Insight
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…”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Supported
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.”
Assertion Supported
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.”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Supported
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…”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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…”
