The Art of Manliness - #112： The Science of Insights With Dr. Gary Klein

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast so the past few

00:00:19.860 years there's been a lot of books that have come out about how irrational humans are and that

00:00:23.740 we shouldn't follow our gut or intuition we shouldn't use heuristics to make decisions

00:00:28.500 quickly instead we should really think things out my guest today makes the case that while the

00:00:35.220 research that has come out in the past few years that these books are based on are useful they've

00:00:40.800 provided some great insights they don't really show us how human beings make decisions in the real

00:00:46.340 world all these experiments that this research has been based on has been done in the lab my guest

00:00:52.020 today makes the case in the real world in complex environments your intuition your gut whatever you

00:00:57.660 want to call it using heuristics can actually be extremely useful and right most of the time

00:01:02.760 his name is gary klein he is a pioneer in the field of naturalistic decision making and the author of

00:01:08.580 several books one is that i've read recently is streetlights and shadows which is all about

00:01:14.160 decision making in complex environments making fast decisions based on your intuition his most

00:01:18.960 recent book which i've also read is called seeing what others don't and it's all about how we gain

00:01:24.400 insights and the science of gaining new insights anyways today on the podcast dr klein and i are

00:01:30.080 going to discuss his research and naturalistic decision making how we can become better decision

00:01:35.260 makers and how we can become more agile decision makers learning how to use those heuristics and

00:01:40.280 intuition when we need to and then also knowing how to use that sort of more slow methodical analytical

00:01:45.660 decision making in certain situations and we also talk about insights the science of insights and what we

00:01:51.000 can do to create an environment in our and around ourselves to have more aha moments uh so a

00:01:57.180 completely fascinating discussion with some actionable things that you can apply today in your life

00:02:00.880 uh it's a i think you're really going to like this show so let's do this

00:02:04.380 dr gary klein thank you so much for being on the show thanks for having me i appreciate it so you have

00:02:14.800 uh spent your career dedicated to studying and researching insights the way we get insights decision

00:02:22.360 making in ambiguous situations you study uh naturalistic decision making how does can you

00:02:30.520 describe briefly what naturalistic decision making is and how it differs from the you know the classical

00:02:35.660 type of decision making we read about in books and in blog posts sure um naturalistic decision making

00:02:44.720 studies how people actually make decisions in uh complex situations and uh uh not just decisions but

00:02:53.580 how they make sense of events how they plan just all a wide range of cognitive activities in uh

00:03:01.380 uh you could say in the wild in in in in situations that aren't controlled and so um it differs from from

00:03:10.560 the conventional approaches to decision making which primarily um rely on carefully controlled studies

00:03:18.580 using um well-researched uh paradigms and tasks and using uh populations such as college students

00:03:29.200 that are easily obtained and can be scheduled for an hour or so at a time and can be given tasks that

00:03:36.820 they haven't seen before because you don't want them to vary in how familiar they are because that

00:03:43.160 could mess up the results and so that right away there there's a problem because we find in natural

00:03:48.520 settings that people rely on their expertise and so rather than screening it out in order to achieve

00:03:55.200 greater control and precision we want to see how expertise comes into play so naturalistic decision

00:04:01.820 making uh really just as a way of exploring all kinds of cognitive phenomena but in uh in field

00:04:09.980 settings and and and not not in under controlled laboratory conditions so some of these field studies

00:04:15.800 or field settings have been firefighters for example what they do to decide how to approach

00:04:20.720 a house that's on fire right that was uh one of one of my early studies back in in the 1980s and

00:04:28.400 the the belief was that in order to be a good decision maker you had to generate a range of

00:04:34.440 different options and then you had to have some criteria for evaluating the option and then you

00:04:39.920 figure out which option scored best on the on the criteria and we thought that firefighters didn't

00:04:46.760 have enough time to to set up that kind of a matrix they probably were just looking at two options

00:04:51.940 rather than a large uh set and we wanted to test that out and we found we thought that was a daring

00:04:58.480 hypothesis but it turned out to be too cautious a hypothesis hypothesis they weren't even comparing

00:05:04.660 two options they would look at a situation and know what to do and be right most of the time and so

00:05:11.600 that created all kinds of um confusion for us because we weren't expecting that so how could they be so

00:05:17.740 confident and so accurate with the first option it turned out because it was because they had enough

00:05:23.680 experience and they built up patterns over 10 15 20 years they built up um a large repertoire of

00:05:30.560 patterns and so they could rely on pattern matching to free to figure out what was going on but they still

00:05:36.540 have to evaluate the option and so how could you evaluate one option without comparing it to the other

00:05:42.180 options and we looked at our notes and we looked at our interview results and we found the way they

00:05:47.060 evaluated it wasn't by comparing it to other options it was by imagining how it would play out in that

00:05:53.460 particular context and so if it worked then they could make a decision in less than a minute if it

00:06:00.300 almost worked they could improve the option and if they couldn't figure out a way to improve it so that

00:06:05.300 it was adequate then they would say forget this what else can i do and keep going down their

00:06:10.600 their repertoire until they found one that would work this was a recognitional strategy and nobody

00:06:17.840 had identified it before because they hadn't studied how people use their experience to make tough

00:06:23.200 decisions under time pressure and uncertainty so this was the development of the recognition prime

00:06:28.820 decision model correct yes that's what that's where it got started and it came as a surprise to us

00:06:35.800 and we were just you know uh you're trying to to work with with experts who are you know trained and and

00:06:44.940 and and and and were demonstrably good at making decisions namely firefighters to see how they could do

00:06:50.480 it because the research suggested that it took at least a half hour or so to to arrange one of these

00:06:56.860 matrices and if you didn't make a decision like that you were supposedly not making a good or rational choice

00:07:02.800 and yet they were making good choices and we didn't know how they did it so that's what we studied

00:07:08.040 in the wild okay and so you develop this ability i guess are patterns what you'd call mental models

00:07:14.900 or are they something separate and distinct from mental models so a mental model is a really squishy kind

00:07:22.920 of concept for us a mental model is the story that we tell about how things work so it reflects the kinds of

00:07:32.120 causes that we think are operating and how those causes interact with each other and that's our

00:07:37.700 mental model but we can't usually usually we can't ever articulate what our mental model is

00:07:43.460 but we certainly have them because somebody with more experience we know has a richer mental model

00:07:49.920 and can reflect a wider variety of causes and and be more accurate about what what's happening and

00:07:56.100 what's going to happen um one of the the things i loved about your book was refreshing about it

00:08:00.680 because it seems like for the past 10 years or so there's been a lot of books put out there

00:08:05.740 um about how we're human beings are extremely irrational we make poor decisions and that we

00:08:11.900 shouldn't trust our instincts or intuition um i guess the upside of irrationality is one of them

00:08:17.740 thinking fast and slow um but you kind of you point out i think you're had you said this a little

00:08:24.540 bit in the introduction that uh the problem with the research that these books are based on is that

00:08:29.280 they don't capture actual decision making right it's in a lab um are these books out there i mean

00:08:37.920 are we as irrational as these books kind of point out that we are or should we can we trust our

00:08:44.260 intuition sometimes you know we're not as irrational as these books are claiming they're making a bold

00:08:50.920 statement and and it's exciting and uh it's uh you know popular it's appealing and the researchers are

00:09:00.060 extraordinarily talented at setting up uh controlled laboratory conditions that make their subjects look

00:09:07.800 uh look like like they they don't know what they're doing and look incompetent um but the reason that that

00:09:15.780 the reason why they set their studies up that way is to show that people will make poor choices

00:09:22.200 because they use heuristics and the way to demonstrate it is to arrange for the heuristics to be

00:09:29.140 misleading and to be inappropriate and and still people use the heuristics so the original idea

00:09:35.240 was to to show that people use heuristics which are rules of thought so simple rules about how to how to

00:09:42.240 the strategies for how to get things done and so they demonstrated that but that doesn't mean we

00:09:47.240 shouldn't use these heuristics these heuristics we would be lost without these heuristics and the

00:09:52.920 researchers haven't shown how valuable these heuristics are and how much we rely on them they

00:09:58.120 haven't looked at at the positive value of the heuristics that we learn through experience

00:10:02.260 and so i have a a a big problem with with the takeaway message from these kinds of books

00:10:09.280 that you shouldn't trust your uh your your intuition you should uh you should ignore your intuition because

00:10:15.840 it's going to get you in trouble now with regards trust um i don't want to encourage anybody to just

00:10:21.960 have blind trust in our instincts in our our intuition because intuition can mislead us that's why

00:10:28.060 what we found the firefighters doing they weren't just going with the top option that that popped

00:10:33.240 into their mind they would evaluate it by imagining what will happen if i put that up that course of

00:10:39.140 action into play here and so they they were evaluating it just not in the conventional fashion

00:10:45.340 so we we shouldn't just blindly trust our intuition but we also shouldn't blindly trust the results of

00:10:51.880 our analysis because we see people misleading themselves fooling themselves and doing incomplete

00:10:57.620 analyses all the time so i don't think you should blindly trust either intuition or analysis

00:11:03.840 so have a a balance yeah we we need to balance the two and rely on the two those are two different

00:11:11.940 kinds of capabilities that we want to take advantage of when we have intuitions about things we shouldn't

00:11:18.560 immediately do it but we shouldn't ignore the intuitions we should listen to them because they

00:11:23.320 may be here telling us things that we other uh from our unconscious that we otherwise wouldn't have

00:11:28.560 been aware of are are there ways i mean are there situations where you know intuition is a better

00:11:35.680 decision making model uh and are there some situations where the more analytical procedural

00:11:41.960 decision making process is better uh there are situations where the one or the other but i'm

00:11:50.660 uncomfortable with that question because in most situations we have to rely on both of them

00:11:55.220 okay so it's uh we don't have to choose should i be intuitive uh for this uh for this uh situation

00:12:02.160 should i be analytical there we should we should we should draw on both of these strengths and and we do

00:12:07.860 okay and there's one of the interesting sections in your first book of in street lights and shadows

00:12:13.140 was that procedures and checklists um sort of that methodical analytical process can actually

00:12:20.020 have some actually have some downsides uh what are those downsides of relying on a procedural base

00:12:27.020 model of decision making right and and i i don't want to uh mislead anyone to uh and and think that

00:12:37.080 that procedures aren't useful they're extraordinarily useful i don't want to take off in an airplane

00:12:42.480 where the pilots have left their checklists you know behind and and and they're just going to um

00:12:48.600 go by the seat of their pants i want them checklists there are many situations where checklists are

00:12:55.700 extremely valuable valuable and and situations where the actions are repetitive the situation is

00:13:02.940 relatively straightforward and you can work out what the procedures are and there's not an awful lot

00:13:08.240 of complexity to contend with but in many situations that that's not that's not the case

00:13:13.720 and and and the procedures break down because um people aren't aren't using procedures to handle

00:13:22.080 complex situations they're relying on the patterns and on the experience that they've built up

00:13:27.940 and and and even when they're trying to rely on procedures um they're using their experience to

00:13:34.620 know how to adapt to procedures and which steps to skip and which steps to add that maybe weren't in the

00:13:41.600 original uh design so people who have experience are even when they're trying to follow procedures

00:13:48.940 they're they're modifying the procedures to fit the situation procedures themselves aren't going to be

00:13:54.820 uh and uh aren't going to let people perform at a satisfactory or expert level okay and i think

00:14:03.000 you mentioned uh typically amateurs follow procedure more like and experts are more likely to use that

00:14:10.720 that experience that they've gained to maybe modify the procedure if they've recognized a pattern that

00:14:16.220 would uh i don't know dictate a different course of action right yeah and um

00:14:24.720 you know novices don't have any expertise and so the the best thing we can do for them

00:14:29.520 is is provide them with some ground rules and steps that they can follow and they're they're

00:14:34.840 they're extremely grateful when we do that um but then we sometimes in organizations people get

00:14:43.300 carried away and say let's proceduralize as much as possible and and that shows that they don't

00:14:49.040 appreciate um their skilled workers and and what their skilled workers have learned and the kinds

00:14:56.020 of expertise that they've gained so i mean if we with the whole if we want to become more adept with

00:15:00.880 our intuition we need expertise but how do we gain up expertise is it is it just a matter of time and

00:15:07.680 just seeing things over and over again um do we need to be methodical about it or do we just it just sort

00:15:14.260 of happens right where we just encountered so many so many vast amount of experiences that

00:15:19.220 through that process you become an expert yeah so that's what most people rely on is just the slow

00:15:28.440 accumulation of experiences and it just sort of works because most of us get better at what we do so

00:15:36.600 um there's nothing wrong with it except it's awfully slow and it's awfully haphazard and in uh and a lot of

00:15:45.480 situations we rely on on feedback but the feedback isn't always reliable and so i think there are ways to

00:15:53.480 speed up the growth of expertise to accelerate its development uh one of the ways uh that is available to most

00:16:01.320 organizations that they don't they don't use is to take advantage of the highly experienced workers

00:16:08.760 and and have them coach uh the junior ones and uh that in that way they can recycle the expertise and

00:16:17.480 make it more broadly available most organizations don't don't take advantage of of this and the senior

00:16:25.560 people the more experienced ones and that as you know you might say maybe they don't want to share

00:16:29.880 their their their their secrets because then they'll be obsolete but even if you wait you know shortly

00:16:35.480 before they retire and say you know can you can help us out now um they resist it because their expertise

00:16:43.400 is not based on rules so they don't they don't have an easy way to describe how they recognize things how

00:16:49.720 they make perceptual discriminations what their mental models are all of these are called

00:16:55.400 tacit knowledge and these are the basis of expertise and people don't um have an easy time of

00:17:03.160 describing it that's why it's tacit knowledge and so experts don't do a good a good job of of explaining

00:17:10.920 it um however what we found is that it's possible to take the experts in the organization and sensitize

00:17:18.920 them to their tacit knowledge and make them aware of uh the skills that that they have that they're not

00:17:26.600 just following rules and the opportunities that they have for um bringing things to the attention of

00:17:34.440 their uh junior colleagues and so i think you can do a a great much better job of on the job learning

00:17:42.600 than organizations currently do so i think that's one uh big area big way that organizations can and

00:17:49.720 leaders can improve the the skill level of of the people in their organization the second way is for

00:17:58.600 the the learners to to try to be more um deliberate about how they improve about how they work they should

00:18:08.440 be you know watching what they're the the skilled performers are able to do and then maybe they

00:18:15.320 should be the ones who start prompting the discussion i know that's hard for for somebody who's junior and it seems

00:18:22.440 um a bit aggressive but we find that that people who are experts are pretty proud of what they do

00:18:29.720 and appreciate that kind of acknowledgement and that kind of attention and so by by sort of saying

00:18:35.800 when you when you did this that wasn't what i what i thought you were gonna do why did you do it or

00:18:41.560 what were you noticing what were you thinking about so you can have that kind of a dialogue so i think it's

00:18:46.520 possible to have that kind of uh an arrangement uh we've also we've also been using um a method of skill

00:18:55.000 development uh called a shadow box method which we've just developed uh within the last year or two

00:19:02.520 um which is uh to help uh trainees see the world through the eyes of the experts without the experts

00:19:11.240 being there and uh the strategy we have is we present challenging scenarios and people go through

00:19:19.080 the scenarios and then in the middle of the scenario they've got to answer questions like rank these

00:19:24.360 options for different courses of action or different goals so they rank them and they write down the

00:19:29.960 rationale but then we only show them um here's what a panel of experts ranked and here's here's what they

00:19:37.800 were noticing here's the rationale reasons that they gave so that the training gets a chance to compare

00:19:44.680 his or her uh skills and observations if those are the experts and so the experts don't have to even be in the room

00:19:53.480 but by capturing all that information up front the the trainings and the novices can see how the experts

00:20:00.680 were viewing the situation and and how that differed from the way they they had been viewing it and you

00:20:06.920 actually started a website with this programming correct correct the website for anybody who's interested

00:20:13.880 is www.shadowboxtraining.com your book uh streetlights and shadows you talk about uh another method of the

00:20:24.680 pre-mortem i think a lot of us have heard of the post-mortem where after i always did these in law

00:20:30.680 school after my exams you would you'd circle up with your law school buddies and then you just sort of

00:20:36.040 dissect the exam afterwards and see which mistakes what problems you might have missed and

00:20:41.880 etc this is the post post-mortem uh but the pre-mortem is this basically you're doing what a post-mortem but

00:20:48.120 before the actual event right and the post-mortem the concept comes from um medicine where you uh have

00:20:57.240 had this kind of a discussion at the uh patient's diet to see what what caused it and so it's it's a

00:21:04.200 valuable opportunity to learn so the physicians learn then family members to learn why why their loved one

00:21:11.000 has uh died and and if it's something uh unusual then you can write it up so the whole community

00:21:17.720 because everybody benefits uh except for the patient the patient is dead so we said why don't we move

00:21:24.840 that up front uh like if you're doing a project instead of doing a post-mortem at the end which

00:21:32.040 you may still want to do why not do a pre-mortem and the way it worked it's really a form of uh risk

00:21:38.040 assistance now if if you have a plan if you have a new program getting started and you've got the

00:21:44.680 team ready and they're all enthusiastic and you see what the plan is then then usually at the kickoff

00:21:50.520 meeting or as you're planning it you'll say okay does anybody see any in any any have any criticism

00:21:56.440 or see any weaknesses and it's hard to to say to an energetic and enthusiastic group

00:22:02.520 here here here's my reservation and so people tend not to to respond with the over the critiques

00:22:10.280 and they may not even be thinking about any critiques they're in mindset of let's do it

00:22:14.760 rather than what could go wrong so we developed this pre-mortem technique and the way it works

00:22:21.400 is we say okay here's the plan and you're looking in a crystal ball and it's now four months later and

00:22:27.880 we started this plan oh gosh the image of the crystal ball is really ugly this plan has fallen

00:22:35.320 apart it's been a disaster so we know that the image is is clear that this has been a disaster the

00:22:43.320 plan has failed now everybody out in the room people on the team and observers everybody's got two minutes

00:22:51.320 minutes to write down why the plan failed and so you just wait and you give them two minutes to

00:22:58.600 to write down their reasons then you go around the room and compile the reasons and it's amazing the

00:23:04.520 kinds of things that people pick up because the mindset is different instead of the mindset being

00:23:10.520 yeah let's get started we're now we're enthusiastic here there's a mindset it's not about what if it'll

00:23:16.920 plan and if it'll fail we know it has failed now use your experience to try to identify what went wrong

00:23:27.160 and people will say the most amazing and prophetic things because they're in a different in a different

00:23:34.520 place so the exercise seems to work uh we've done some research it seems to work more effectively than

00:23:40.440 far more effectively than just asking people to do a critique interesting and how do you i mean i could see

00:23:46.200 this sort of uh depressing people where they're just like i don't want to take action on this how

00:23:51.080 do you avoid that where you uh you get all these problems and it's just so overwhelming that oh maybe

00:23:57.880 this thing's not going to work at all it's not even try is there a balance to it i mean how do you end

00:24:03.240 up how do you take action despite seeing all the problems yeah we were doing this using this

00:24:09.880 pre-mortem technique we were teaching it to uh to other organizations but we were using it ourselves

00:24:15.800 and then some of our staff members started to raise exactly that concern this you know we don't want

00:24:21.560 to be over confident and over optimistic but this is this is really uh reducing our our motivation

00:24:29.880 here so we added an additional step and the additional step i'm glad you asked me about that

00:24:34.600 the additional step at the end of the pre-mortem is to say okay we now have all the reasons people have

00:24:40.440 uh identified so why this plan failed now let's take another two minutes and everybody write down

00:24:48.760 what he or she personally can do to prevent this outcome from occurring from prevent to prevent these

00:24:58.680 reasons from from biting us and so now we compile that and we found some ways to improve the plan to make

00:25:07.160 it more rugged and and that seems to take some of the emotional sting out of the pre-mortem and leave

00:25:13.880 people uh enthusiastic but a bit chastened and maybe not over optimistic anymore that's good yeah i guess

00:25:21.640 the over optimism can has gotten to us in a lot of trouble and a lot of societal problems i guess like

00:25:27.720 the mortgage crisis was a crisis of over optimism yes people just people are just overconfident and

00:25:37.400 yeah in these situations because when you're just getting started you wouldn't start if you didn't

00:25:42.680 think it was going to be a good program and so you're you're looking at all the ways that that that

00:25:47.400 it's going to uh succeed and you tend to ignore uh some of the potential problems and we want to correct

00:25:54.600 all right so your your most recent book um is seeing what others don't it's about how we gain

00:26:02.440 insights and i think most people think of insights as sort of this mystical thing that just happened

00:26:07.960 out of the blue that you know the eureka moment uh and there's nothing really we can do to

00:26:15.000 control there's really no science behind it but in your book you make a case that there's actually

00:26:19.240 there's some patterns um to insights and so what are those main patterns for insights that you've

00:26:27.320 uncovered right so uh we can i conducted uh a study of uh 120 examples of insights and um previously for

00:26:42.360 the last few decades there have been a number of researchers conducting the studies of insight but

00:26:48.760 they conducted it in laboratory settings and it's hard to schedule an insight it's hard to say

00:26:54.200 let's you know you're going to have an insight at three o'clock friday afternoon but they the

00:26:59.880 the paradigms that that they use presented um people with an impasse problem where people are likely to be

00:27:08.280 making um inappropriate assumptions that trap them and so the problem seems unsolvable and people wrestle with it and then

00:27:18.680 some of them not all of them but some of them realize wait a second here's the trap and they

00:27:24.600 discover that the belief that's trapping them the unnecessary assumption they're making and then they they

00:27:31.400 they escape the uh they get around the impasse so we call that uh an impasse path and when i did my uh

00:27:40.520 my review as a naturalistic decision researcher i found that some of the cases fit that category

00:27:48.760 not too many that was actually one of the smallest categories i found the most common category was a

00:27:55.880 connection uh halfway that people use where you have knowledge that you've already gathered and then you're

00:28:04.280 exposed to some additional knowledge and you put that together with what you have and now you have

00:28:10.920 a much richer mental model a much richer idea and it's sort of uh an explosive aha experience of

00:28:20.120 wow now i see what i can do that i didn't realize before and so that's a second path and it was the most

00:28:26.600 common and we also found a third path that we haven't seen discussed in the literature that we

00:28:32.680 we call a contradiction path so the connection path is how you put things together contradiction

00:28:39.240 path is when you realize that these things don't fit together that there's a disconnect here and

00:28:47.720 do you have time for a short example sure um so uh this came from one of the interviews we had done

00:28:54.520 on the project where we studied police officers so then this uh relatively this a highly experienced

00:29:01.560 police officer is riding in his car and he's got a much less experienced uh experienced officer next

00:29:08.600 to him and they're at a stoplight and they're just waiting for the light to turn then the younger

00:29:14.120 officer looks looks up and he says huh because the driver of the car ahead which is a brand new bmw

00:29:23.000 and he sees the driver take a drag on a cigarette and then flip the ashes he says what because

00:29:32.120 nobody who's driving a new bmw is just going to flip the ashes onto the upholstery into the car

00:29:38.200 and if you borrowed the car from somebody you wouldn't do that this is somebody else's car so this

00:29:45.800 doesn't make any sense at all so they pulled the car over and as you can imagine it was a stolen car

00:29:53.000 and so the insight which he got immediately was these pieces don't fit together something is wrong

00:29:59.320 you need to investigate so this was a contradiction path is a third path that we identified so it turns

00:30:06.120 out that there's several different pathways to gaining insight not just um working around impasses

00:30:13.480 and and giving up unnecessary exceptions when you talk about some of the in the book you talk about

00:30:18.760 things that keep us from gaining insights and you talk about uh goals could possibly get in the way of

00:30:26.440 insights how could goals get in the way of gaining new insights because goals are supposed to be great

00:30:32.600 right we're supposed to have goals and accomplish them and feel good about ourselves

00:30:38.280 yeah this happens all the time and the the the problem with goals i mean who could be against setting

00:30:44.920 goals and and we certainly should set goals the trouble is when we fixate on these goals now if if the

00:30:52.200 if the project is clear and and the goals can be identified nicely up front and the situation isn't going to change

00:31:01.240 then yeah you you you try to reach your goal um the trouble is in many many cases we're we're approaching um

00:31:12.280 filled with what's called wicked problems and ill-defined goals that can't be defined up front and and and and

00:31:19.400 don't have any clear definition like for example um our goal is to you know find a solution for gold global warming

00:31:29.880 what's the right answer well there isn't a right answer or our goal is to reduce the cost of of of uh of

00:31:39.560 health care i mean we all want to do that what's the right answer there's not a right answer so these

00:31:46.360 kinds of goals and and many uh smaller ones on a personal level are examples of wicked problems and the

00:31:54.200 goals that we start out with um turn out to be fairly shallow the more we wrestle with the problem the more we're going to discover the

00:32:03.480 trap here is if we stay locked into our original our initial idea of what the goal is

00:32:09.560 we're not going to um you're not going to improve we're not going to shift to a more sophisticated goal

00:32:15.880 and we have people especially in organizations who are given tasks and and and they're told here's the

00:32:22.520 goal and they're afraid to make any kind of a change and so they lock into their initial goal they fixate

00:32:29.160 on their initial goal and their initial goal is simply inadequate and too shallow and they they do a

00:32:35.960 mediocre job so for that reason we advocate something that we've called management not management by

00:32:42.200 objectives but management by discovery to have people try to identify their goal up front but then

00:32:49.960 um be sensitive to what they've learned about the goal as they go along so that they can replace their

00:32:55.960 initial goal with a more valuable one and a more powerful one fascinating um another part in your book in

00:33:05.560 and seeing what others don't uh you talk about the role of serendipity and insights and making new

00:33:13.080 connections i'm curious there's been a lot of talk about uh you know we're seeing this in our own lives

00:33:19.160 right now with companies like amazon and netflix that have algorithms or programs that allow smart

00:33:26.760 discovery where you find things that are related to your interest already and uh you don't have to go to

00:33:33.720 the books you know there's no more browsing the bookstore where you just stumble upon a book you

00:33:36.920 never would have found uh if you were just browsing randomly are those sort of algorithms going to get

00:33:43.240 in the way of insights or possibly get in the way of insights i think so and and i'm i certainly appreciate

00:33:53.080 the power of big data and we have access to uh uh an amazing amount of data that we never could have imagined

00:34:05.480 before different kinds of data and we can obtain very easily and so there's more data than we can possibly

00:34:13.080 handle so we want to have algorithms that will do the job of sorting through it and these algorithms can do and

00:34:21.080 do a wonderful job of finding patterns and um of being able to uh track trends and and and and things like

00:34:31.880 that the problem uh with uh with a big data approach problem is that it um locks us in to what was what the

00:34:45.480 the original programmers knew and what their beliefs were and what their dimensions were uh and so the

00:34:52.200 algorithms reflect what people already knew and so you can use these programs to follow historical trends

00:35:00.280 which is very powerful but what happens again to a situation that has changed in some subtle but really

00:35:07.320 important ways and so the historical trends don't apply any and so uh what we see happening in organizations

00:35:15.880 is people giving up their own control to the uh to to the analytical approaches and relying on that and so

00:35:26.840 their expertise is starting to diminish as they cede control to the programs and the programs which are

00:35:34.440 are are very good at um um uh crunching uh the data using what we already know are not as as always

00:35:46.840 uh are usually not as good at picking up the departures from from the previous trends and being able to notice

00:35:55.160 um that the world has shifted in some small subtle but significant ways that have to be taken into account

00:36:03.720 and so without somebody watching what's happening um the the programs can can mislead us if if we're not

00:36:14.120 careful and and we're going to if we're not and if we're not mindful of this we're going to lose our

00:36:20.680 capability to provide an oversight for these kinds of programs and just become more and more dependent on

00:36:27.240 that and and i'm seeing that happen in in too many situations sure i mean people would say in the stock

00:36:33.320 market you might be seeing that um in other areas of uh economic life as well so i mean i guess the the

00:36:40.680 trick would be use these as a tool but don't make them a crutch right for for people who who are you know

00:36:49.560 one of the leaders um there's no way to evade their own responsibility for uh developing their own

00:36:59.880 expertise building their own mental model or making sure that the people on their team continue to

00:37:06.920 develop expertise so that they can work more effectively with teams what can uh individuals do

00:37:13.480 to cultivate insights are things are there practices or routines or something of that nature that we can

00:37:21.240 put in our put into place in our everyday lives where in basically make it a more fertile environment for

00:37:26.440 insights um i've wondered about that this is just started working on the book and it's only in the

00:37:34.760 last a few months that i've come up with something and i haven't tested it so i i may be wrong but it's it's

00:37:41.880 an idea that i'm i'm playing around with now and the idea is about um having people cultivate

00:37:50.040 an active mindset an active stance i'm calling it an insight stance or an instance about things that

00:38:00.280 happen around us and part of that me it will involve um noticing our insights our large ones but even our

00:38:09.800 small ones we tend to dwell on our mistakes a lot of us do i know i do you know i should have done this or

00:38:16.520 i should have realized that and and and and and that that's helpful but we should also uh celebrate

00:38:24.360 the insights when we have when we um notice contradictions that other people weren't spotting

00:38:30.280 or when we make connections that other people hadn't seen or when we um realize what what's wrong with

00:38:39.800 with with with with one of our beliefs or mental models and improve it and so we should be celebrating

00:38:47.880 these and and uh appreciating how we're continuing to uh to to build expertise so that's part of it

00:38:55.480 is to be able to uh uh just become more sensitive to insights that we have and to be more alert to

00:39:05.240 insights that we might have uh related to that is trying to just encourage people's curiosity

00:39:12.520 uh so that if you see a coincidence you don't just dismiss it oh it's just a coincidence um maybe it

00:39:19.560 is but maybe it deserves a second or two to think i wonder could there be something here that is worth

00:39:26.040 my attention or if you had get uh received a piece of of information that contradicts what what you uh

00:39:33.320 believe instead of saying well that's just an anomaly i don't have to pay attention to it

00:39:38.040 most of the time you don't but maybe give it a few seconds and say if this was actually a a an

00:39:45.800 accurate data point what what could it be telling me uh and so we can try to be more deliberate and

00:39:53.720 more mindful about um becoming open but it's not simply becoming open that sounds too passive

00:40:00.120 it's about being curious about coincidences and connections and anomalies and things like that

00:40:07.240 rather than just doing our work in a mindless fashion you can also um try to um be more alert when

00:40:17.160 we're working with a team be more alert to um to conflicts and confusions and i'll give you an example

00:40:25.880 there sure uh i was putting on a workshop and it was to a bunch of uh executives and we were talking

00:40:34.120 about expressing intent and uh how important it is now hard it is and one of the uh executives said i

00:40:43.160 know just what you mean i just had a situation uh last couple of days i i i gave one of my subordinates

00:40:50.840 his job to do i told him here's what i want i explained what i wanted my deputy was there so

00:40:56.920 my deputy heard me off he went and then we brought him back a day or two later to see how he was doing

00:41:03.880 and he was going off in the wrong direction and he just totally missed the boat and i said no no

00:41:09.400 that's not what what i want again here's what i want and he said okay i'll try to do better and off

00:41:14.840 he went and i turned to my deputy and i said didn't i explain it and he said yeah you did you just

00:41:19.240 you just missed it and so he was resonating to what i was saying but that didn't i didn't feel right

00:41:26.360 to me so i asked him when he came back and he had missed the boat did you think about asking him

00:41:34.200 what did you think i wanted and and and the man said uh no i i didn't why would i do that

00:41:42.200 and and and i thought of course that's what you want to do if somebody has misunderstood your

00:41:52.440 directions maybe there's a flaw in that person's mental model and this is a chance for for you to

00:41:58.840 discover it with him or maybe your description wasn't as clear as you thought and this is an

00:42:05.400 opportunity for you to get feedback about how people are understanding your directions and maybe

00:42:12.520 you can do a better job there's all kinds of opportunities when people are confused or having

00:42:19.000 a conflict or things like that that we would just as soon sweep under the rug and instead of sweeping

00:42:25.880 under the rug we can say this is an opportunity to gather some insights so there's ways of doing of

00:42:33.160 having a an insight stance individually and also in an organization fascinating well gary where can

00:42:41.560 people find out more about your work uh the um i've given the the website for the www.shadowboxtraining.com

00:42:53.160 there's another website that we have www.macrocognition that's all one word macrocognition.com

00:43:02.440 or they can uh look up my work on amazon or go into a bookstore uh and uh my book seeing what

00:43:12.200 others don't the remarkable ways uh people gain insights or streetlights and shadows searching for

00:43:19.000 the keys to adaptive decision making those are my two most recent books fantastic well dr gary klein

00:43:24.760 thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure thank you i appreciate the conversation our

00:43:29.160 our guest today was dr gary klein he is a research psychologist specializing in naturalistic

00:43:33.000 decision making make sure to check out his books on amazon.com streetlights and shadows completely

00:43:37.000 fascinating if you enjoyed our articles on situational awareness or the oodle loop this

00:43:41.480 book will flesh out some of the concepts we discussed in those articles also check out his

00:43:45.560 latest book uh seeing what others don't all about the science of insight really fascinating and you'll

00:43:50.040 also have some takeaways and how you can have more insights in your own life or create an

00:43:54.440 environment for insights make sure you also follow gary on twitter he's always posting interesting

00:43:59.080 research his twitter handle is kle insight at kle insight and then you can visit his websites to

00:44:05.560 learn more information about his work macrocognition.com and shadowbox training.com

00:44:11.800 well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice

00:44:18.680 make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com and if you enjoy

00:44:22.840 this podcast and have gotten something out of it i'd really appreciate it if you go to itunes or

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00:44:31.160 that also please recommend us to your friends that's the best compliment you could give us until next

00:44:35.240 time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly

The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025

#112： The Science of Insights With Dr. Gary Klein

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