Gary Klein
Chief Scientist, ShadowBox LLC. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
2shows
2appearances
40statements
6resolved
6supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
10said about them ↓ Everything Gary Klein said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Klein: Debiasing fails because cognitive biases are effective learned heuristics
“I know my sense from the literature is that there's been little of any success in de-biasing people, and I think that's a good thing because the biases that get identified Are essentially related to the heuristics that we've learned and are part of the experie…”
Klein: Organizations inadvertently stifle insights because insights are disruptive and disorganizing
“What blocks insight is that organizations say they want insights, and they want innovation, And they really don't, but they're being serious. They think they want insights, but insights are disorganizing. As you point out, insights make you change the way you …”
Klein: Someone who cannot name past mistakes is not an expert
“If the person says, I can't think of any mistakes. To me, that means this person may be competent, but it certainly is not an expert. Experts are well aware of their mistakes and their mistakes eat at them until they can sort of imagine what I should have done…”
Klein: Historical performance and tenure do not reliably prove expertise
“I may be an investor and I have a track record of calling the market right in the last five times. And people say, wow, he really knows what he's talking about. But there are lots of people who are trying to predict which way the market is going to go. And som…”
Klein: Research shows group brainstorming fails to yield more innovative ideas
“The research on like brainstorming, we're all brainstorming together. The research shows that brainstorming does not produce more ideas and more innovative ideas.”
Klein: Experts rely on situational recognition, not comparing options
“And the discovery we made is that people don't Generate lots of options and use lots of standard evaluation dimensions. They use their experience to size up situations very quickly and to identify what's going on, what's likely to happen next, what can I accom…”
Klein: Discouraging Immediate Reactions Would Cripple Decision-Making
“Some people say we should discourage people from coming up with immediate reactions, but that's ridiculous, because that's not the way we think, and it would cripple us, so instead you want us to come up with a quick reaction, but If something, if we're wrong,…”
Klein: Breaking Through Skill Plateaus Requires Unlearning Outdated Beliefs
“My speculation working with a colleague, Holly Baxter, is that people get up to a certain level of performance And then they start to stagnate and they start to plateau. And people who break through and move to the next level are the ones who engage in unlearn…”
Klein: Premortems work by rewarding people for surfacing failure modes
“The way the premortem works is it reverses the usual dynamic of these meetings. Often at the end of a meeting, somebody will say, all right, we're done. We're just about done with the meeting. Does anybody see any problems? Nobody wants to identify a problem. …”
Klein: Premortems fail when framed as 'what can go wrong'
“One of the mistakes is that they just frame it wrong from the beginning. They'll say, okay, we should do a pre-mortem. So what can go wrong? It's not an issue of what can go wrong. We're dealing with a crystal ball that has showed that the plan has failed. We …”
Klein: Emotions Enable Decision-Making by Accessing Learned Patterns
“They lost their jobs because they could not use their emotions because our emotions are a way of drawing on, on the patterns we've built and on our experiences.”
Klein: Consensus decision-making favors safe options over bold innovation
“And I also don't like consensus decisions because those tend to be, and in other situations, the consensus is fairly risk averse, unlike with the Martian. And people want to have something that everybody can agree with, and you've lose, lost your opportunity F…”
Klein: Pre-mortem leaders must share a serious risk first to set candor
“And the reason for that is people don't know how candid to be, and the leader is going to set an example. And if the leader picks something that's frivolous or trivial, that tells people not to take it seriously. So it's really important for the leader to come…”
Klein: Research shows using a devil's advocate produces significantly worse outcomes
“I'm only aware of one study that tried to evaluate the effect of a devil's advocate to see if it had an effect, and they got a significant result. It was significantly worse than not using a devil's advocate.”
Klein: Pre-mortems reduce overconfidence significantly more than listing pros and cons
“Listing pros and cons are just cons. Reduced confidence, but the premortem reduced confidence more than any of the other techniques we measured.”
Klein: Most organizations focus solely on reducing errors over increasing insights
“To improve performance, what you want to reduce is errors, and that's what most organizations do. They try to cut down on errors, but they're missing the up arrow of improving, increasing insights. And so most organizations only focus on reducing errors.”
Klein: Curiosity about confusing anomalies is the core driver of insights
“So in terms of insight, in terms of changing our beliefs, that's the secret sauce for this kind of pathway, or even practically for any of the pathways, is to become curious about things that don't make sense.”
Klein: Corporate Reward Structures Favor Avoiding Mistakes Over Fostering Insights
“If you have an idea that's a bad idea and you make a mistake, that's the down arrow. Everybody can see it, right? It's public. So there's a lot of cost for making a mistake. If you fail to make an insight, nobody will know. So the reward structure is always fa…”
Klein: Good Ideas Are Fragile Because Single Gatekeepers Easily Reject Them
“It only takes one person in that chain to say, nah, we better not do it. And then the idea is rejected. And good ideas are fragile and precious and easily discarded.”
Klein: Evaluate decision-making by probing rationale in simulated scenarios
“How do you evaluate their decision making? You run them through a scenario, see what choices they make, find out what their rationale is, find out the reasons that they're picking one thing over another, and use that to determine if you think that their mental…”
Klein: Evaluate decisions by reasoning at the time, not just outcome
“Now, some decisions may have been good decisions that didn't work through no fault of the employee, and some may have been bad decisions that worked because the employee got lucky. So you can't just look at the outcome, but you have to look at what was the per…”
Klein: A complete mental model requires four distinct components
“My idea of a mental model started out with how something works. And now it includes all four of these components, how it works, what its limitations are, how to work around them, and how to anticipate confusion on the part of people who I'm going to be working…”
Klein: Stories bypass the ambiguity and limitations of abstract language
“Language is as a means for communication. But it's also a means for miscommunication because there's all kinds of ambiguity in the words that we use and people use the same words and mean different things and then believe that they mean the same thing and can …”
Klein: Researchers Find Scientists Use 'Knowledge Shields' to Dismiss Anomalies
“But the researchers who have investigated this find that scientists do the same thing. They have something that's called knowledge shields the way all of us do. That, that a variety of techniques for explaining away inconvenient data and anomalies.”
The other half of the tape: Gary Klein's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 8 times in 5 episodes across the shows. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Daniel Kahneman 3Annie Duke 3Ted Seides 1Mark Baumgartner 1
Statements about Gary Klein, by other people (2)
Kahneman: Premortems legitimize and reward dissent in group decision-making
“It's beautiful because when people are coming close to a decision, it becomes Difficult to raise doubts or to raise questions. People who are slowing the group down when the group is nearing a decision are procedures really, you know, it's annoying, you know, …”
Kahneman: Premortems legitimize team dissent and reveal critical decision loopholes
“And the premortem legitimizes that sort of dissent and that sort of doubt. Not only legitimizes it, you know, it rewards it. And so that's a very good idea. I don't, you know, I don't think that it's going to prevent people from making mistakes, big mistakes, …”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Capital Allocators 5
the Knowledge Project 3
2025 2 mentions in 1 episode
2020 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2019 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Gary's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| KNOWLEDGE PROJECTLEDGER | Chief Scientist, ShadowBox LLC | 1 | 27 | 100% 3/3 | full record on the Knowledge Project → |
| CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | 1 | 13 | 100% 3/3 | full record on Capital Allocators → |