Gary Klein - insights on intuition

I like the work of Gary Klein because it tries to understand the simple problem of how individuals in difficult situations make good decisions. There is no time for optimization or decision trees. There is no time for carefully reasoning of all scenarios with what-if analysis. Decisions have to be made and made quickly. This is the life of a trader, a fireman, or a military officer.

The simple graph above is the focus of the work in this book. Everyone wants performance improvement and there are two ways to get it. You can decrease errors or you can increase insights. Most of the work on decision-making is focused on decreasing errors. There is less work and research on how to increase insights which is where Gary has focused his attention.

The emphasis on decision-making is more focused not on mechanistic forms of error reduction but trying to find insights. Klein provides some very good examples, stories, and theories but it is not easy to form better insights. He focuses on some the basics which can provide insights. What are the underlying assumptions used to make the decision. Faulty assumptions will lead to poor conclusions. A variation of the garbage in and garbage out. Just as important is understanding the knowledge needed or used in a decision, the beliefs that reprints the foundation of a decision, priorities of the decision-maker, and constants associated with a decision. We cannot be mind-readers.

We have to make connections. See contradictions that exist in our views and discard flawed beliefs. Klein believes that we can gain insights through practice and experience. There is a framework that can help with this process. We have to work our insight muscles.