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: Experts Relish Improvisation When Standard Routines Fail
“If they're doing the same job over and over again, they get bored, and then something happens, and they can't use the same routines, and the journeyman, they get really frustrated like that. It's not supposed to happen. I don't know. Who do I call? And the exp…”
Klein: Teams tackling wicked problems must avoid locking into original goals
“And we're finding that the notion of the goals is going to get richer and it's going to change as we proceed, as we go along. And you want to capture that. You don't want to lock in to our original ideas because almost certainly our original ideas are going to…”
Klein: Teams reporting zero surprises on complex projects should worry leaders
“Has anything happened in the last three months that has surprised you? And if you say, no, no, nothing, nothing has surprised me. You don't have to worry. That's when you have to worry, because I want to know what surprised you.”
Gary Klein: When Options Are Balanced, Pick Arbitrarily Instead of Agonizing
“These are the hardest decisions people ever wrestle with. And the paradox is if the advantages and disadvantages of the two options are almost perfectly balanced, it doesn't matter which one we pick. And yet we will spend days, weeks going around in a funk. Wh…”
Klein: Half-Day ShadowBox Training Boosts Expert Alignment by 25%
“We show that people's match to the experts increases by about 25% in just a half a day of training.”
Klein: Aim for individuals to trust you more after encounters than before
“One of his rules of thumb, maybe the most important one for my consideration is he said, whenever he's in an encounter with a civilian, or even with a lawbreaker, he said, I want that person To trust me more at the end of the encounter than at the beginning.”
Klein: True expertise relies on tacit knowledge, not explicit rules
“For complex tasks and ambiguous situations with lots of uncertainty, there's no set of rules that are sufficient, and an expertise is It's not about just incorporating all the rules. Expertise is about building tacit knowledge, and that's the core.”
Klein: Effective simulators require rigorous training scenarios, not visual fidelity
“It doesn't have to look like the real thing, and you don't have to waste a lot of money on that. You have to have really good training scenarios that put people through their paces.”
Klein: After-action reviews fail by ignoring the decision-maker's cognition
“And frequently the after action review is you did X and you should have done Y. If you had done Y, things would have turned out better. But it doesn't get into the cognitive part. When you chose X, what were you seeing? What were you interpreting? In hindsight…”
Klein: Cap pre-mortem risk writing at exactly two minutes
“When we did this for a number of projects in my company, one minute was leaving people frustrated, because people were still writing when they said time is up. When we tried three minutes, a lot of people would be finished, and they'd be twiddling their thumbs…”
Klein: Pre-mortems fail unless facilitators assert the plan has definitively failed
“We see premortems fail when the person who's facilitating will say something like, okay, we've seen the plan, let's do a premortem, what could go wrong with the plan? That's the wrong approach. What can go wrong with the plan? That's a typical critiquing appro…”
Klein: Teams in a garden path study failed to surface collective doubts
“And we once did a study where we had four-person teams going through an exercise, and it's called a garden path exercise, where we introduced something at the beginning that made it seem that certain thing was going to happen, and everybody was preparing for i…”
Klein: Pre-mortems must be capped at 20 to 30 minutes
“Premortem should take no more than a half hour, Maybe 20 minutes. If it goes for an hour, that's too long. So there's a virtue of keeping it really brief, because that compresses the energy rather than dissipates it.”
Klein: Meet others' apparent mistakes with curiosity, not criticism
“When I see people make mistakes, instead of immediately becoming critical and impatient, to become curious. Why would somebody smart do something that looks stupid? Maybe there's a reason. Maybe I need to try to investigate further.”
Klein: Fixation Errors Occur When People Explain Away Anomalies
“The way we get stuck in fixation and making fixation errors is we explain away the anomalies, hold on to the original wrong impression until it's far too late.”
Klein: Pre-mortems succeed by turning risk identification into a competition
“On the other hand, with a pre-mortem, The contest is to see who can come up with the most clever and worrisome issues that haven't been discussed at the time, so the whole incentive system changes, and now people, people are competing with each other to come u…”
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
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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 → |