YouSaid · the spoken record

Gary Klein

lines on the record: 89
first: 2022-08-09
most recent: 2022-08-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And in terms of mindsets, that's such an important mindset shift. The previous mindset was I want to get people to do what I tell them. And so I've got to be tough and I've got to be threatening. And this new mindset was, how can I get them to do what I want and have faith in me”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“just by the way he carried himself and the way he talked to them and I said I can't continue much longer in the mode that I am what's he doing what what's his technique and he said ever since then I've been trying to come up with golden words and I've been jotting them down when I see other police officers use them and I'm trying to build a repertoire for how to gain voluntary compliance One of his rules of thumb, maybe the most important one for my consideration is he said whenever he's in an encounter with a civilian Or even with a law breaker, he said, I want that person to trust me more at the ends of the encounter than at the beginning. And that governs the way he carried himself He was carrying himself in a way that would move the needle to create greater trust rather than diminish trust.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“was a large police officer. It was hard to fit into this office. Not only was he extremely strong. And like his arms were bigger than my legs. He was a really strong police officer. And he said, I joined the police because I like the action. I just liked it and it was exciting, but I noticed as my career was going on. If I would sometimes get in fights with people, and I almost always won the fight, but it was damage. I was accumulating damage. And then I looked at one of my colleagues. He could get people to do things for him.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“rather than intimidation. And for many a number of police officers, they only know one dominant way of getting civilians to comply with them, which is to threaten them, to intimidate them We did a project a number of years ago. My wife and I did the project to try to see what other techniques for gaining voluntary compliance, for avoiding these kinds of direct confrontations. And the nickname for this project was funded by DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The nickname was the Good Strangers Project. And we studied military personnel and we studied police officers who were known to be good at diffusing situation, at creating an environment that was a benign rather than a high conflict environment. One of the things we learned So I remember one police officer that we interviewed. It was a small office.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a very important observation because this has come up in some of the work that we've done with use of force decisions. where if you're a police officer, you might be in a situation, should I use force or not? And sometimes that's just part of the job. That's a horrible part of the job for police officers. But we find that There may be sometimes ways To avoid getting into that decision. The way you structure it, the way you frame it, the way you manage it. can possibly diffuse the situation so that you don't necessarily have to get into a confrontation that you might be able to avoid it. So yes, structuring the environment is a much better approach. And this is something we have done a little bit with, not as much as we would like. When I say we, this is my friend and colleague John Schmidt. How do you get voluntary compliance?”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you do that as successively as you go and you write down why you highlighted that Q and we go through this scenario. After you finish that, we say now let's go through the same scenario and we've had experts do the same thing you did. Let's see what the experts were focusing on and when they were focusing on it compared to you. And what reasons they gave. So this really is seeing the world through the eyes of experts”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's how Shadowbox works. And in a half a day of training, we show that people match to the experts increases by about 25% in just a half a day of training. Now there's another version of Shadowbox, which is video-based where I'll have like a one or two minute video of something. And I'll say, here's a situation. It could be police officer using a body camera footage, or it could be something that's staged in a hospital. And like if it's a hospital, tell me what's happening in the situation. And you watch the scenario from beginning to end. And then we say now let's start again. And as we go through the scenario, you can pause it at any point you want, and then there's a little circle and you can put the circle around any Q that you think is important to be watching.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you rank order them and you write down your reasons and then we say. See what the experts picked And then immediately we show you how your ranking compares to the experts. And you want to match the experts. You're really trying to get your ranking to match theirs. So that's the game part you want to get that to match. But the real learning is look at what the experts wrote down as their reasons. Here are the things they noticed. Here are the things that they inferred. Here's the things they worried about. Here's the opportunities they saw. And you look at what you wrote down and what they wrote down. And now you are seeing the world through the eyes of experts. But the experts don't have to be there because that would be a bottleneck. They've done their work and now we just have what we recorded from them and we can provide it to you as feedback so you're seeing the world at least this scenario through their eyes.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then we stop it again, decision point two. Here are three goals that you might pursue. Rank order the importance of each of these goals and write down your reasons. And then we continue with them. We stop it again. Here's decision point three. Here's five pieces of information that you can pursue that would help you. Rank order the importance of each one of them and write down your reasons. And it could be anything like that. And we just go through this scenario that way. At the same time, I've had a panel of maybe three experts. They've gone through the same scenario that I'm showing you. They've done their ranking. Written down their reasons We've combined their rankings. synthesized the reasons. So now when you go through this scenario and we get to decision point one, here's four different courses of action.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So here's how Shadowbox works. It's primarily a scenario-based approach. I create a tough, challenging scenario. And we go through this scenario. Usually it's in text. I stop it part of the way through and I say, here's decision point one, Shane. At this point, here's four different options, things you can do, courses of action. Rank order, which you would do from top to bottom, and then write down your reasons, sort of like your decision log. And then we continue the scenario.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It doesn't matter which one we pick. And yet we will spend days, weeks going around in a funk. Which one am I going to choose? Committees spend hours going over it. And if there's anything that can be valuable and efficient in what I'm discussing, it's this. When you think you're in a zone of indifference to recognize I'm in a zone of indifference, I'm never going to be able to tease them apart. I'm just going to pick one and spend my time in more fruitful ways If it means flipping a coin.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, I love the idea of the zone of indifference. And the phenomenon, the way the phenomenon works is if I've got two choices, a terrible option and a wonderful option. Quick, which one do you pick? Okay, that's not a hard decision. As we move them closer together, and so now the terrible option has some positive features and a great option has some negative consequences. And we get to this point where it's really hard because the strengths and advantages of one versus the other are almost totally balanced. These are the hardest decisions people ever wrestle with. And the paradox is if the advantages and disadvantages are the The two options are almost perfectly balanced.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's different from something that's sort of like painting a room where everything is predictable. So I say, as anything happens in the last three months that has surprised you. And if you say, No, no, nothing has surprised me. You don't have to worry. That's when you have to worry because I want to know what surprised you. And now we can start to examine that and see and be curious about it and see what it might mean and how we can change our notion of the problem or the goals or any of any of the important parameters”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“original ideas because almost certainly our original ideas are going to be inadequate. Now there's also a way to do project reviews that could try to capture more insights. In many organizations if we're doing a project I'll say okay Shane you're doing this project. Let's have a review every three months and now it's a standard review what resources have you expended? What did you project that you were going to expend? What tasks did you accomplish? Where are we in the milestone chart? And we go through all of those things. But I can also ask you in that review meeting, Shane, in the last three months since the last meeting. Has anything happened that surprised you? If we're dealing with a conflict situation, with a wicked problem,”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What are your thoughts about this? In what ways do you think do you have a different sense of what's going on here or what our goals can be? And let's capture that. So that's the way to go around the table, not in a rote fashion. You're starting to get into the area of wicked problems and difficult problems. And I'm doing a project on that right now with two colleagues, John Schmidt and Sean Murphy on wicked problems and how to proceed with wicked problems and we're finding that the notion of the goals is going to get richer and it's going to change as we proceed, as we go along. You want to capture that. You don't want to lock in.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What do you think? Okay, good. What do you think? So we're just checking the boxes so that I can say, but I went around the table and I learned what people had added mind. That's not the way to do it. Instead of just checking the boxes, you want to be curious about what do they think.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so I have a bunch of reactions because you've said a lot of very interesting and exciting things for this map. So first of all, I agree with you, better to have a single leader that they trust. They don't have to think that the leader is infallible, but they just know that the leader is going to be effective at making the most of the team's resources. But one of the traits that you want in a leader is somebody who can honestly query the team members and see what they think. A lot of times that querying is done in a rote way that doesn't accomplish much. So I know that I'm the leader, but I'm not supposed to say, here's what we're doing. I'm supposed to have some guys of being open to other ideas. So I say, so let's go around the table and see what other people...”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the pre-mortem method. To a great extent. And I think what's important about the pre-mortem method that could also be used generally by a group and team environment is to have people craft their ideas and their interpretations and their assessments individually and privately before they surface it to other people. And the research on like brainstorming, we're all brainstorming together. The research shows that brainstorming does not produce more ideas or more innovative ideas. And I think teams would be in 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.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And people want to have something that everybody can agree with. And you've lost your opportunity for somebody who's had an insight, somebody has a new idea of trying to put that in practice, but the consensus is to try to do the safe thing that's comfortable that everybody can live with rather than to do something that's bold and innovative. So I have problems with consensus decisions.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You want places where there's hills, but if the hills are too great, then you have a risk of an avalanche. At a certain point, they'll look ahead and say, this could be risky. Do we want to continue or not? And it's the same dynamic. There's a lot of pressure on people to inhibit their fear and go along with the consensus rather than finding a way to vote anonymously and realizing that one or two of the members don't want to do it. Having votes that are anonymous is important. And I also don't like consensus decisions because those tend to be, in other situations, the consensus is fairly risk averse, unlike with the Martians.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the people on the spaceship know that if they go back, it's going to be risky. So they said, let's see if we can come to a consensus about what to do. I don't like the idea of consensus decisions, and I don't like the idea of a consensus decision in this kind of a dangerous environment. Because as the people in the spaceship went around, there was enormous pressure on everybody to go along with the consensus, which was we should go back and rescue him. And it was public. And they went back and they risked all of their lives in order to save them. What they should have done is had people vote in a way that was secret. And I see this with people who are cross-country skiing and back country, and you don't want to just cross country ski where it's”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the captain's orders had to be obeyed because under that time pressure with that kind of urgency and those kinds of stakes, you needed to switch your decision strategy to something more autocratic. So there's no general rule for how a team should make decision. It's going to depend on the situation and the context. I can give you an example of what not to do. There was a movie with Matt Damon a number of years ago called The Martian. And Matt Damon is part of a team that went to Mars and something happened and they needed to depart and they gathered everybody together but they couldn't find Matt Damon. He was available and it was urgent that they depart and so they departed without him. That's why he wasn't there. So now they've taken They realize he's still there. So the decision is, do we go back or not?”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“decision making the teams use different kinds of strategies and there's different formats you can have an autocratic team where a leader just makes a decision you can have teams voting you can have the vote be anonymous if people are afraid of repercussions there are situations like let's take a pirate ships when you have pirate ships around pirate ships were extremely democratic there was nobody in charge they voted who was going to lead them they they voted about what targets they wanted to attack but once they were in battle there was a captain”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the idea that emotions cloud our thinking and interfere with our decisions and our judgments, we know where this area is. We can do laser surgery to triangulate different laser beams, to create a lesion in this area so you will no longer be troubled by emotions when you make decisions. And my challenge is to any of the judgment decision researchers who worry about emotions clambing our decisions, would you have the surgery done? I have yet to find the backer, and I have said, I will pay for the surgery myself. Now this would be a great opportunity. Nobody has taken me up on this offer.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there are some people who have a lesion in this part of the brain. And this is work done by DiMasio 15 years ago or so. And he studied people with lesions in that part of the brain where they were unable to draw on their emotions to make decisions. In other words, they were purely rational. They were like Mr. Spock. Their intelligence didn't suffer. Their IQ is as high as it ever was before the lesion. 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 the patterns we've built and on our experiences. So here's the demonstration, the thought experiment I have. If you Are a strong believer.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We would be crippled without those heuristics. And I've created a thought experiment, which is, you know, people worry about emotion clouding our intellect and getting in the way of good decision making. And as it turns out, there's a part of the brain, I forget what the structure is called, where emotion...”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Coming up with insights and making decisions. So availability bias. Of course that's going to be helpful if I want to draw on my experience in order to know how to work in a situation. It's not going to be perfect, but that's what my experience advised me. The same thing for representativeness bias, anchoring bias. I'm going to anchor on a number. Now, sometimes people do foolish things if you just give them a random number. They anchor on that. So people are capable of foolishness. But generally, I've got to start somewhere. And so I've drawn my experience to see what's this like. And I'll anchor on that and I'll adjust from that because my initial impression, if I have a reasonable amount of expertise, is going to be accurate. And so the heuristics that get criticized”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Flawed, and yet people, many people, most people fall prey to it. 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 strengths of these heuristics. And Dani Kahneman and Amas Tversky, who developed these ideas, they themselves stated that these heuristics are generally useful, even though they're not perfect. What's happening is a community is setting up, because it's easy to set up studies where the heuristics get you the wrong answer. And so there's lots of these studies performed. And so that's the message that gets compiled without looking at the upside. So I've written about positive heuristics, that all the major heuristics that get criticized are extremely valuable.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't like the idea of decision biases. I know my sense from 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 when one of them doesn't work. But it's a heuristic. It's not an algorithm. So sometimes heuristics don't work. And the way the research has been done is you put people, you give them a task where the heuristic that they're used to applying, it's not going to apply in this situation. And you show that people fall into the trap that you've set to them. And you say, you see their heuristics are”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so I have to be careful about this and just caveat what I'm about to say that I'm an outlier, that the whole issue of decision and judgment biases is a major line of research. And the community, the heuristics of biases community has been extremely effective in the research they've done and the applications that they've put this work to and the judgment decision community. So I want listeners to understand that the dominant view is that these biases are important and need to be taken into account. Having said that, I don't agree.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So instead of creating a culture of trust and candor, the leader is creating a dangerous environment where people can get in trouble and the leader is being shielded and protected.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 to explain why. So say, what can go wrong is too tentative. It's too vague. And so that's, I think, maybe the most common mistake that people make is they don't frame it that way. Another mistake is they let individuals talk too long. and everybody else is waiting. And this way we're going around the room in a pretty rapid clip. And everybody just stating one thing at a time. And a third mistake might be the leader gets cold feet. and says, I just want to hear what everybody else has.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so it's sort of like it's almost theatrical. I mean, there's a certain performative quality to this. And we try to, I try to do it quickly. I just want to get everybody's entry very quickly so that the energy level stays high. And I want to get one from each person because often like one of the senior members of the team might want to give the entire list and then everybody just sort of in a receive mode. And I want to get out of that mode. I want everybody ready.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it creates a sense of trust that I can say something and I'm not going to get criticized for it. The way the pre-mortem works is it reverses the usual dynamic of these meetings. Often at the end of a meeting, somebody will say, all right, we're just about done with the meeting. Does anybody see any problems? Nobody wants to identify a problem. We've just spent the last hour and a half coming up discussing the plan. Nobody wants to admit that there's a problem. People aren't even thinking about problems. They're all in a goal mode. Let's get started. They're impatient to start. And there could be consequences of exposing problems.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we're seeing all the ways that this plan that we were so confident, so overconfident in, now our overconfidence has been diminished. Now, some people have worried that maybe the confidence level got too low, so then we added a last part of the exercise. Look at everything on the whiteboard. Look at all of those items. Now let's take another two minutes and write down what each of us, what can I do personally to try to reduce the chance of some of these happening. And then people are writing down what they can do. And that's a way of trying to reduce the risk. And so that's how we run a pre-mortem. What we find is it surfaces ideas and flaws. People hadn't considered, but it also creates a culture of candor in the team where people are used, are starting to get used to expressing problems rather than covering them up.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A long list of things that would explain why this project failed. And most of them are things that people hadn't thought about. And now we sort of are harvesting the collective wisdom of the people and the scar tissue of the people in that room.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I say, time's up. I'm not usually a whiteboard or on Zoom. I'll have a virtual whiteboard. And I'll say, now I'm going to go around the room. And I'll start if I'm the project leader. Here's the top of my list. Here's the thing that I mentioned. And usually it's something that never came up during the meeting. The leader and the facilitator could be different people, but in this case we'll say it's the same person. I want to set a good example that I'm not just coming with something that's absurd, but something that's real. And then I go to the next person. Shane, what do you have on top of your list? And then Dave, what do you have on your list that neither Shane nor I have mentioned? And we go around the room and I'm writing these down. And usually we go around the room a second time, sometimes a third.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, I do have a crystal ball, but I don't carry it around with me all the time. I'm looking at imaginary crystal ball, and it's now six months from now. Oh. And this project has gone off the rails in a major way. It's been a disaster. It's been a failure. It could be six months, could be a year. Pick your timeframe. What happened is the crystal ball is showing failure. Now the crystal ball isn't showing us why it failed. It's just showing us that it has failed. That much is certain, and the crystal ball is infallible. It never lies. Now, everybody around the table. You have a pad of paper in front of you and a pen. Take the next two minutes and write down all the reasons why this project failed. And then I have the timer and I start the timer and then everybody's writing like mad for the next two minutes.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we said instead of doing a post-mortem for projects that fail after they fail, let's move it to the beginning. That's why it's called a pre-mortem. And the way it works. if we're on a team, we take everybody on the team, we're all sitting around at a table, and usually we do it at a kickoff meeting. Here's how we're going to carry out the plan. Now, we've spent an hour, hour and a half just through the kickoff meeting. What are we going to do? Who's doing what? What are the roles and functions? We've got all that nailed down. And we've got about 20 minutes left and enough time to do a pre-murder. And I say, okay, now we're going to do the pre-mortem. Everybody, just relax, sit back in your chairs. Now, I'm looking in an imaginary crystal ball.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To the front, like a postmortem. A postmortem is something that you do like in a hospital when a patient has died. And a physician does a post-mortem to find out why did the patient die. And the advantage of doing a post-mortem and discovering what was the real cause of death or the causes of death is that the physician gets smarter, now has a richer mental model, so it helps the physician. And now the physician can tell the family, here's why your loved one died, because they really want to know. And now you can help reduce their pain by giving them an answer. And they can work with that. Everybody benefits from a post-mortem except for the patient, because the patient is dead.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just sort of invented it for a company I was running back in the late 1980s. And we mostly had successful projects, but not always. Sometimes our projects would fail. And then we would do an after action review. We'd say what went wrong. And we'd realize, oh, if we had just done this differently, it might not have ended so badly. And I said, why don't we always have a kickoff meeting when a project starts? Why don't we move that after action review?”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And something happens and they can't use the same routines. And the journeyman, they get really frustrated like that. It's not supposed to happen. I don't know. Who do I call? And the experts, their eyes light up. Okay, we can't use the techniques that have been successful for us up to now. What can we do? What can we invent? And so the eyes lighting up is like to me a key to cognitive flexibility theory is to get people into that mode where they're excited when things don't go as planned and they're going to have to improvise.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How did a flexibility theory is the notion of trying to help people achieve expertise? Aye, preventing them from locking in to routines and standard ways of doing things so that they can become more naturally adaptive. You can give them vicarious experiences that can't be handled by the usual routines just to force them out of their comfort zone and to get them into a mindset of not only being prepared to be adaptive, enjoying being adaptive because that's another thing that I've noticed about experts. they're doing the same job”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I could have used that problem and it could have been much better. And so by the end of that kind of rumination, that kind of reflection, my reaction is, I can't wait to do another workshop because now I want to try that again. But the immediate reaction is one of being pretty devastated by a mistake. And so it's going to be a hard case if you tell me, Gary, you know, try to make mistakes. That's how you're going to learn. It's not in my emotional makeup. Maybe it's in your shame, but it's not in my emotional makeup.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but where people spoil it is they then take it one step too far and say the more errors you make, the more you're going to learn which is true and say we want to encourage people to make errors. And they don't mean that. Organizations don't want to encourage people to make errors, especially some of the industries that I work in where errors can be very dangerous. And the fact is I don't like to make mistakes. If I do something, if I put on a workshop that has gone poorly, my immediate reaction is I never want to put another workshop on again. This is just too painful. And it takes me a few days to get out of that emotional funk and to think about it and say, you know, if I had done it this way.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So the second worker with a turbulent year has learned much more. What can you do for worker A who's had this smooth year? You can take some of these crises that worker that the second worker had and encapsulate them as stories or as scenarios and you can present them to worker A just to give them vicarious experiences to get them to move forward. So that's something that you can do. And we've seen organizations doing things like that. And that's actually one of our decision training methods is to provide those vicarious experiences.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let's imagine two people starting out a job. We'll say person A and worker A and worker B, they're both going to be on a job for a year. Worker A has a lucky year. Everything goes smoothly. And there is no disruptions, no problems. It's just a really very, very low stress year. Worker B has had a turbulent year. All kinds of things have gone wrong. All kinds of adaptations have been necessary. There were mistakes made that had to be identified and diagnosed and recovered. And one thing is like the whole year has been filled with all of this. Who is the one that you would like to have working with you after that first year?”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so this gets into the issue of expertise and how do people get to the higher levels of expertise. And some models of expertise say that people just acquire more and more information and that's how expertise builds. But that doesn't work because that's like having unexamined experiences and you're not coming up with a richer mental model. My speculation working with a colleague Holly Baxter is that people get up to a certain level of performance and then they start to stagnate and they start to plateau and people who break through and move to the next level are the ones who engage in unlearning. Who realize there are certain conventions they've bought into or beliefs they hold that are either wrong or are limited and don't apply as broadly as they imagine.”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that you could capture is what do you think is going on in the situation now? Describe what's going on. And then as time occurs, maybe people can jot down data that they receive that are inconsistent with that belief. So you can sort of track when is it that you first started to lose faith in your initial impression? Could you have questioned it earlier? Did you wait longer than you needed to?”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's not the way we think, and it would cripple us. So instead, you want us to come up with a quick reaction. But if we're wrong, there's going to be an anomaly and we want to be able to revisit it. So 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. Now for your decision journal,”
2022-08-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT