How to Be a Good Decision-Maker Without Comparing Options

In the 1980s it was thought that to be a good decision-maker, you had to generate a range of different options and then have some criteria for evaluating them. But firefighters would look at a situation and know what to do and be right most of the time,. So how could they be so confident and so accurate with the first option? It turned out because they built up patterns over 10, 15, 20 years. They weren't even comparing two options.