{"id":45,"date":"2002-10-17T13:56:36","date_gmt":"2002-10-17T18:56:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=45"},"modified":"2002-10-17T13:56:36","modified_gmt":"2002-10-17T18:56:36","slug":"how-people-really-make-decisions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=45","title":{"rendered":"How People (Really) Make Decisions"},"content":{"rendered":"

A conversation yesterday with Pete Kaminski<\/a> brought to mind one of the more interesting books I’ve read in the last few years.
\nThe book is called Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions<\/a>, by Gary Klein, a social science researcher and consultant. The book is badly named. It’s not a neo-Machiavellian business manual; it’s fascinating social science research on how people (really) make decisions, in contrast to how we think people make decisions, influenced by our mental models of people as computers.
\nSpoiler: people make and share decisions with stories
\nKlein started out looking to find experimental evidence for the way people make decisions, based on long-established academic work on decision theory. The conventional theory predicts that people compare alternatives, and make a rational choice among alternatives. The conventional wisdom is bolstered by a mental model of the brain as a computer, which methodically compares choices in a decision algorithm.
\nKlein’s group did fieldwork among experienced professionals who make frequent life-and-death decisions as part of their job — intensive care nurses, fire-fighters, military tank commanders. What they found, to their suprise, is that people’s decision-making process is nothing like the textbook model.
\nKlein made two interesting discoveries — about how experts make decisions, and how they communicate with co-workers.
\nExpert decision-makers don’t analyze and evaluate alternative options. Instead, they visualize a picture of the situation in their minds eye, envision a single course of action, and run a mental movie carrying out the action. If the scenario plays out, they quickly act. They never consider a second alternative. If there is a problem with the mental scenario, they visualize a second course of action, and implement it instantly if the mental movie plays through.
\nThe experts mental images are very rich; an experienced fire-fighter will imagine the structural stresses on various parts of the building based on the appearance and sound of the fire. An experienced intensive care nurse will visualize a diagnosis based on few clues about a baby’s skin color, breathing, and vital signs. When the experts visualize the image, they don’t think about the components, one-by-one; they quickly identify “points of leverage” — what aspects of the system are most subject to change.
\nPost-mortem analysis shows that the “first-choice” decisions by experienced experts are most often right; the second-best choices identified in case study analysis are less good than the expert’s first choice.
\nKlein’s group found that the rational, comparative method of decision-making was followed, not by experts, but by novices first learning the field. Despite the fact that novices were following a more analytical method, the highly considered choices of novices were more likely to be wrong than the expert’s first choice.
\nWhen experts troubleshoot a problem, they also diverge from the textbook model. Instead of analyzing the components of the problem, they tell a story to explain the various facts. When expert mentors teach novices, in the field and by the water cooler, they communicate their lessons by means of stories.
\nI particularly liked the way Klein summarized the difference between computerized decision making methods (define a closed-problem space, break the space into sub-spaces, search the sub-spaces) and human decision-making (pattern-match based on experience, simulate scenarios using imagination, use an iterative process to reach goal, change the goal if necessary; and communicate learning using stories.
\nHowever, there is a significant limitation to Klein’s observations.
\nThe decision-making methods that Klein describes enable experts to make quick, effective decisions under pressure. But those skills support preset strategies. The commander of a fire-fighting unit can save the lives of his team and extinguish the fire; but he can’t say whether the Forest Service should have a fire-suppression policy in the first place. Sometimes the intuition of experts can lead them astray, when the situation calls for a truly novel response.
\nBy the way, I was referred to the book by my friend David Blank-Edelman, the author of Perl for System Administration, who used the book’s concepts in a conference presentation<\/a> on the similarity between network administration and veterinary medicine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A conversation yesterday with Pete Kaminski brought to mind one of the more interesting books I’ve read in the last few years. The book is called Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, by Gary Klein, a social science researcher and consultant. The book is badly named. It’s not a neo-Machiavellian business manual; it’s fascinating … Continue reading “How People (Really) Make Decisions”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prDRq-J","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}