What's Your Intuition?

How to Size Up a Big Decision

"I suppose I was led astray by a book," recalls Klein. He was working as a civilian psychologist at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Fairborn when the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus published the controversial book What Computers Can't Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence (Harper & Row, 1979). "Dreyfus argued that people are injecting meaning into everything around them," Klein continues. "And because they are active interpreters of their world, their experience cannot be deconstructed into the kinds of rules that will fit into expert systems."

The book rocked the artificial-intelligence community, which derided Dreyfus as an ignorant outsider. But for Klein, Dreyfus's argument was a revelation. Klein had been helping the Air Force to develop a training program using flight simulation at Wright-Patterson, and he had noticed that novice fighter pilots were trying to follow the classic decision-making model, which was similar to the one being used to construct artificial-intelligence systems: They used deductive logical reasoning to help them make deliberate choices. But as the trainees put in hundreds of hours of flying time, and as their skills and experience grew, they abandoned the model.

"I had a conversation with an instructor pilot that really stuck with me," recalls Klein. "When he first started flying, he was terribly frightened. If he made a mistake, he'd die. He had to follow all of these rules and checklists in order to fly the plane correctly, and it was an extremely nerve-racking time. But at some point in his development, he underwent a profound change. Suddenly, it felt as if he wasn't flying the plane -- it felt as if he was flying. He had internalized all of the procedures for flying until the plane had felt as if it was a part of him. He no longer needed any rules."

Six years after he founded his company, Klein won a major contract from the Army Research Institute, which asked him to study how people make decisions under time pressure and uncertainty. He decided to track firefighters. He moved into a firehouse in Cleveland and started his interviews. But there was a problem: Veteran firefighters said that they never made decisions. They would simply arrive at a fire, look it over, and attack it. Klein was horrified. "Here we'd just won this big contract, and we were focused on members of a community who said that they never made decisions.

"The commanders said fire fighting is just a matter of following routine procedures," Klein continues. "So I asked to see the book in which all of those procedures were codified. And they looked at me as if I was nuts. They said, 'Nothing's written down. You just learn through experience.' That word -- 'experience' -- became my first clue.

"I noticed that when the most experienced commanders confronted a fire, the biggest question they had to deal with wasn't 'What do I do?' It was 'What's going on?' That's what their experience was buying them -- the ability to size up a situation and to recognize the best course of action."

Intuition Starts With Recognition

Klein's breakthrough interview was with a fire commander who often claimed that he had ESP, or extrasensory perception. Klein made no attempt to hide his skepticism, but the commander insisted on telling his story: He and his crew encounter a fire at the back of a house. The commander leads his hose team into the building. Standing in the living room, they blast water onto the smoke and flames that appear to be consuming the kitchen. But the fire roars back and continues to burn.

The commander is baffled by the fire's persistence. His men douse the fire again, and the flames briefly subside. But then they flare up again with an even greater intensity. The firefighters retreat a few steps to regroup. And then the commander is gripped by an uneasy feeling. His intuition (he calls it a "sixth sense") tells him they should get out of the house. So he orders everyone to leave. Just as the crew reaches the street, the living-room floor caves in. Had they still been inside the house, the men would have plunged into a blazing basement.

Klein realized that the commander gave the order to evacuate because the fire's behavior didn't match his expectations. Much of the fire was burning underneath the living-room floor, so it was unaffected by the firefighters' attack. Also, the rising heat made the room searingly hot -- too hot for such a seemingly small fire. Another clue that it was not a run-of-the-mill kitchen blaze: Hot fires are loud, but this one was strangely quiet -- because the floor was muffling the roar of the flames that were raging below.

"This incident helped us understand that firefighters make decisions by recognizing when a typical situation is developing," says Klein. "In this case, the events were not typical. The pattern of the fire didn't fit with anything in the commander's experience. That made him uneasy, so he ordered his men out of the building."