Your Memberships & Subscriptions
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Audible sample Sample
Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions (The MIT Press) Kindle Edition
Anyone who watches the television news has seen images of firefighters rescuing people from burning buildings and paramedics treating bombing victims. How do these individuals make the split-second decisions that save lives? Most studies of decision making, based on artificial tasks assigned in laboratory settings, view people as biased and unskilled. Gary Klein is one of the developers of the naturalistic decision making approach, which views people as inherently skilled and experienced. It documents human strengths and capabilities that so far have been downplayed or ignored.
Since 1985, Klein has conducted fieldwork to find out how people tackle challenges in difficult, nonroutine situations. Sources of Power is based on observations of humans acting under such real-life constraints as time pressure, high stakes, personal responsibility, and shifting conditions. The professionals studied include firefighters, critical care nurses, pilots, nuclear power plant operators, battle planners, and chess masters. Each chapter builds on key incidents and examples to make the description of the methodology and phenomena more vivid. In addition to providing information that can be used by professionals in management, psychology, engineering, and other fields, the book presents an overview of the research approach of naturalistic decision making and expands our knowledge of the strengths people bring to difficult tasks.
- ISBN-13978-0262112277
- PublisherThe MIT Press
- Publication dateFebruary 18, 1999
- LanguageEnglish
- File size3984 KB
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
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.
Review
Klein is one of our era's very few most important thinkers on decision making, and this brilliant book is a classic. Ever wonder how people solve fiendishly hard problems in an instant, or how you can do that, too? Look no further; this book offers answers.
(Cass R. Sunstein, Founder and Director, Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy, Harvard University)Sources of Power opened my eyes to an entirely new way of looking at the world. It is as relevant now as it was twenty years ago.
(Malcolm Gladwell)About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B002V1I69S
- Publisher : The MIT Press (February 18, 1999)
- Publication date : February 18, 1999
- Language : English
- File size : 3984 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Enhanced typesetting : Not Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : Not Enabled
- Print length : 338 pages
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Dr. Gary Klein is a cognitive psychologist and the author of five books, including Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions and his most recent work, Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights. He regularly works with leaders in domains such as healthcare, military, law enforcement, petrochemical industry, social work, and business management to assist them with issues in organizational expertise and workplace insights. Dr. Klein is well known for his ability to communicate complex ideas in psychology through compelling and relatable stories from his research in expertise and decision-making. He has received praise from intellectual icon and storyteller, Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote, "No one has taught me more about the complexities and mysteries of human decision-making than Gary Klein."
Dr. Klein is widely known for changing the landscape of cognitive psychology by pioneering the Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) movement in 1989. Until this point, psychologists used laboratory settings to study how people make decisions, with a heavy focus on human bias and error in judgment. Dr. Klein flipped the focus to conducting decision research in real world settings, studying how experts including firefighters, military battle commanders, and doctors use intuition and experience to engage in effective decision-making. As one would expect, Dr. Klein's radical new take on cognitive psychology research invited opposition from the traditional community. What is notable, however, is the respect Dr. Klein has received from psychologists and researchers whose perspectives have differed dramatically from his own. As Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman wrote in a recent article, "Gary Klein is a living example of how useful applied psychology can be when it is done well...Klein and I disagree on many things...But I am convinced that there should be more psychologists like him."
Dr. Klein currently works as a Senior Scientist at MacroCognition LLC in Dayton, Ohio and recently started a new company in 2014, ShadowBox LLC, which develops training for organizations that allows novices to think like the experts. He is also a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), and received the 2008 HFES Jack A. Kraft Innovator Award.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
More comments on my views of the booK:
Gary Klein would be the first to say that some of his concepts are a work in process and NDM (Naturalistic Decision making) is not just one man or one concept such as RPM (Recognition-primed decision model). Klein begins the dialog on the nature of decision making and how it can be incorporated into decision support systems and knowledge based systems. I believe knowledge based applications will be the trend in the next ten years or so and lots of money will be wasted when one does not properly consider the cognitive issues involved in development.
Some may say that Gary is guilty of stating the obvious but all too often the obvious is ignored because...well it's obvious. Also, lab rats and college students are not necessarily what/who you need to study when looking at how experienced decision makers make decisions. NDM (naturalistic decision making) offers an alternative to the rational choice strategy (see Herbert A. Simon). In the rational choice strategy the decision maker:
1. Identifies the set of options
2. Identifies the ways of evaluating these options.
3. Weights each evaluation dimension.
4. Does the rating
5. Picks the options with the highest score.
Throughout the book Gary shows that the rational choice strategy is seldom used by experienced decision makers. One alternative to this framework is NDM and one instance of this is RPM. For those not versed in cognitive science, RPM may offer an easy to understand content validation on how experts make decisions:
* It appears to describe the decision strategy used most frequently by people with experience.
* It explains how people can use experience to make difficult decisions.
* It demonstrates that people can make effective decisions without using a rational choice strategy.
Can RPM's logic be incorporated into command and control and decision support systems? DoD has examples where that has been done.
I think the biggest issue is no decision model (good or bad) is brought into the design and left up to the IT developers and programmers who certainly do not have the decision skills to embed that knowledge. Too often the decision makers have been left out of the equation because it was thought to be more of an IT thing and the result is a failed information system. As Klein states:
"Too often software designers are not told what key decisions are that the system must help the operator or heuristics that the operator is likely to use. Left without any way to visualize the operator, designers do the best job they can to pack information onto screens so that it will all be there when needed."
Many users of DSS and KM have been victims of such a process of "packing/" Those that do use some decision model, often tend to select optimization models which may have their place but may not be relevant to the context and type of decision maker that will use the system. These types of optimization models tend to be more useful for junior decision makers but there can be a case made that optimization models could be used to bring experienced people out of a certain mind set.
Klein edited an earlier book written by various practitioners if you are interested in delving further but I think "Sources of Power" gives you a good overview of NDM. What I like about NDM is the fact that extensive work has been done with experienced decision makers. Decision making is messy and you can't just "study" it with student test subjects on campus in my opinion.
Decision making is a personal thing that is also influenced by context for example the emotional stress sometimes linked with decision making under crises. Gary Klein in a sense says that you can't ignore that emotion because decision making is personal and any IT support has to be in harmony with the decision maker(s). These questions should be asked and discussed and certainly NDM is but one concept in the vast world of decision making theory that goes beyond the basic decision model of Herbert A. Simon.
These sources of power include:
- Intuition depends on the use of experience to recognize key patterns.
- Mental simulation is the ability to imagine people and objects through transformations.
- Spotting leverage points means spotting small changes that can make a big difference.
- Experience can be used to focus attention on key features that novices don't notice.
- Stories bring natural order to unstructured situations and emphasize what is important.
- Metaphors apply familiar experiences to new situations to suggest solutions.
- Communicating intentions in a team helps members "read each other's minds."
- Effective teams evolve a "team mind" with shared knowledge, goals, and identity.
- Rational analysis plays an important role, but can be over applied.
The author spends some time with other theories of decision making, emphasizing both their strengths and the sometimes faulty assumptions they incorporate. He makes good points about the inadequacy of decision bias theories to explain successful, real-world decision processes. Klein describes how artificial intelligence and other computational theories reduce decision making to a search through a well-defined set of alternatives. Most decisions, he argues, are not so well structured.
Klein likes to stay close to his data. The book reflects this in the space given to detailed decision making examples he has used to develop and test his theories. In addition to a traditional Table of Contents and lists of Tables and Figures, there is also a list of fifty-two Examples, allowing readers quick access to these cases. Klein also links his theories back to decision making contexts he expects readers to encounter. Each chapter ends with an Applications section that identifies practical implications for decisions out there in the world.
This is a thought-provoking book, grounded in both applied research and practical experience. It is profitable reading for anyone who strives to make better decisions.
In that sense it's fairly academic and dry, but if you happen to "pair" it with a book about those underlying processes and then read them in tandem (example Monday lunch break read book A, Tuesday read corresponding chapter(s) from book B) then it becomes a little more interesting and even entertaining. I did this by happenstance but it turned out to make both books better and easier to absorb. You find out real quick just how gullible, how illogical, and prone to "processing errors" we all are at times, and some things you can do to be aware of your limitations in this regard, and hopefully make better decisions in your work or even political votes.
The secondary book that I recommend reading along with this one, which I think can be interesting for both business and academic types, is Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. At one point, in one of the two books the author even describes meeting the other, references his book and working theories, and how they disagree on what's happening in certain decision scenarios. Read and understand these two books and I think you have effectively given yourself a college level course in basic psychologies of decision making.