Gary Klein
Research psychologist, instrumental in founding the field of naturalistic decision making; developed the recognition-primed decision model, the PreMortem method and the ShadowBox training method, and wrote Sources of Power and Seeing What Others Don't.
Gary Klein did not write this page. ppll compiled it from their own words, each linked to the source. Is this you? · Report a mistake
Latest Blog
What they believe
-
Experts facing time pressure decide by recognition, a blend of intuition and analysis, and this accounted for almost 90% of firefighters' hard decisions.
in 1985, um my colleagues and I came up with a description of how people actually make life-and-death decisions under extreme time pressure and certainty. And we called it the recognition prime decision model. And it's a blend of intuition plus analysis. And we found we studied firefighters. We found that most fire that accounted for almost 90% of the tough decisions firefighters made.
youtube.comSaid 9 Aug 2022This on korrents
The bold line is korrents’ wording; the quote is theirs. These one: what they wrote before what they said aloud, one per source, newest first.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 16 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
Experts facing time pressure decide by recognition, a blend of intuition and analysis, and this accounted for almost 90% of firefighters' hard decisions.
in 1985, um my colleagues and I came up with a description of how people actually make life-and-death decisions under extreme time pressure and certainty. And we called it the recognition prime decision model. And it's a blend of intuition plus analysis. And we found we studied firefighters. We found that most fire that accounted for almost 90% of the tough decisions firefighters made.
Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144 Said 9 Aug 2022
Teaching people a decision model is useless, because the intuition it rests on is built from experience and has no shortcut.
What we could we could train people by saying, "Here's the recognition prime decision model. Now, you know, follow this." And that would be useless. Because of uh telling people the strategy isn't going to buy them anything. The intuition part is a reflection of the patterns they've built up through experience. And so there's no shortcut for that.
Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144 Said 9 Aug 2022
Debiasing has largely failed, and that is fine, because the biases identified are experience-built heuristics that only look like biases in hindsight.
I don't like the idea of decision biases. I know my sense of the literature is that there's been little if any success in debiasing people. And I think that's a good thing. Because the biases that get identified are essentially related to the heuristics that we've learned and are part of the experience that we have. And they only look like biases in hindsight once one of them doesn't work.
Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144 Said 9 Aug 2022
Show 13 more
Decision-bias research is itself biased, studying only how heuristics fail and never the strength they supply.
Um but nobody has done research on the positive side of these heuristics. And so, I think that's a bias on the part of the decision bias researchers that they're only looking at the down arrow. How do these heuristics get us in trouble? And they're not looking at the strength of these heuristics.
Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144 Said 9 Aug 2022
Emotions are how a person draws on accumulated patterns, so people who lose access to them make worse decisions rather than more rational ones.
But their lives became miserable. It would take them 45 minutes to decide what restaurant to go through. They got divorced. They lost their jobs because they could not use their emotions because our emotions are a way of drawing on on the patterns we've built and on our experiences.
Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144 Said 9 Aug 2022
A pre-mortem has to treat the failure as certain and ask why it happened; asking what could go wrong is too tentative to work.
One of the mistakes is that they just frame it wrong from the beginning. They'll say, "Okay, we should do a pre-mortem. So, what can go wrong?" It's not an issue of what can go wrong. We're dealing with a crystal ball that has showed that the plan has failed. We know that it failed. And our job is is to explain why. So, saying what can go wrong is too tentative. It's too vague.
Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144 Said 9 Aug 2022
Groups as a rule make terrible decisions; one person should decide and the group should only supply input.
I have problems with group decisions. I think groups as a rule like a heuristic make terrible decisions. Individuals should make decisions. Groups should provide input. Um but there should be one sort of person making the decision.
Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144 Said 9 Aug 2022
Brainstorming together produces no more ideas and no better ones than having people generate ideas privately before sharing them.
the research on like brainstorming where all brainstorming together the research shows that brainstorming does not produce more ideas or more innovative ideas. And I think teams would be and groups would be better having individuals generate their own concepts and then after they've done it independently and privately sharing it with the others.
Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144 Said 9 Aug 2022
When two options are almost perfectly balanced the choice does not matter, and those are exactly the decisions people agonize over.
And we get to this point, these are the hardest decisions people ever wrestle with. And the paradox is if the advantages and disadvantages of the two options are almost perfectly balanced, it doesn't matter which one we pick. And yet we will spend days and weeks going around in a funk, which one am I going to choose?
Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144 Said 9 Aug 2022
A decision cannot be judged by its outcome, because good decisions fail through no fault of the decider and bad ones succeed by luck.
Now, some decisions may have been good decisions that didn't work through no fault of the employee. And some may have been bad decisions that worked because the employee got lucky. So, you can't just look at the outcome, but you have to look at what What was the person thinking about when they made the decision?
Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144 Said 9 Aug 2022
A run of correct forecasts is not evidence of expertise, because among many forecasters some are right by chance.
I may have I may be an investor. I have a track record of calling the market right in the last five times. People say, "Wow, he really knows what he's talking about." But there are lots of people who are trying to predict which way the market is going to go. And some of them are going to get it right by chance. And people assume it's because they know what they're what they're doing, and in fact they're just the lucky ones.
Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144 Said 9 Aug 2022
Experts stay highly aware of their own mistakes, and the people who stall at competence are the ones who move on and forget theirs.
So, experts are highly aware of mistakes. But people who are journeymen, many of them stay as journeymen because they they want to move on and forget about their mistakes.
Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144 Said 9 Aug 2022
Breaking through a skill plateau requires unlearning beliefs and conventions that are wrong or narrower than assumed.
people get up to a certain level of performance, and then they start to stagnate. And they start to plateau. And people who who break through and move to the next level um are the ones who have to who engage in unlearning. Who realize there are certain uh conventions they've bought into or beliefs they hold that are either wrong or are limited and and don't apply as broadly as as they imagine.
Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144 Said 9 Aug 2022
Fixation errors come from explaining away anomalies and holding on to a wrong first impression until it is far too late.
So we we want people, that's the way we break out of fixation, is we notice the anomalies. The way we get stuck in fixation and making fixation errors is we explain away the anomalies, hold on to the original wrong impression until it's far too late.
Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144 Said 9 Aug 2022
Scientists use the same knowledge shields as everyone else, explaining away inconvenient data to hold on to their story.
But the researchers who have investigated this find that scientists do the same thing. They have something that's called knowledge shields, the way all of us do, that that a a a variety of techniques for explaining away inconvenient data and anomalies. But what we're effectively doing is we're holding on to our story.
Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144 Said 9 Aug 2022
Organizations sincerely believe they want insights and still suppress them, because insights are disorganizing.
What blocks insight is that organizations say they want insights and they want innovation and they really don't. But they're they're being serious. They think they want insights. But insights are disorganizing.
Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144 Said 9 Aug 2022
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
Where they publish
Site gary-klein.com His own site: the books, the peer-reviewed publications and the methods.
The front door — books, peer-reviewed publications, media appearances and the decision-making methods he is known for. Static rather than a stream, so it is the place to establish what he has done, not what he said this week.
Link verified 8 Sept 2026.
Blog Seeing What Others Don't His Psychology Today blog on insight and decision-making. Has a feed.
Short posts on how people gain insights, spot anomalies and decide under pressure — the working notes of the research the books came out of. Named after his 2013 book.
Recent
- "Sources of Power": How the Book Came Into Being 16 Oct 2026 We are advised to use a systematic process in performing projects such as writing a book. However, the writing of my book "Sources of Power" depended on accidents and discoveries.
- The Origins of Naturalistic Decision-Making 16 Sept 2026 The Naturalistic Decision-Making (NDM) movement emerged 40 years ago. For that to occur, eight factors had to converge.
- Imagine There Was No Naturalistic Decision-Making Movement 16 Aug 2026 The Naturalistic Decision-Making community just celebrated its 40th anniversary. A counterfactual exercise of imagining that NDM had never started reveals its many contributions.
Show 17 more
- Caregivers Can Look Backward to Move Forward 11 Mar 2026 Caregivers for people with dementia can get caught up in all the capabilities the patient has lost. Perhaps it is possible to learn to notice the strengths the person still has.
- Toilet Paper as a Weapon 17 Feb 2026 A mindset of adaptability and improvisation, coupled with perspective-taking skills, can help people overcome what look like overwhelming challenges.
- 4 Decision Games That Changed Me 9 Jan 2026 More than reading about theory, actual experiences are what shape our understanding. These can be efficiently provided through scenario training such as Tactical Decision Games.
- The Joy of Political Canvassing 8 Nov 2025 Political canvassing—going house-to-house—seems like a tedious chore. But here's how one candidate adopted a mindset filled with curiosity and adventure. And she won her race.
- Why Do People Make Risky Decisions? 21 Sept 2025 There are several reasons why people might voluntarily engage in risky sports and activities, and we should not try to find a simple, single-cause explanation for their behaviors.
- How I Became a Naturalistic Researcher 9 Aug 2025 Personal Perspective: Controlled experiments and methodological rigor are important for testing hypotheses, but a naturalistic approach may be better for studying decision-making.
- Double-Barreled Pre-Mortems 9 Jul 2025 The pre-mortem method for risk assessment can make people very risk-averse. A double-barreled pre-mortem could help foster boldness to balance the risk aversion.
- Decision-Centered History 22 May 2025 Psychologists can help the telling of history by flagging major decisions and speculating about how they were made. In that way, we can provide a decision-centered history.
- Can AI Do Pre-Mortems for Us? 23 Apr 2025 AI systems can churn out effective pre-mortem critiques of plans. But they miss the team dynamics and culture-building benefits of in-person pre-mortem sessions.
- The Problem With Experience 6 Mar 2025 Most people gain expertise on their own, not through training programs or coaching. But experience alone will not lead to expertise. It's just the starting point.
- Contrast Sets: The Importance of Anticipating Confusion 6 Feb 2025 Training should not just be about presenting material. Trainers need to anticipate where people can get confused and then skillfully introduce contrast sets to foster expertise.
- The Difference Between Expertise and Experts 8 Jan 2025 Personal Perspective: While there is no gold standard for who is an expert, the development and application of expertise are important in many different professions and activities.
- Why Introverts Have a Hidden Advantage in the Workplace 31 Jul 2024 Extraverts seem like better leaders and entrepreneurs. However, introverts have advantages.
- Illuminators and Diminishers 29 Jun 2024 Traditional decision research makes us feel inadequate, doubting even the experts. Naturalistic decision-making does the reverse; it excites us about expertise and our abilities.
- Conversations With Kahneman 18 Apr 2024 A Personal Perspective: Danny Kahneman, cofounder of the heuristics and biases school, and I engaged in an adversarial collaboration. We found ways to develop intuitive expertise.
- Making the Most of a Failure 13 Mar 2024 A Personal Perspective: If we think about our failures, we can diagnose what went wrong, and strengthen our mental models.
- Spotting Exaggerated Claims for AI Superiority Over Experts 13 Feb 2024 Developers of AI systems often exaggerate their superiority to people. Watch out for learning confounds, accusations of biases, smuggled expertise, and analytical gimmickry.
Link verified 8 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
Podcast As a guest Long interviews he sat for — chosen, not exhaustive.
His own voice by his own participation: conversations he agreed to, on the hosts' own channels. One for now rather than a list padded with episodes nobody checked.
Link verified 8 Sept 2026.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter, especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked article and a belief on korrents.com are left in their original language.