What Gary Klein thinks about behavioural science
Research psychologist who founded naturalistic decision making, the study of how experts decide in the field, and developed the recognition-primed decision model from studies of fireground commanders. He wrote Sources of Power and Seeing What Others Don't, runs the ShadowBox decision-training method, and ran an adversarial collaboration with Daniel Kahneman on the conditions under which expert intuition can be trusted.
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11 dated positions, 2022, in their own words. Our reading of what Gary Klein has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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Their wordsSo, experts are highly aware of mistakes. But people who are journeymen, many of them stay as journeymen because they they want to move on and forget about their mistakes.
↗Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144youtube.com 2nd of 16 in this recording
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Their wordsNow, some decisions may have been good decisions that didn't work through no fault of the employee. And some may have been bad decisions that worked because the employee got lucky. So, you can't just look at the outcome, but you have to look at what What was the person thinking about when they made the decision?
↗Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144youtube.com 4th of 16 in this recording
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Their wordsSo we we want people, that's the way we break out of fixation, is we notice the anomalies. The way we get stuck in fixation and making fixation errors is we explain away the anomalies, hold on to the original wrong impression until it's far too late.
↗Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144youtube.com 6th of 16 in this recording
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Their wordsOne of the mistakes is that they just frame it wrong from the beginning. They'll say, "Okay, we should do a pre-mortem. So, what can go wrong?" It's not an issue of what can go wrong. We're dealing with a crystal ball that has showed that the plan has failed. We know that it failed. And our job is is to explain why. So, saying what can go wrong is too tentative. It's too vague.
↗Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144youtube.com 8th of 16 in this recording
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Their wordsI don't like the idea of decision biases. I know my sense of the literature is that there's been little if any success in debiasing people. And I think that's a good thing. Because the biases that get identified are essentially related to the heuristics that we've learned and are part of the experience that we have. And they only look like biases in hindsight once one of them doesn't work.
↗Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144youtube.com 9th of 16 in this recording
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Their wordsUm but nobody has done research on the positive side of these heuristics. And so, I think that's a bias on the part of the decision bias researchers that they're only looking at the down arrow. How do these heuristics get us in trouble? And they're not looking at the strength of these heuristics.
↗Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144youtube.com 10th of 16 in this recording
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Their wordsBut their lives became miserable. It would take them 45 minutes to decide what restaurant to go through. They got divorced. They lost their jobs because they could not use their emotions because our emotions are a way of drawing on on the patterns we've built and on our experiences.
↗Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144youtube.com 11th of 16 in this recording
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Their wordsthe research on like brainstorming where all brainstorming together the research shows that brainstorming does not produce more ideas or more innovative ideas. And I think teams would be and groups would be better having individuals generate their own concepts and then after they've done it independently and privately sharing it with the others.
↗Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144youtube.com 13th of 16 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd we get to this point, these are the hardest decisions people ever wrestle with. And the paradox is if the advantages and disadvantages of the two options are almost perfectly balanced, it doesn't matter which one we pick. And yet we will spend days and weeks going around in a funk, which one am I going to choose?
↗Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144youtube.com 14th of 16 in this recording
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Their wordsin 1985, um my colleagues and I came up with a description of how people actually make life-and-death decisions under extreme time pressure and certainty. And we called it the recognition prime decision model. And it's a blend of intuition plus analysis. And we found we studied firefighters. We found that most fire that accounted for almost 90% of the tough decisions firefighters made.
↗Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144youtube.com 15th of 16 in this recording
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Their wordsWhat we could we could train people by saying, "Here's the recognition prime decision model. Now, you know, follow this." And that would be useless. Because of uh telling people the strategy isn't going to buy them anything. The intuition part is a reflection of the patterns they've built up through experience. And so there's no shortcut for that.
↗Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144youtube.com 16th of 16 in this recording