The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 27 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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: 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: 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.”
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.”