Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making

I'm a big fan of Gary Klein's book Sources of Power, and I keep quoting it often in workshops and lectures. Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making is a follow-up to Sources of Power, published 10 years later. Although it's not exactly fresh meat, it only recently came to the top of my book queue. With the topic of adaptive decision making, this book fits in nicely with the recent trends in software delivery. My impression of the book was not as mind-blowing as Sources of Power, but it was certaintly thought-provoking enough to deserve a strong recommendation.The key thread in the book is examining the relationship between analysis and intuition, largely comparing standard procedures and skills based on experience. `The way we see in bright light differs from the way we see in shadows. Neither is the "right" way. We need both.' is a quote that summarises Klein's argument well. He examines contexts in which standardising ways of doing things helps and the contexts where that hurts, in particular with skilled performers, showing that experts mostly rely on heuristics drawn from stories instead of rules. There are many nice stories in the book about decision biases, but often arguing for the oposite conclusion from most popular psychology books. Klein discredits most of the research on decision biases and exposing how reasoning strategies can lead to errors because they were done using college students performing tasks that are unfamiliar, artificial, and relatively independent of context. His idea is that biases aren't distorting our thinking, but instead reflect our thinking. As in his previous work, Klein attacks the Rational Choice model of decision making, arguing that analysing several options and comparing to pick the best one doesn't help anyone make better decisions, because it ignores the way experienced people actually make decisions, and does not really help novices.With the rising popularity of big data and company analytics, I found particularly interesting the topic of collecting too much information and how that can lead to worse results. Concluding that "most experts use fewer than five cues when making judgments", Klein quotes research showing that teams with incomplete information often perform better than teams with detailed information, as more information often does not improve the accuracy of judgements but leads to overconfidence. There is also a nice tie-in with experiment-based strategies becoming more popular in the software world ("The only ones who succeeded had jumped to conclusions and tested them.") and an examination of the value and importance of feedback when dealing with "wicked problems", in which the goals are incomplete and keep changing, as well as occasionally conflicting.

Superb read.A beautifully balanced and delivered discourse on the flaws and limitations of practically all cognitive thinking models used today. The author informs you why they are flawed by method of pulling them apart so you can clearly see their inherent problem or limitation, gives good examples of real life situations that are relative, never uses a loose or abstract example to support his point and then informs how to achieve a more rounded, deeper understanding and appreciation of how to look at problem.I am an analyst by training and this book sadly blows out the water the original training I received years ago. I was so impressed with the book I bought the same book multiple times and gave them to my leadership and work colleagues for their personal consumption. For those who took the time to read the book were full of smiles after reading the book, they reported to me they found the book professionally enlightening and powerful in its substance, a ‘great book’.

Great product, like-new condition with rapid shipping times.

The growing gap between those with technical literacy and those can be closed, in part, by explaining technical findings using stories. Those who make the greatest impact on our views and the way we do things are expert as using stories to illustrate their points. Dr. Klein has collected a career's worth of insights and illustrates them with compelling stories that make this an easy-to-read, easy-to-comprehend volume that will enable readers to apply the important arguments he shares. My own investigations into government acquisition and healthcare information technology are threaded with people's desires to "remove the artistry" from practice and replace it with standardization. Dr. Klein makes compelling, and what I hope are broadly accepted, arguments for growing, supporting and taking best advantage of expertise -- rather than remove the artistry, he shows the advantage of focusing instead on creating more artists. "Streetlights and Shadows" is a highly useful volume for program managers, systems and specialty engineers that, once picked up, is hard to put down.

Klein does a great job clearly explaining the research and issues concerning naturalistic decision making. He walks through 10 myths about decision making and clearly contrasts it with formal decision making methods. Unlike some popularizations of psychology and human factors research, Klein clearly describes the actual research behind the conclusions, so we get a much richer understanding. Yet the writing is conversational and very easy to follow. It's a great balancing act. For the same reasons, the book also serves as a great resource for organizing and finding the relevant literature.

Mr. Klein delivers the goods on methodologies of adaptive decision making in complex environments. He takes on eleven largely believed maxims (such as "Its bad to jump to conclusions---wait to see all the evidence.") and demonstrates the inherent weakness of these commonly held beliefs. Klein discusses in detail decision making, expertise, adapting, and sense-making. He uses real-world examples from meteorology to the military to demonstrate a uncommon approach to adaptive decision making. If your organization needs flexibility and adaptability, Mr. Klein's title will provide insights that should not be ignored. Highly recommended.

This was a really interesting book. I think managers should be reading this because they tend to want to create more "stuff" in order to compensate for the lake of judgement. I got a lot out of this book.

Walks through the most common assumptions about what should be done to solve problems and drive continuous improvement, showing how these generally hold up well under simpler, more straightforward conditions (solving puzzles) - and it so well in more complex situations (solving mysteries). Very pragmatic and useful knowledge managers and leaders in all walks of life...

This book is very good, Klein has again made a damm good book, Klein has also include some info from Kahneman both of these lads wonce did not see eye to eye but in recent years there works have started to over lap and this book shows it in parts. very good book!

brilliant

"Streetlights and shadows" is a perfectly accessible book which makes a convincing case that intuition is a distillation of experience and indispensable for coping successfully with complexity. Analytic thinking is indispensable as well but insufficient for making good decisions in complex settings. The author restricts theoretical considerations to a sufficient minimum and focuses on dealing with complexity in real-world situations, providing an abundance of factual examples and a rich and multi-faceted portrait of human cognition for complex tasks.The book is well-structured and clearly written but quite repetitive and often the author's conclusions appear not very strongly supported by the presented evidence. Nevertheless, the emerging picture of human cognition and the role of intuition in complex problem-solving is coherent, comprehensive and plausible.

Fits with my current writing