What's Your Intuition?

Don't Deliberate -- Simulate

Klein's interview with the commander of an emergency-rescue crew opened a window into the way that mental simulation works in the real world. The commander is called out to rescue a woman who fell off an elevated highway and landed on the metal struts of a sign that was directly underneath the roadbed. She is dangling there, semiconscious, when the rescue team arrives. The commander has a minute or two to figure out a way to pull the woman to safety.

As two of his men climb out onto the sign, the commander considers using a rescue harness to haul the woman back up to the overpass. But he realizes that his men would have to shift the woman into a sitting position before they could attach the harness, and she might slide off the sign supports.

He comes up with another approach: Instead of trying to snap a rescue harness onto the woman's shoulders and thighs, his men could attach it from behind. That way, they wouldn't have to move her before she was secured to a rope. But then he imagines that in lifting the woman, the harness would twist her back and injure her.

Then he comes up with a third idea: They'll use a ladder belt -- a strong belt that firefighters buckle over their coats when they scale ladders. His plan is to slide the belt under the woman, tie a rope around her and to the belt, and then lift her up to the overpass. He thinks his idea through again, likes it, and tells his crew to begin the rescue.

In the meantime, a hook-and-ladder truck arrives. That crew positions a ladder directly underneath the woman. A firefighter scrambles up the ladder just as the rescue commander orders his men to lift the woman using the belt and rope. As they lift her, the commander realizes that he's made a terrible mistake: The ladder belt is too large for the woman. As the commander put it, "She slipped through the harness like she was a strand of spaghetti." Luckily, she falls right into the arms of the crewman on the ladder.

Mental simulations aren't always foolproof, as this case shows. But many times, they succeed. And they are efficient. It took about 30 seconds for the commander to evaluate each choice and arrive at what he thought was a good solution.

"We used to think that experts carefully deliberate the merits of each course of action, whereas novices impulsively jump at the first option," says Klein. But his team concluded that the reverse is true. "It's the novices who must compare different approaches to solving a problem. Experts come up with a plan and then rapidly assess whether it will work. They move fast because they do less."

The More You Know, the Faster You Go

If Klein is right, then organizations that teach decision-making skills by insisting that people generate large sets of options might actually slow decision makers down. Weighing options generally makes sense for novices, who need a decision-making framework to help them think their way through a problem, says Klein. But the way to get people past the beginner stage is to accelerate the growth of their experiences, so that they can rapidly accumulate the memories and the cues that will enable them to make faster, better decisions.

"I've been at commercial-airline conferences," says Klein, "where pilots are given little laminated cards that have acronyms on them like STAR -- Stop, Think, Analyze, Respond. It's a dysfunctional strategy, because in a real emergency, pilots wouldn't have enough time to use it."

The best decision makers that Klein has seen are wildland firefighters, who are force-fed a constant diet of forest fires. They fight fires 12 months a year -- in the western United States during the summer, and in Australia and New Zealand during the winter -- and rapidly build a base of experience. And they are relentless about learning from experience. After every major fire, the command team runs a feedback session, reviews its performance, and then seeks out new lessons. Moreover, the people at the top start at the bottom. The lowest-level crew members know that their leaders have been in their boots and have felt their exhaustion. This breeds trust and confidence all the way down the line.

Marvin Thordsen, 50, a senior research associate at Klein Associates, watched a wildland-fire command staff take only a few days to assemble a team of 4,000 firefighters, drawn from all over the country, to fight a fire in Idaho that had engulfed six mountains. "It's hard enough to make policy, to give direction, and to manage an intact organization of 4,000 people, even in a safe setting," says Klein. "These guys created that organization in less than a week -- and built in enough trust to risk people's lives. They knocked us out."

What does expertise feel like on an individual level? Klein answers this question with a final narrative. There is little drama in this story. No one is at risk. There are no last-minute rescues. It begins with a visit that Klein and his wife made to a county fair soon after they moved from New York to Ohio.