Gary Klein, sources of power

 

Gary Klein, Sources of power : how people make decision, 1998 

p.276

One definition of uncertainty (paraphrasing Lipshitz and Shaul 1997) is “doubt that threatens to block action”. Key pieces of information are missing, unreliable, ambiguous, inconsistent, or too complex to interpret, and as a result a decision maker will be reluctant to act. In many cases, the action will be delayed or will be overtaken by events as windows of opportunity close. 

p.291

   Regarding the nature of our data, one weakness of our work is that most of the studies relied on interviews rather than formal experiments to vary one thing at a time and see its effect. There are sciences that do not manipulate variables, such as geology or astronomy or anthropology. Naturalistic decision making research may be closer to anthropology than psychology. Sometimes we observe decision makers in action, but we rely on introspection in nearly all our studies. We ask people to describe what they are thinking, and we analyze their responses. We do not know if the things they are telling us are true, or maybe just some ideas they are making up. We can repeat the studies or, better yet, other investigators can repeat the studies to see if they get the same results. Nevertheless, no one can confidently believe what the decision makers say. 

   The use of introspection raises questions about how much to trust the findings of studies. However, alternate methods of scientific inquiry have their own problems and limitations. Research on naturalistic decision making collects and reports data, and it can be used as a source of ideas and hypotheses. The think-aloud data are soft, and fuzzy, and they are difficult to interpret. Nevertheless, we can still learn a lot by observing and questioning people as they perform realistic tasks with natural contexts. 

   (Klein, Gary, Sources of power : how people make decision / Gary Klein., 1. decision-making., 1998, 685.403, MIT Press, )

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    fear, loss, fear of loss, fear of missing out

    Want One Of Those (WOOT) 

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“Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire”

                            ──Jean de La Fontaine’s aphorism

https://web.archive.org/web/20081201191332/http://www.strategy-business.com/press/16635507/08110

Wayback Machine  

Thought Leader

Pankaj Ghemawat: The Thought Leader Interview

by Art Kleiner

 

The seer of “semiglobalization” argues for appreciating regional distinctions.

... [...] ....

In a way, that’s a symptom of the same issue that affects writing about globalization in general. Jean de La Fontaine’s aphorism “Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire” captures much of the utopian/dystopian quality of publications about the flat world, the death of distance, the end of history, and so forth. But a reality-based perspective on global strategy leads to different prescriptions. To which I should add, of course, that realism is not a recommendation to stay at home. Columbus managed to believe that the world was round but still took a pretty interesting trip — and discovered some unexpected things on the way!

Reprint No. 08110

Author Profile:

Art Kleiner (kleiner_art@ strategy-business.com) is editor-in-chief of strategy+ business and author of Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege, and Success (Doubleday, 2003). 

This article is from Spring 2008

strategy+business is published by the global commercial consulting firm  Booz & Company.

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