What's Your Intuition?

It's Saturday afternoon in midsummer. A man named Gary Klein sits in a Cleveland fire station, waiting for the next alarm to blare. Klein, 56, is a cognitive psychologist -- a cartographer of the human mind who maps how people perceive and observe, think and reason, act and react. He has left the sterile setting of the laboratory, where his peers scrutinize humans as if they were rats in a maze, in order to investigate real people operating in the real world.

Klein and his research team are attempting to crack a mystery that has intrigued psychologists for decades: How do people who work in unpredictable situations make life-and-death decisions? And how do they do it so well? According to decision-making models, they should fail more often than they succeed. There is too much uncertainty and too little time for them to make good choices. Yet again and again, they do the right thing. Klein wants to know why.

At 3:21 PM, the alarm goes off. Klein, an assistant, and an emergency-rescue crew scramble aboard an EMS truck. Three minutes later, they pull up to a house in a suburban neighborhood. A man is lying facedown on the front lawn. Blood is pooling all around him. He slipped on a ladder and pushed his arm through a plate-glass window, slicing an artery. The head of the rescue team -- Klein calls him "Lieutenant M" -- quickly estimates that the man has already lost two units of blood. If he loses two more, he'll die.

Even as he leaps from the truck, the lieutenant knows by judging the amount of blood on the ground that the man has ripped an artery. In an instant, he applies pressure to the man's arm. Emergency-medical procedure dictates that the victim should be checked for other injuries before he is moved. But there isn't time. The lieutenant orders his crew members to get the man into the truck. As the vehicle races to the hospital, a crew member puts inflatable pants on the victim to stabilize his blood pressure. This marks another real-time judgment call: Had they put the pants on the victim before moving him, the crew would have lost precious seconds.

The ambulance pulls up to the hospital's ER. Klein looks at his watch: It's 3:31 PM. In a matter of minutes, the lieutenant made several critical decisions that ultimately saved the man's life. But he ignored the conventional rules of decision making. He didn't ponder the best course of action or weigh his options. He didn't rely on deductive thinking or on an analysis of probabilities. How did he know what to do? When Klein asked him, the lieutenant shrugged and said that he simply drew on his experience.

For Klein, "experience" is not a satisfactory answer. Yet most of the time, that is the only answer that he gets. Even expert decision makers -- from veteran firefighters to battle-tested software programmers -- are often unable to explain how they make decisions. "Their minds move so rapidly when they make a high-pressure decision, they can't articulate how they did it," says Klein. "They can see what's going on in front of them, but not behind them."

This age-old enigma pushed Klein to decide, more than 20 years ago, to launch a research company that would do what expert decision makers couldn't. Klein Associates Inc. has studied men and women working in intensive-care units, Blackhawk helicopters, fire stations, and M-1 tanks. In the process, Klein's cognitive detectives are gaining valuable insight into how people harness their intuition to help them make decisions under extreme pressure. Klein calls these abilities "sources of power," a phrase that became the title of a clear-eyed, engaging book, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions (MIT Press, 1998).

Klein's investigation into real-world decision making is yielding valuable lessons for businesspeople as well. Over the past 20 years, he and his colleagues have worked with Amoco (now BP Amoco), Duke Power Co., and the world's largest airlines -- as well as with the U.S. armed forces -- to help those organizations build faster, better decision makers. Team leaders and foot soldiers of the new economy battle shifting goals, missing information, nonstop confusion, and do-or-die deadlines -- and still must make choices. By getting people to narrate their high-stakes decisions -- that is, to tell their stories -- Klein puts himself in a position to see what they know, and to understand the inner workings of how they make decisions.

Klein told his own story in a conference room tucked into the back of his Fairborn, Ohio office building. With his graying beard, white oxford shirt, and affection for polysyllabic speech, he could easily be mistaken for a university professor. He is courteous, but he is also a fearless thinker. A student of human intuition, he had the courage to bet his career on the hunch that people have grossly underestimated the power of gut instinct.