Sources of Power, 20th Anniversary Edition: How People Make Decisions (Mit Press)

This book takes a look at how decision makers absorb info, process, and make decisions under pressure, in real-world situations, abstracted above the level of neurological and psychological processes. It doesn't tell you what's going on in the person's brain or why but rather the "what this looks like in the real world when it happens" aspect.In that sense it's fairly academic and dry, but if you happen to "pair" it with a book about those underlying processes and then read them in tandem (example Monday lunch break read book A, Tuesday read corresponding chapter(s) from book B) then it becomes a little more interesting and even entertaining. I did this by happenstance but it turned out to make both books better and easier to absorb. You find out real quick just how gullible, how illogical, and prone to "processing errors" we all are at times, and some things you can do to be aware of your limitations in this regard, and hopefully make better decisions in your work or even political votes.The secondary book that I recommend reading along with this one, which I think can be interesting for both business and academic types, is Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. At one point, in one of the two books the author even describes meeting the other, references his book and working theories, and how they disagree on what's happening in certain decision scenarios. Read and understand these two books and I think you have effectively given yourself a college level course in basic psychologies of decision making.

Gary Klein is a cognitive psychologist who has "gone native," shifting his focus from the laboratory to the messy world of firefighters, tank commanders, and other naturalistic decision makers. Their work environments are defined by "...time pressure, high stakes, experienced decision makers, inadequate information, ill-defined goals, poorly defined procedures, cue learning, context, dynamic conditions, and team coordination." Instead of cataloging their errors, Klein has identified the mental capabilities that help them succeed. His book presents these "sources of power" for our consideration.These sources of power include:- Intuition depends on the use of experience to recognize key patterns.- Mental simulation is the ability to imagine people and objects through transformations.- Spotting leverage points means spotting small changes that can make a big difference.- Experience can be used to focus attention on key features that novices don't notice.- Stories bring natural order to unstructured situations and emphasize what is important.- Metaphors apply familiar experiences to new situations to suggest solutions.- Communicating intentions in a team helps members "read each other's minds."- Effective teams evolve a "team mind" with shared knowledge, goals, and identity.- Rational analysis plays an important role, but can be over applied.The author spends some time with other theories of decision making, emphasizing both their strengths and the sometimes faulty assumptions they incorporate. He makes good points about the inadequacy of decision bias theories to explain successful, real-world decision processes. Klein describes how artificial intelligence and other computational theories reduce decision making to a search through a well-defined set of alternatives. Most decisions, he argues, are not so well structured.Klein likes to stay close to his data. The book reflects this in the space given to detailed decision making examples he has used to develop and test his theories. In addition to a traditional Table of Contents and lists of Tables and Figures, there is also a list of fifty-two Examples, allowing readers quick access to these cases. Klein also links his theories back to decision making contexts he expects readers to encounter. Each chapter ends with an Applications section that identifies practical implications for decisions out there in the world.This is a thought-provoking book, grounded in both applied research and practical experience. It is profitable reading for anyone who strives to make better decisions.

I will not repeat many of the fine reviews already posted. What I will say is that "Sources of Powers" looks at how real experienced people make REAL decisions in the field as opposed to traditional research where decision making is researched via students as "lab rats" in unrealistic situations. You will learn about NDM (Naturalistic Decision Making)/RPD (Recognition Primed Model) as it can apply to the developement of decision support systems and command and control systems. DoD has used these concepts to develop collaborative and DSS applications that decision makers will actually use. If you will be involved in the development of DSS or collaborative type software then you should give this textbook a read. This book is very popular with DoD and as a reading assignment in several universities.More comments on my views of the booK:Gary Klein would be the first to say that some of his concepts are a work in process and NDM (Naturalistic Decision making) is not just one man or one concept such as RPM (Recognition-primed decision model). Klein begins the dialog on the nature of decision making and how it can be incorporated into decision support systems and knowledge based systems. I believe knowledge based applications will be the trend in the next ten years or so and lots of money will be wasted when one does not properly consider the cognitive issues involved in development.Some may say that Gary is guilty of stating the obvious but all too often the obvious is ignored because...well it's obvious. Also, lab rats and college students are not necessarily what/who you need to study when looking at how experienced decision makers make decisions. NDM (naturalistic decision making) offers an alternative to the rational choice strategy (see Herbert A. Simon). In the rational choice strategy the decision maker:1. Identifies the set of options2. Identifies the ways of evaluating these options.3. Weights each evaluation dimension.4. Does the rating5. Picks the options with the highest score.Throughout the book Gary shows that the rational choice strategy is seldom used by experienced decision makers. One alternative to this framework is NDM and one instance of this is RPM. For those not versed in cognitive science, RPM may offer an easy to understand content validation on how experts make decisions:* It appears to describe the decision strategy used most frequently by people with experience.* It explains how people can use experience to make difficult decisions.* It demonstrates that people can make effective decisions without using a rational choice strategy.Can RPM's logic be incorporated into command and control and decision support systems? DoD has examples where that has been done.I think the biggest issue is no decision model (good or bad) is brought into the design and left up to the IT developers and programmers who certainly do not have the decision skills to embed that knowledge. Too often the decision makers have been left out of the equation because it was thought to be more of an IT thing and the result is a failed information system. As Klein states:"Too often software designers are not told what key decisions are that the system must help the operator or heuristics that the operator is likely to use. Left without any way to visualize the operator, designers do the best job they can to pack information onto screens so that it will all be there when needed."Many users of DSS and KM have been victims of such a process of "packing/" Those that do use some decision model, often tend to select optimization models which may have their place but may not be relevant to the context and type of decision maker that will use the system. These types of optimization models tend to be more useful for junior decision makers but there can be a case made that optimization models could be used to bring experienced people out of a certain mind set.Klein edited an earlier book written by various practitioners if you are interested in delving further but I think "Sources of Power" gives you a good overview of NDM. What I like about NDM is the fact that extensive work has been done with experienced decision makers. Decision making is messy and you can't just "study" it with student test subjects on campus in my opinion.Decision making is a personal thing that is also influenced by context for example the emotional stress sometimes linked with decision making under crises. Gary Klein in a sense says that you can't ignore that emotion because decision making is personal and any IT support has to be in harmony with the decision maker(s). These questions should be asked and discussed and certainly NDM is but one concept in the vast world of decision making theory that goes beyond the basic decision model of Herbert A. Simon.

This is a fascinating and readable insight into how our brains solve problems and make decisions, individually or in teams. Focusing on experienced professionals it draws on decades of introspective field studies of naturalistic decision making environments encountered by firefighters, nurses, pilots, tank commanders, designers, cooks, chess players, and others, confronted with various levels of quality of information to help them. Plenty of examples serve to illustrate the extent to which recognition and intuition, both stemming from experience, is key. Sometimes people get things dreadfully wrong and a detailed example is provided of a step-by-step analysis of what happened during the 1988 shooting down of an Iranian civilian airliner by the USS Vincennes. Mental simulation is important, and human limitations as well as the use of techniques such as snap-back and pre-mortem strategies to look for flaws are discussed. Knowledge engineering is analogous to petroleum discovery, extraction and exploitation. Intent statements have been proven key towards ensuring correct interpretation of a mission order. The use of stories, metaphors and analogues help to make sense and disseminate, assist reasoning and prediction. It may take ten years to make an expert, and what they bring to the table is the superior ability to detect and assimilate a problem and resolve it or predict outcomes, read minds, and to perceive so-called leverage points; those clever ideas that help accelerate identifying and solving a problem. The book is certainly a thought provoker. It stresses the importance of experience. But some might say that over-reliance on expertise can sometimes inhibit necessary risk-taking, in innovation for example, where there is a need to escape from blinkering and me-too solutions (too many problems foreseen by someone with experience, too much hesitation in cases where a bad decision may be better than no decision at all). In manufacturing, for example, the convenience created by the presence of expertise can slow down the drive to stabilise processes, to reduce variability, simplify and improve feedback and make those processes more user friendly to lesser mortals and thereby more generally exploitable. Again in manufacturing, to the other extreme expertise can foster overconfidence in the theoretically possible succeeding in a challenged environment; sometimes, those experts who have gained good ‘firefighting’ abilities to rapidly solve crises may have too often compromised their standing by bending the rules and putting other factors at risk (safety, final product performance, conformity with specifications in manufacturing, etc.). The irreplaceable expert represents a huge challenge to knowledge capitalisation; avoiding a situation being crippled when they are no longer available. It raises the vital issue of the required critical mass of an organisation necessary to ensure continuity. In any case, this will be a rewarding book for anyone who has to deal with crises and work with expert and non-expert teams, take initiatives and make decisions, particularly under pressure. It is certainly a rewarding read.

This book is based on close study of real decision making, such as by firefighters, medical staffs, and military commanders. Thanks to its naturalistic-anthropological approach, Klein's work is much more significant than most of the studies of experimental decision psychology in quasi-laboratory conditions, for instance on rather simple choices facing probabilistic uncertainty -- which reveal heuristics and biases that are interesting, but of narrow significance.Instead of the conclusions on human "irrationality" arrived at by simplistic experiments, this book demonstrates that experience-based expertize achieves high quality decision skills, partly on tacit levels. These include, for instance, recognition-primed decision making, mental simulation, and making sense of complex situations by building fitting "stories, metaphors and analogues, though a number of error propensities must be guarded against.The findings must in part be taken with caution, as they are based on oral reporting by actors on what they are thinking, which is not very reliable as recognized by the author (e.g. p. 291). But, all in all, this is a very important book providing findings and models of profound importance for all dealing with series of choices enabling development of expertize. However, from my concerns with high-level policy making and criticl political judgment the book is of little help, as recognized by the author (e.g. p. 282, though not adequately discussed. Thus, to take the Cuban Missile Crisis, public health policies, choices on energy sources, or the Arab-Israeli conflict, with their singular features and radical uncertainties, little in the book is relevant. Even less so is it applicable to fully novel issues, such as coping with the unprecedented opportunities and dangers provided by science and technology, such as human enhancement, mass-killing materials, and obsolescence of standard employment patterns. All these require new decision making paradigms, based on some combination between in-depth study of historic future-weaving choices, more adequate understanding of human minds, and novel conceptions of "high-quality judgment" viewed inter alia as fuzzy gambling for high stakes. This is beyond the book.Professor Yehezkel DrorThe Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Already a classic in the field of decision-making, the book written by Gary Klein provides a lucid and critical review of the topic under study. The author is to be congratulated for providing both breadth and depth across this rapidly expanding and complex discipline, drawing the reader into a more questioning and critical approach to the subject matter. Thoroughly recommended textbook.

A very good book detailing how various people make decisions. I bought this gift for my dad who owns a small business. He really likes it and uses it as a guidebook on how to make future business decisions.I am no business guy but I read a few chapters of it and it is well written and has great insight. Worth reading it.

great book must read for anyone looking at naturalistic decision making and RPD model. this book covers this topic very well, is the No.1 book i used!