Sources of Power

Interesting points from Sources of Power - How People Make Decisions, by Gary Klein.

The author tries to avoid advocating any single approach towards decision making, but instead studies how people make decisions in various circumstances. Knowledge of decision making in field is at least one take away from the book. Besides that the author analyzes the decision making process based entirely on rigorous research of real people and circumstances and presents his results. It's up to the user to draw any strong inferences or lessons from these results. The author simply ensures that the research is rigorous and relevant.

I've only read first half of the book so far. The book begins by dispelling the common belief that most decision making is comparative analysis based. In reality, most decisions, and important ones (examples cited are from military, fire fighters, ICU nurses, etc.), are of type RPD (Recognition Primed Decision). These are decisions which are essentially sequential in nature where the decision maker considers a list of options sequentially and picks the first one he likes. In fact, most such decision makers believe that they are not actually making a decision. In contrast, most outside observers get the impression that the decision maker actually made a "decision" (meaning decided based on comparative analysis).

According to author's survey of few hundred important decisions taken by individuals in serious and/or time-pressure circumstances about 80% fall into the RPD category. There are several scenarios where RPD is not the primary decision process, e.g., RPD is based on recognition for which an essential requirement is subject expertise. So when novices are making decisions they tend to be more comparative analysis based than RPD. Similarly, when the decision needs to be justified, e.g., to a higher authority, comparative analysis based decisions are more common. There are several other interesting statistics in the book regarding how the contribution of different decision making approaches varies by scenario.

Once the plenitude of RPD is established, the book delves into the details of how RPD works and what are the various components of the RPD process. Probably the most significant model the book introduces is that of simulation. Simulation is useful in two scenarios:

1. In the scenario recongnition phase where the available data is matched with past experience to decide which scenario we are in. Simulation helps by arranging and explaning a set of sequence of events such that the end result is the current scenario. This knowledge of the past, or what brought us here, is often critical in deciding where we are headed in the future. The author also introduces the notion of "expectancies" - once a simulation has been made to arrive at our current position, the decision maker can generate a set of expectancies and watch out for them in the future. If certain expectancies do not happen, or certain unexpected things keep happening, then that might be a good reason to worry that the simulation (and hence our perception of the current scenario and future) may be incorrect. The author amply illustrates this point using the example of the Libyan passenger airliner whose pilots failed to verify the expectancies, the fire fighter who figured that something was not right and pulled his team out of the house just before the entire first floor went crashing into the basement (he was not told that the house had a basement), etc.
   
2. Simulation is also fundamental in predicting and analyzing the effect of the decision. The power to do useful and realistic simulations can be very useful in making important decisions. Future simulation, like other aspects of RPD (like scenario recognition) require a good deal of experience. However, in most cases creative ideas can play an important role in the simulation - coming up with a creative insight into a problem and being able to simulate its effect can be very valuable in solving difficult problems. The author gives the example of the newborn baby with a blocked throat, the fire fighter who chose to make a rescue by removing the car's roof, etc.
   

The second half of the chapter on simulation is very interesting. Here the author makes some summary observations based on experiences drawn from different experiments. One of the topics covered here is about expertise. Who is an expert ? How do experts use and leverage simulation, etc. Here are some points:

• Experts are constantly improving themselves by doing simulations, mental or aided by paper, computer, etc.
• Pre-mortem (crystal ball). The author defines pre-mortem as the process of assuming that something failed even before actually doing it and then trying to figure out how the failure might have happened. In their experience, they found that pre-mortem often generates new/interesting insight into the problem. It's called the crystall ball approach also since a powerful analogy is that of looking at the future in a crystal ball and finding that something failed.
• Post-mortem. The author uses this concept in a more general sense. They do a postmortem of a task after the task but before results are out and then after results are out.
  
• An important trait of experts is the gut to doubt the data. This is highlighted using numerous examples throughout the book. The data available for making decisions may not always be accurate or timely. In such scenarios, the decision maker has to leverage his past experience not only for decision making, but also for weeding out inconsistencies in the data or outright doubting the data. In some ways, this is a higher form of expertise. There are several examples of this, e.g., the firefighter doubting their knowledge of the fire and pulling out the entire team before the floor collapsed into the basement, or the Naval ship crew not doubting the fact that a passenger airliner was emitting millitary frequencies making them believe that it's a millitary aircraft, etc.

The Vincennes shootdown is one of the classic examples of decision making going wrong under complex scenarios. The incident is but a combination of multiple smaller incidents and provides valuable insight into decision making. For one, half of the ship crew had already made up their mind that the object they are handling is really a missile and they were looking for reasons to justify it. This shows how individuals often make gut decisions subconsiously and then attempt to justify them by contorting evidence. Secondly, the ship crew did not doubt inconsistent, unlikely data, most importantly the millitary frequency coming from the passenger airliner was due to an error in placing the instrument, it was not double checked. Thirdly, it shows that under severe time pressure, better decision support systems are needed in order to avoid making wrong decisions, e.g., in this case better visualization and analysis tools.