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An expert explains how the conventional wisdom about decision making can get us into trouble--and why experience can't be replaced by rules, procedures, or analytical methods.
In making decisions, when should we go with our gut and when should we try to analyze every option? When should we use our intuition and when should we rely on logic and statistics? Most of us would probably agree that for important decisions, we should follow certain guidelines--gather as much information as possible, compare the options, pin down the goals before getting started. But in practice we make some of our best decisions by adapting to circumstances rather than blindly following procedures. In Streetlights and Shadows, Gary Klein debunks the conventional wisdom about how to make decisions. He takes ten commonly accepted claims about decision making and shows that they are better suited for the laboratory than for life. The standard advice works well when everything is clear, but the tough decisions involve shadowy conditions of complexity and ambiguity. Gathering masses of information, for example, works if the information is accurate and complete--but that doesn't often happen in the real world. (Think about the careful risk calculations that led to the downfall of the Wall Street investment houses.) Klein offers more realistic ideas about how to make decisions in real-life settings. He provides many examples--ranging from airline pilots and weather forecasters to sports announcers and Captain Jack Aubrey in Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander novels--to make his point. All these decision makers saw things that others didn't. They used their expertise to pick up cues and to discern patterns and trends. We can make better decisions, Klein tells us, if we are prepared for complexity and ambiguity and if we will stop expecting the data to tell us everything.
"I know of no one who combines theory and observation--intellectual rigor and painstaking observation of the real world--so brilliantly and gracefully as Gary Klein."--Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers and Blink
(Malcolm Gladwell )"Gary Klein has taken aim at attempts to base decision making on analytic reasoning. To his credit, he does not claim that analytic decision models are useless. He argues that they are limited, and he shows how and why. Klein shows the importance of human understanding and experience as alternatives to analytic models, especially in complex and dynamic situations. He makes his point with many excellent examples, drawn both from his own extensive experience and from the literature. This is a book that should be read by anyone with a serious interest in how decisions ought to be made, whether by humans or machines." Earl Hunt , Professor Emeritus, University of Washington
Gary Klein is a Senior Scientist at Applied Research Associates. He is the author of Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions (1999) and the coauthor of Working Minds: A Practitioner's Guide to Cognitive Task Analysis (2006), both published by the MIT Press.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating and Readable,
By Robert Barcus "Clinical Psychologist" (Yellow Springs, OH United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making (Bradford Books) (Hardcover)
This book is fascinating and wonderfully well written. I have read Dr. Klein's previous works and followed his rise in the world of decision making. The book was very engaging, starting with a little pre-test about the reader's attitudes about 10 principles of performance improvement. He uses these ten questions as the backbone of his structure.
As he addresses each one in turn he explains what you are about to learn; tells you about it; illustrates it with examples that read like good mystery stories(many quite personal; explains what the example illustrates; and tops it off with a disclaimer where he acknowledges the limitations and competing arguments. This pattern repeats with examples coming every few pages. Of course he reiterates what we've learned in a clear,brief chapter summary. This guy knows how to help you learn. He doesn't just drill you with information. He educates and most importantly entertains. I loved it.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Making choices in the real world,
By
This review is from: Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making (Bradford Books) (Hardcover)
I have gone through life assuming that following through on a plan was a key to good management. Fact is, however, that my plans are sometimes fuzzy and, when, clear, I haven't followed them. And I have managed to get through a career with modest success and thanking the organizational gods that no one found out I was a muddling through. Without specifically endorsing a muddle-through approach, Gary Klein's _Streetlights and Shadows_ does make clear that most decision-making in the real world, regardless of any plan-organize-and-follow-through model, involves a healthy dose of adjusting, re-directing, accommodating,and adapting.
What Klein does is explain that his is the norm in any organization's activities and provides suggestions/insights into how to accept that plans often must change and how to make the changes. One suggestion: Assume that the plan your embarking on has failed. What are the most likely reasons that your plans did not work out? What should you have alerted you to the problem? How could you have adjusted? Klein's style is readable and full of specific examples and anecdotes to support his general observations.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Compelling stories, essential to technical management evolution,
By Steven V Deal (Yellow Springs, Ohio) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making (Bradford Books) (Hardcover)
The growing gap between those with technical literacy and those can be closed, in part, by explaining technical findings using stories. Those who make the greatest impact on our views and the way we do things are expert as using stories to illustrate their points. Dr. Klein has collected a career's worth of insights and illustrates them with compelling stories that make this an easy-to-read, easy-to-comprehend volume that will enable readers to apply the important arguments he shares. My own investigations into government acquisition and healthcare information technology are threaded with people's desires to "remove the artistry" from practice and replace it with standardization. Dr. Klein makes compelling, and what I hope are broadly accepted, arguments for growing, supporting and taking best advantage of expertise -- rather than remove the artistry, he shows the advantage of focusing instead on creating more artists. "Streetlights and Shadows" is a highly useful volume for program managers, systems and specialty engineers that, once picked up, is hard to put down.
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