Having referred to this book a few times in other reviews, this reviewer thought it was about time she wrote its own review, not least because she gives it the full five star rating it surely deserves.

For the first few chapters, the message seems to be that rational choice strategy--the practice of listing available options, evaluating their payoffs, and choosing the best option adjusted for risk--is a flawed way of making decisions in a vast array of situations. In particular, situations where information is incomplete, stakes are high, and time is short. Klein intially presents the reader with life-or-death emergencies as candidates, but before long it becomes apparent that many if not most decisions faced everyday qualify for this "naturalistic" descriptor. This reviewer was informed, for example, that the task of choosing what to wear to the office would delay her leaving home until at least nightfall were she to cover all the possibilities and their relative merits comprehensively. Selecting a career in the first place would probably take until normal retirement age.

So people cut corners, and they use heuritics and biases. But experts (like successful firefighters) tend to make good quality decisions repeatedly and with split-second timing. How do they do that? Klein and his researchers conduct painstaking interviews and document them meticulously to find out, and the result appears to be that these experts simply select the best choice right off the bat, without evaluating anything. Some of them reluctantly wonder if they have extra-sensory perception.

But the purpose of Klein's book is not to second that at all, because in fact they don't. Rather, it does a fantastic job of plotting out how split-second expert decisions are rational, and draw on the same mental calculations that a rational choice algorithm would, except they are faster, and semi-conscious, and to the extent that they use shortcuts, these are mostly smart ones, honed through experience which feeds a latent data-set of patterns to be recognised, and trains an expert mind to spontaneously simulate new, similar but different applications of that. If this all sounds abstract in a review, this reviewer hopes she can tempt others to read some of Klein's detailed case analyses which are brilliantly illuminating.

Expert decisions in the field are fallable too, but the mistakes as presented here are as informative as the successes in outlining the processes involved (the Vincennes Shootdown is one of many highly insightful ones which gets a chapter to itself). And by employing careful ex-post analysis that is at all times meticulously honest, the book rather fails to end with a punchy set of secrets that will enable the reader to try this at home, and change her life. That testifies to the integrity of the subjects treatment and thus the value of this text in the eyes of this reviewer. Plus, she draws some comfort that she must have some level of skill at this stuff anyway, since she's yet to be seriously late for work as a result of her wardrobe dilemmas. ( )

US research psychologies; various universities; famous for his naturalistic decision making theory
Pros: interesting topic; unique angle; clear academic-writing style
Cons: applications are weak; theory building is arbitrary and obvious without justification; lack of linkages to related diciplines ( )

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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

http://12frogs.com/reading/reviews/20... ( )