Critical Decisions - Redeciding cognitive biases - Gary Klein (Sources of Power)

HEC Alumni

Gary Klein is a research psychologist famous for pioneering in the field of naturalistic decision-making. He studied how people make life or death decisions under extreme time pressure and uncertainty, especially firefighters, military generals or ICU nurses he has observed on the field.
He is the best selling author of « Sources of Power » edited by MIT Press, « Streetlights and Shadows » and most recently « Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights ».
He presented a PreMortem method of risk assessment in 1998, summarized in a classic HBR article, he published in 2009 a joint study with Daniel Kahneman « Conditions for intuitive expertise: A failure to disagree » after several years of collaboration, and he was one of the leaders of a team that redesigned the White House Situation Room.
« Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority,
it is time to pause and reflect ».
Mark Twain
During this phone interview with Gary Klein, who likes to debunk false assumptions and limited beliefs to test how strong our foundations are, we address different questions :
- With such compounding evidence for decades, why are we in 2020 blinded by the truth that outside a laboratory, cognitive biases are not such a problem or don’t even exist ?
- Do decision-makers care about biases ?
- What is the impact of the 2020 crisis on our mental view of the world ?
- How to differentiate true science filled with doubt, humility and curiosity, and researchers who think there is a definitive truth, and believe they have found it ?
- Is there a right way to think ?
- How can we improve decision-making performance in organizations facing critical situations, based on human strengths and capabilities ?