The professionals studied include firefighters, critical care nurses, pilots, nuclear power plant operators, battle planners, and chess masters. Each chapter builds on key incidents and examples to make the description of the methodology and phenomena more vivid. 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.

If you aren't using the term naturalistic decision making, or NDM, you soon will be. Even as a very young field, NDM has already had far-reaching applications in areas as diverse as management, aviation, health care, nuclear power, military command and control, corporate teamwork, and manufacturing. Put simply, NDM is the way people use their experience to make decisions in the context of a job or task. Of particular interest to NDM researchers are the effects of high-stake consequences, shifting goals, incomplete information, time pressure, uncertainty, and other conditions that are present in most of today's work places and that add to the complexity of decision making. Applications of NDM research findings target decision aids and training that help people in their decision-making processes. This book reports the findings of top NDM researchers, as well as many of their current applications. In addition, the book offers a historical perspective on the emergence of this new paradigm, describes recent theoretical and methodological advancements, and points to future developments. It was written for people interested in decision making research and applications relative to a diverse array of work settings and products such as human-computer interfaces, decision support systems, individual and team training, product designs, and organizational development and planning.