notes-books-powerOfIntuition

notes on The Power of Intuition by Gary Klein

chapter 3: where do our hunches come from?

Recognition-primed decision (RPD) model (of intuitive decision-making)

The situation generates cues

You use cues to recognize patterns (which were learned by experience)

Patterns activate a list of action scripts (which were also learned by experience; when a totally novel situation is faced, you can imitate or you can use conscious analysis)

you mentally simulate what you think will happen if you follow the script, and assess the result. if you predict a problem, you try to repair the plan; then you repeat this step, mentally simulating the repaired plan. if you can't repair it, you discard this action script and move on to the next action script and repeat.

note: the distinguishing feature of this model is that at any one time there is only one action script being evaluated; you are never comparing plans.

barriers to intuitive decision-making

• organizational policies
  • counting paper credentials more than experience
  • global organizations make it difficult for remote teams to communicate lessons learned
• rapid turnover: leads to less experienced staff
• rapid pace of change: experienced staff are considered obsolete and not listened to
• procedures: procedures leave no room to take advantage of intuition. also, people are trained to follow the procedures, not to understand and modify them or to design new ones
• metrics: "can be useful as a corrective to relying too heavily on impressions, but if managers try to make decisions based on numbers alone they run the risk of eroding intuitions"
• information technologies: "...are reducing their operators to" data entry clerks. staff aren't trained to use information sources that the machines can't access (e.g. the way babies look in a premature baby ward; the machines can access temperature, weight, etc, but can't detect things like a slightly mottled appearance) "operators come to passively follow what the " machines "recommend rather than relying on their intuition.

chapter 4: intuition skills learning: speeding up your learning curve

write down your guesses, then check the eventual results against them

form a bunch of teams, do thought exercises, then have teams explain to each other their solutions and why

later...

risks: keep an inventory of risks

sources of uncertainty:

• missing information
• untrustworthy information
• noisy environment
• inconsistent information
• uninterpretable information

((i would add, unknown unknowns))