Expertise in Decision Making: Lessons from Firefighters

How did a breakthrough in understanding how humans make split-second decisions and how did studying firefighters unlock the key piece of understanding expertise?

Gary Klein is the President of ShadowBox LLC who researches decision-making and is the author of several books. His latest book is Snapshots of the Mind, a compilation of essays that span his career. Also recently published was the 20th Anniversary edition of Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions which explores the ways in which expertise factors into decision-making in ways you may not have realized initially.

Gary and Greg discuss the complexities of decision-making, covering the importance of experience, expertise, and the role of mental models. They also explore concepts such as positive cognitive psychology and the idea of implementing positive aspects of decision-making as opposed to focusing on flaws. 

Gary discusses his innovative ShadowBox method used for training decision-makers by providing simulations of expert decisions. He also talks about the role of insights in successful decision-making and the challenges organizations face in fostering a culture of insights.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

Can you have an optimal error path?

46:24: So, you want people to learn from feedback. But it's not that trivial because a lot of times, I see people say, "Yeah, we're going to provide feedback about whether you succeeded or not," but that's just the beginning. You also want to help people diagnose why they got it wrong, what they were misinterpreting, what they were missing that they should have been watching more carefully. And so there's that diagnostic part, which gets into the tacit knowledge, which sometimes people can do by themselves. Sometimes, you want to bring in another pair of eyes, somebody with more expertise, to help you unpack: "Why did I get that wrong? Or was there something I could have done that would have prevented this?" So you want to have that kind of opportunity for diagnosis to help get richer feedback rather than just, "I got it right or I got it wrong."

Should you trust your intuition?

19:25: People ask me, "When should you trust your intuition?" And the answer is never because intuition can mislead you. But that doesn't mean you should trust analytical methods either because they can mislead you as well. So, you need to be able to use both for intuition. You don't want to totally trust your intuition, but you want to at least listen to your intuition because your intuition may be telling you some things that aren't captured in the analyses.

Distinguishing experts from journeymen

28:26:  One of the hallmarks of humans, and particularly experts, is to engage in speculative reasoning when you've gone beyond what they've encountered before. And that's one of the ways that we distinguish experts from journeymen: you throw something at an expert that the expert hasn't seen before, and their eyes light up, and they say, "What can we do about this?" Whereas a journeyman says, "I don't know. I'm going to have to call somebody else in." And they get uncomfortable rather than enthusiastic. So yes, as people become more skilled, they love the challenge of having to engage in speculative reasoning. That's human capability and a human source of power.

How experts navigate mistakes

47:55: Some people, if they make a mistake, say, "Okay, I'm putting it behind me." But the real experts don't put the mistakes behind them. They're really upset about these mistakes, and they keep mulling about it until they can come up with some idea. "Here's what I could have done. Here's what I should have done." And then they can start to relax. And that's one of the ways we distinguish the real experts from the ones who are just pretending: you ask people what's the last mistake they made, and the real experts know the last mistake they made because they're still processing it.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• Martin Seligman
• Daniel Kahneman
• Amos Tversky
• Arab oil embargo
• Billy Beane
• Ben Shneiderman
• Case method
• Knowledge shielding

Guest Profile:

• Gary-Klein.com
• ShadowboxTraining.com
• Wikipedia Profile
• LinkedIn Profile

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Snapshots of the Mind
• Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions
• Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights
• Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making
• Working Minds: A Practitioner's Guide to Cognitive Task Analysis
• Intuition at Work: Why Developing Your Gut Instincts Will Make You Better at What You Do
• Linking Expertise and Naturalistic Decision Making
• ResearchGate Profile
• Resarch.com Profile
• Google Scholar Page