The key ideas

The Power of Intuition

Gary Klein, 2003

Experienced firefighters told a researcher they did not make decisions at all: they simply knew what to do. Psychologist Gary Klein discovered that behind this “simply knowing” lay recognition of situations accumulated over years. The book offers stories of firefighters and nurses and a practical way to train intuition: examine difficult decisions and learn to notice what an expert sees.

Who it is for

For anyone who must decide quickly at work without complete information: managers, physicians, teachers, specialists, and anyone wanting to understand when to trust their instincts.

Intuition is how we turn our experience into action.

What the book is about

Psychologist Gary Klein approached experienced firefighters with a simple question: how do you choose between options when a house is burning? Many gave an unexpected answer. They do not choose. They do not even consider themselves to be making decisions. They arrive and simply know what to do.

How can you decide without choosing? And if this is “simply knowing,” can it be learned?

Klein spent years studying people who decide quickly under pressure: firefighters, nurses, military personnel. His field is called naturalistic decision making. People are studied in their actual work rather than a laboratory. The book appeared in 2003, originally titled Intuition at Work. It is a practical book built on interviews and the author’s model rather than a collection of rigorous experiments. Its central idea is that intuition is experience you can accumulate and train rather than a sixth sense or gift.

Idea 1. A decision nobody chose

Textbooks recommend comparing options by their advantages and disadvantages. Firefighters in Klein’s interviews rarely did so. They recognized the situation: “I’ve seen this kind of fire before.” Recognition brought the first suitable course of action with it.

They did not compare it with other options. They quickly ran it through their minds: would it work here? If so, they acted. If something failed in their imagination, they adjusted the plan or tried the next one.

Klein described this as the RPD model: recognition-primed decisions. It is his model, developed from field interviews. It describes how experienced people often decide rather than how everyone “ought” to decide.

An experienced driver sees a ball roll into the road and slows down before thinking that a child may run after it.

For an experienced person, choosing may become compressed into recognition. Perhaps that explains why decisions can be hard to explain: there was simply no comparison of options to recount.

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About the author

Gary Klein is an American psychologist and a founder of naturalistic decision making. He studied how firefighters, military personnel, clinicians, and managers make decisions and worked with the US Marine Corps. He developed the RPD model and premortem technique, and wrote Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions.

All books by this author: Gary Klein

Terms from the book

  • Premortem
  • Naturalistic decision making: A research field studying how people decide in actual work, under time pressure and with incomplete information, rather than in laboratory tasks. Klein is one of its founders.
  • RPD model: Klein’s recognition-primed decision model: an experienced person recognizes a situation, immediately sees a suitable option, and tests it mentally. The author’s model, built on field interviews rather than a universal law of thought.
  • Mental simulation: Imagining a possible action step by step to notice where it might fail.
  • Decision requirements table: A tool from the book: four questions about a difficult decision, including how an experienced person’s decision differs from a novice’s. The author’s practical tool rather than a scientific test.
  • Decision review: Examining a real case afterward: what someone noticed, how they understood the situation, what they expected, and what could have been done differently. The aim is to update experience rather than assign blame.

All terms

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