Customer Reviews

Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making (Bradford Books)

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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.

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.

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.

Mr. Klein delivers the goods on methodologies of adaptive decision making in complex environments. He takes on eleven largely believed maxims (such as "Its bad to jump to conclusions---wait to see all the evidence.") and demonstrates the inherent weakness of these commonly held beliefs. Klein discusses in detail decision making, expertise, adapting, and sense-making. He uses real-world examples from meteorology to the military to demonstrate a uncommon approach to adaptive decision making. If your organization needs flexibility and adaptability, Mr. Klein's title will provide insights that should not be ignored. Highly recommended.

In 1998, Gary Klein gave readers Sources of Power, a thoughtful, innovative consideration of how to make decisions in complex situations. Here, he returns to the same subject in even greater depth. Klein has spent decades studying and interviewing people, such as firefighters, soldiers and pilots, who make decisions in complicated, shifting, high-stakes circumstances. He discusses what most people believe about making decisions, and shows how they err...some of the time. In ambiguous, unknown settings or under complex conditions, people tend to simplify until their beliefs become dangerous. This entertaining book grapples with many of life's more challenging situations. As a result, getAbstract recommends Klein's insights to leaders, trainers and anyone who must make more effective decisions in crises.

The ideas contained within "Streetlights and Shadows" are likely to strike a resonant chord for middle and upper level managers, and will surely help them to immediately do a better job - it certainly helped me!

This book is just bad. It's one anecdote after another. I found his conclusions unsupportable on the basis of the data presented. Even the data presented at the very start is bad. He uses a Likert scale (ordinal numbers) and calculates an average. This is common practice, but not a proper statistical analysis.
Much better research is found in some of his references.
I suggest reading "Managing Uncertainty: Resilient Response Performance in an Age of Uncertainty" by Weick and Sutcliff. It is a much better analysis of how high-functioning organizations make reliable decisions.