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ognitive Psychologist, Studies Decision Making in Crisis - Making decisions, understanding intuition and getting better at adapting our decisions and thinking; especially when there isn't enough time or information to make the best decision. There's actually a guy, Gary Klein, that studies highly complex, extreme risk decisions and how to improve them.
Read more about Gary here, and really you should...his work helps leaders, parents of all stripes. Joining Pete A Turner today is Bruce Gudmundsson - also a former guest. Bruce actually uses Gary's work in his day-to-day work training young Marine officers in how to adapt. #decisionmakinggames #podcast #episode #garyklein #shadowbox #BIDS #groundtruth #vision #orientation |
Haiku
Decision Making
When it’s life or death outcomes
And there is no time
Similar episodes:
Bruce Gudmundsson
Daniel P. Bolger
Brian Keating
Decision Making
When it’s life or death outcomes
And there is no time
Similar episodes:
Bruce Gudmundsson
Daniel P. Bolger
Brian Keating
Transcription
Jon Leon Guerrero 0:00
Hey, this is john Leon Guerrero. Our guest today is Gary Klein. He is a research psychologist and a pioneer in the field of naturalistic decision making. He has a BA in psychology from City College of New York, and his PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Pittsburgh. Now in 1973, and a prime example of how discomfort creates advancement, the Arab oil embargo forced American pilots to train in simulators
Hey, this is john Leon Guerrero. Our guest today is Gary Klein. He is a research psychologist and a pioneer in the field of naturalistic decision making. He has a BA in psychology from City College of New York, and his PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Pittsburgh. Now in 1973, and a prime example of how discomfort creates advancement, the Arab oil embargo forced American pilots to train in simulators
Jon Leon Guerrero 0:00
Hey, this is john Leon Guerrero. Our guest today is Gary Klein. He is a research psychologist and a pioneer in the field of naturalistic decision making. He has a BA in psychology from City College of New York, and his PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Pittsburgh. Now in 1973, and a prime example of how discomfort creates advancement, the Arab oil embargo forced American pilots to train in simulators that forced their training and decision making data into a focused, observable environment. And Dr. Klein began to investigate the way people develop expertise. In 1978. He founded his own r&d company, client and Associates, and began to study a range of topics that are now described as the naturalistic decision making framework that led to his breakthrough in the recognition prime decision model. And that describes the way people actually make decisions in natural settings this week.Search was subsequently incorporated in army doctrine for command and control and led to Dr. Klein being one of the leaders of the team that redesigned the White House Situation Room. co hosting this episode is Bruce Gudmundsson. And we owe Bruce a debt of gratitude for in instigating the interview with Dr. client in the first place. So thank you, Bruce, we really appreciate you. We appreciate your work as well and your acknowledgement of Dr. Clients influence on it. You guys really should look Bruce Gudmundsson up as well. As always, if you like what we do, please help us out by giving us at five star review and a brief rating on iTunes or Stitcher or Google Play or wherever you're listening to this fun podcast. We really appreciate the love. And I promise it will only take you a minute we think you'll be fascinated and we hope you'll learn a little something from our guest today. Dr. Gary Klein, millions rock productions
Jay Mohr 2:02
This is Jay Mohr
Jordan Harbinger 2:03
This is Jordan Harbinger
sebastian junger 2:04
This is Sebastian Junger
dexter holland 2:04
This is Dexter from the OffSpring
Unknown Speaker 2:07
, Rick Marana Stewart Copa, this is Mickey lapses and this is a skunk Baxter Gabby Reese is Rob belly This is john Leon gray and this is Pete a Turner.
Gary Klein 2:17
This is Gary Klein. I'm a cognitive psychologist I study how people make life and death decisions under extreme time pressure and uncertainty and you're listening to the break it down show
Niko Leon Guerrero 2:30
and now the break it down show with john Leon Guerrero and Pete a Turner.
Pete Turner 2:36
Yeah, so Gary is a big thinker, probably the leading thinker in these kind of topics the decision making thing, you can see his work at shadowbox training calm. You should go there. Everybody can learn more about decision makings and intuition and how these things intermingle. And you can definitely also follow him on Twitter. And so Gary, what's your
Gary Klein 2:56
Twitter handle KLEINSIGHT @kleinsight
Pete Turner 3:02
KleinSight and so make sure you guys go there. So when you have someone who's a master on teaching us about decision makings and all of the different things that go into that, you have to bring in Bruce Goodman son who's been on the show before because he absolutely trains young military people in this skill set. So, Bruce, really briefly, give us like a synopsis of how people can find you and what you do. And then we're going to get off and running and start talking about decision making.
bruce gudmundsson 3:28
Okay, yeah, I'm first of all, I'm gonna say I've been a fan of Gary Klein and his work since the 1990s. The early 1990s a phone number for you know, followed his work for a long time. It's a lot to inform my own thinking and my own work for the past now three years nearly so it's a real pleasure to be here on the break it down show with with Pete and with with Gary. So I'm thrilled to be here. So the way the best way to find me is through the military instructor gateway, that is is on blogspot. And you just type in teach us mc.blogspot.com.
Pete Turner 4:07
So what's cool about all this is Bruce is teaching, in this case, you know, young military officers how to make decisions. So he'll say, you're a Napoleon. It's this day, and this time, and what are you going to start doing? And then what Bruce does is he uses Gary's frameworks to help create that learning environment in a way so that these young officers can understand how they're making decisions. Gary, when you hear that Bruce is using these tools to train our young military officers, what are your thoughts initially off of that?
Gary Klein 4:38
I'm very excited. I'm very pleased that Bruce is putting them into action. I've known about Bruce's work for a couple of decades and I've been very impressed by the research and the writings that he's generated. So I'm delighted to have him here as part of this conversation. Bruce is one of the leaders of change in mindset and the Marines and look Like it works, it looks like it's it's it had an effect. And it's an amazing case study of changing the culture of an organization.
Pete Turner 5:10
Hey, this is Pete real quick, I just want to let you guys know we are proud to announce our official support of save the brave, a certified nonprofit 501 c three, with a charge of helping veterans with post traumatic stress. Here's how you can help go to save the brave calm, click on the link on the website. And my recommendation is this subscribe, give them 20 bucks a month. You've got subscriptions you can turn off right now that you're not using that are $20 a month, swap that out get involved. Let's help these folks out.
And it's an amazing case study of changing the culture of an organization. I'm leaving room for you, Bruce. Oh, yes.
bruce gudmundsson 5:46
Well, thank you. I this is very, very kind. I think the work the work of changing the culture continues. It's an unfinished task. But I think we have made enormous progress in the past the past three decades. That Gary also played played a role in that I know that you worked closely with with john smith. And john Schmidt continues to work with us was both the author of FM fm one warfighting, which I recommend that everyone read are all your listeners will, will gain much from it. But john Schmidt was also one of the key people in the revival of the tactical decision game, which are these simple one step games exercises that asked Marines to take on a role in a scenario and then solve a problem very, very quickly. And that done having made solve that problem quickly, and really, probably intuitively, then to reflect upon that and do an analysis of their thinking. So first, it's the what you're going to do. And then after everyone has done that, and that's been discussed, then people talk about talk about the why.
Gary Klein 6:59
Okay, so let me build on that, because I would just spend some time with john. Last week we are at the naturalistic decision making conference, we, we've been putting on these conferences for 30 years now. Every other year, we alternate between the US and, and Europe and this one we held in San Francisco just just last week. And the idea is to get naturalistic decision making researchers together to see what we've learned and and how we can do our jobs better. And john was there and he talked about a study he ran using tactical decision games just to see what kind of effect he had. So he started using tactical decision games, maybe in the early 90s. And after about four years, he wondered, am I having any effect and technical decision games are simply here's a puzzle, here's what's going on. Here's the map. Here's what your your orders are. And then this just happened. What do you do now? And so it really pushes people out of their comfort zone pushes them to have to adapt to be able to make decisions without much chance for, you know, for thinking and for analysis. JOHN never states this anywhere in the tactical decision games, but it pushes people to be prepared to give up what their orders were. And coming in the the the culture of the Marines was, if you give me an order, I'm going to carry it out that you can count on me. I'm going to carry out the order just as you described it. That's who I am. That's a powerful attitude. However, what if the situation is different? And what if people have to read what's going on? And so tactical decision games, force them out of that mindset forced them to think about how could they possibly adapt and and not follow the orders. And so, month after month, he would publish one of these tactical decision games in the Marine Corps is that every month, monthly A month, this message was get coming across subliminally because people were put in situations where the orders didn't make sense. And john wondered, after four years of this, he wondered, am I having any effect? So he took his very first tactical decision game, he reformulated it so that it wouldn't be clear that it was the same dynamic. And he ran it again, to see how people responded. And he had all the responses from the first time. And then from four years later, and he found a tremendous difference. He found that people the first time that people who responded were all over the place and some of them gave up the orders. Some of them didn't know what to do, some of them just about, you know, maybe at least half of them follow the orders, even though the orders didn't make sense anymore. And then four years later, when he presented it, just about everybody jettison the original water because Because it didn't make sense. To me, that's a triumph of, of, of changing a mindset without telling people if if john had said, I'm trying to change the way you think they would have been resistance, he didn't do that. He just month after month got that message across about the importance of being able to adapt, to use your judgment to use your experience to read the situation. And so it's very exciting to see.
bruce gudmundsson 10:28
In fact, I was I was present in John's first working group and appear in Quantico in 1989. So when we started using, we revived the TDG as a training method, and I stress the word revived because it's a very old method. I've got the oldest TDG I know about all this reference is second century BC, and that was described by Machiavelli in the 16th century. So it's been around for a long time. The trick and this is that this is where having a facilitator like john Schmidt comes in The trick is using them in the right spirit doing exactly what john did, which was to set up these problems so that the players don't merely have to go through a process but actually have to think and actually have to have to challenge at the challenge their orders, really think on their feet.
Gary Klein 11:22
And what we've been doing recently and john is working with us, he's working with my company he's he's part time with with shadowbox training, is to try to take this to the next stage. And what we're doing now is we're trying to help young officers, we're trying to help anybody really who goes through this type of training, trying to help them see the world through the eyes of experts, without the experts having to be there. And that's always been a bottleneck. You know, you can maybe identify experts, but they're experts, they're busy and they don't have time and they can't, you know, be involved and put on training. And so I learned about this shadowbox method. We didn't develop it. I learned about it from a friend of mine, Neil Hines, who was a firefighter, a battalion chief retired from New York fire department, and he developed it. And the way it works is you, you have a challenging scenario like you do with TDG tactical decision games, you have a challenging scenario. And then you have decision points on the way in that scenario, and it could be here's four courses of action. rank order which one you prefer preferred from highest to lowest, and write down your reason. But it's not just courses of action. It could be here's three goals rank order, which is your top priority, second and third, and write down your reasons or it could be here's five, cute five types of information, rank order how important these types of information are for what you do. doing now and write down your reason. So that's what you do if you're being trained. But we've also have a small group of maybe three to five experts go through the same scenario, the same decision points. They write, they do their own ranking. They write down their reasons, and then we compile it. So after I've done my ranking, you show me, here's what the experts ranked, and I want my ranking to match the experts. So that's sort of the the dramatic part, but the real learning comes in. When we show people. Here's what the experts was thinking about. Now compare it, what they wrote to what you wrote, and all of a sudden, you're realizing they're seeing things in the same scenario. That never even occurred to me. They're noticing implications. They're drawing inferences need that's completely went to bed by me. And so you go through these and then a short period of time, even a half a day, all of a sudden, your rankings are matching the expert by 25 to 30%, greater, greater match at the end of a half day, then at the beginning, you're really starting to, to see the world at least these scenarios through their eyes.
Pete Turner 14:18
That's interesting. A lot of what I did in when I would be in the combat zone was look for what the commander couldn't see, and be on the same patrol as another element and bring back a different side of that story, you know, and oftentimes, it was the Afghan side or the Iraqi side, so we could see what was possible for them. It's one thing to say, build a bridge, do this, do that, you know, all these incredible things the military can do. But what were the things that were important to do on that day for the Rockies that was possible for them. And then how did you link that to the government and it was it was really small things. But if you're not looking for small things, if you're looking for grand gestures like rebuild the bazaar or You know, start up the the multimillion dollar generator and power this, you know, Government Center, it's really hard to see those small things. And that orientation takes a while, because it's disconcerting, because you see problems everywhere. When I'm out there with my peers, and they see something different because of their institutional knowledge and their training to look for, I don't know, inoculate 1000 goats instead of what the farmers really want is x, not whatever you're providing. How do you from within that organization, nudge the dial more effectively to get the unit to be or the commander to understand where those decisions need to change and how they can lead the people that are not on task for they're not wrong, but they're not right?
Gary Klein 15:45
Well, this ties into something that my colleagues and I've been doing recently, which is what we call a cognitive after action review.
Pete Turner 15:54
Okay
Gary Klein 15:55
, actually, we call it cargo cognitive after action review guide for observers. And and the notion here, having watched, you know, marine exercises and army exercises, there's after action reviews, and typically the after action reviews, and maybe they've changed since I've seen the last one. Typically it's you went left and you should have gone right? You did axiom should have done why, but it's not what were you noticing? What were you picking up? In hindsight? What could you have been paying more attention to? Because if we can't be smart in hindsight, we can never be smart. And so I think in terms of building up your units so that they acquire the sensitivity that that you just described, Pete, you could give lectures and things, but I think it has a greater impact. If you talk about what happened in the last patrol. And what will people noticing and what could they have been noticing, and you keep doing that it's really about the cognitive part of what they're doing, rather than just You went left and you should have done right.
bruce gudmundsson 17:03
What were you thinking?
Gary Klein 17:09
That's what motivates you, Bruce. But you don't want to say it that way. Because that doesn't encourage discussion that that might encourage defensiveness.
bruce gudmundsson 17:19
Yeah, no, no, I'm I'm being deliberately ironic here. It's It is interesting that we have this cultural baggage when somebody says, What were you thinking? It can be seen as an accusation. But if you do it right, then, you know, you're actually saying that question, but in a very different tone of voice. So, Pete, Gary, what was on your mind when you made that decision? What did you see?
Gary Klein 17:41
Right? We once had an experience where we were providing cognitive skills training for the Los Angeles County Fire Department. And we had their training officers in the workshop and it was a three part workshop because I prefer not to do like one one workshop or arrangements where people are excited, then they walk out, then they get overtaken by events and they never think about it before. So we have them come back a second time A month later to see how's it going? And then maybe then a third time, two months later, for sure to workshop to see how's it going? So the first one, this one senior firefighter battalion chief said, can you use this with people who are attitude problems? And to me that sounded like clinical psychology and I don't do clinical psychology. So I said, No, it's not for attitude problems, or people who have psychological problem. It's really about training, decision making skills. And he said, he sort of, you know, shook his head. And he came back a month later and he said, You guys are wrong. Let me tell you what happened. I was asking last time about attitude problems because I have this one guy in my unit, and he's a real jerk, and I don't know how he got through the training. Now. He's in my and my department. And I really just think we have to wash them out. He's always doing he's not never doing what he's supposed to do. And so after the last workshop, we had a run we went out to, to put out the fire. And I gave him some direction. And he didn't follow orders the way I expected him too. And I said, at the end come into my office when we all get back and get cleaned up. And he came into my office. And I had just I've we had given them a poster and he was, he said, I was about to read them out, like I always do, because I keep writing them up. And eventually we'll, we'll wash them out. But before I did, I looked at the poster about how to do this kind of work. And I thought, let me give it a try. Then I'll read them out and do the What were you thinking? So instead of saying, what were you thinking? I said, So when this happened, you handled it in a way that I I wasn't expecting, tell me, tell me what, what, what was on your mind. And then this senior firefighter told our class A said, you know, he explained what he was thinking about. And it made a lot of sense. And it wasn't what I expected but it was actually pretty clever. And at that moment I realized he wasn't the attitude problem. I was the attitude problem. So you can question people but the way your question and and whether you're sincerely interested in what was in their mind that that's the essence of doing a cognitive after action review.
bruce gudmundsson 20:31
So this this sounds very Socratic to me. I mean, genuinely Socratic, you're not trying to lead someone to a conclusion. But really what you're asking an open ended question out of genuine curiosity about his his point of view.
Gary Klein 20:47
Exactly. Yes.
Pete Turner 20:50
brings up a lot of questions. Let me go back to the shared experience analysis stuff. So when you go out you can say what were you thinking? In all honesty, when you're deployed as a battalion, you've got these attached enablers, you don't really do that you don't really sit back and say, What did we all see, you know, we all go back, we write our individual reports, we shoot them out. And in my case, I shoot and everybody's like, this is what I saw. And I don't mind you guys questioning my analysis, because I expect that and I want that need that, but you can't question what I saw. What I often got back were rejections on what I saw, because we're in the same patrol, but I'm looking for different things because of my unique experiences staying through unit after unit after unit and scenes, you know, the same institutional base mistakes I had, you know, the unfortunate fortune of seeing a lot of my own and the unit mistakes. So when you can't practically have an after action review and all the reports have been written, you know, you can have one but it's down with the platoon level, you know, it's it's immediate, and then it's over. And then let's be honest, most after actually Your reports or reviews really go nowhere. It doesn't change institutional behavior. It's just something that you have to ensure that you've done so that nobody above you gets mad at you for not checking that block, right? We want Did you see?
Gary Klein 22:18
Right? So I'm thinking about these is having the primary value for the members of your platoon.
Pete Turner 22:24
Right, okay
Gary Klein 22:25
to take it to get the advantage of what you saw that they missed.
Pete Turner 22:30
Mm hmm.
Gary Klein 22:30
And so that's what you are providing to them. And the next step would be for them to take your reports, and circle, all the things that you picked up on. That was that were all the things that were in front of their eyes, sure that when zooming past them, that's where I see the value.
Pete Turner 22:49
the thing that would happen and this is the internet, you know, because the officers usually are, you know, they're picked because they're the best amongst their peers. That's why they're leading in a combat zone. You know, the colonel gets the report as well as As the brigade commander, you know, they're getting the full report still at this point. And they're able to slowly nudge the unit through their own leadership, whether it's the specific enabler or the unity. I remember one brigade commander saying we're going to stop doing as many things wrong. And we're going to get more things right. I don't want a big pile of he said the word shit. I don't want a big pile of shit in the middle of room that we didn't got wrong. I want a few things that we got right that are going to last. And so you know, that was based on our reports slowly nudging this unit away from this leaf will focus to more of a state building focus, quite frankly. So so that it worked in that it didn't work in this somebody in the after action review angle because it was just too hard to swallow. But when the commander started giving out his intent, the pens went up people started writing and changing how they approach these problems. Bruce, when you hear that, like that lesson from the field, come down. How does that hit with you when you're trying to give because the lieutenant or the captain in this case, he's Running a platoon is standing next to another Captain who's running an enabler team and one of them gets it and the other one doesn't.
bruce gudmundsson 24:06
I'm drawn back to the idea of Socratic conversation,
Pete Turner 24:11
okay,
bruce gudmundsson 24:11
of asking questions in a spirit of openness in spirit of genuine inquiry, not rhetorical questions, not questions that are there are punitive. But genuine questions that ask about, you know, what's really going on here. One of the great teachers of tactical decision games from the early 20th century Ferdinand fash like to say the quest says UTM, what's going on here? What's really going going on here? Let's forget our theories. Let's forget previous experience. Let's just focus on what actually happened. So, you want to be able to ask that question. Another way of looking at it is using the word Pete very carefully critique as the idea off inding fault. But I think there's another definition of critique and much more useful one that that Clausewitz provides for us and the fifth chapter of of on war, where he talks about the application of abstract thought, deliberate thought to particularly particular events. And again, you're asking, what's going on here? How does this relate to what I already know? How does this relate to the way I'm making sense of the world? How does it relate to my cognition? You know, what, what, in fact, was I was I thinking this broader deeper view of critique is something that I think I'd like to see more of in, in our military culture.
Gary Klein 25:48
So let me provide my perspective on what you just said, Bruce. For me, it boils down I hate to when people say boils down because that always gets ridiculous but it does. boil down to two, one word. And that word is curiosity. Okay. And I remember a very senior instructor in the petrochemical industry told me at the beginning of his career, as you know, a tech leader and an instructor, he was just waiting for people to make mistakes, and then he would slam. And that's the way they would have better performance because they would reduce the number of mistakes. And after a while, he realized he wasn't getting very far. And then he started instead of looking for mistakes to slam. If somebody made a mistake, instead of slamming the person, he wondered, why did the person this is a smart person who wants to do a good job. So why did the person go down that road? And he would be genuinely curious to see what he could learn? And maybe there was a good reason for it. So it was the switch from the punitive to to the curious, and I think that that's what I'm hearing and, and what you're describing Bruce in that, you know, that To initiate that kind of curiosity, during critiques and during responses would be, I think, extremely powerful of mindset shift.
bruce gudmundsson 27:09
Yes, yes. And say it's a very hard thing to do. Because so much of our schooling, I won't use the word education, but I'll say schooling is about producing the right answer at the right time. And and reproducing it in a way that's unequivocal. That the you have to be able to say the same things with confidence. You You give the solution to the math problem with confidence. You don't say, Well, you know, maybe I could be wrong. Maybe I've missed a step here. You just give a number. And if you're right, you're right. If you're wrong, you're wrong. And we reward people for this kind of certainty, as opposed to rewarding them for curiosity.
Gary Klein 27:50
Now, a friend of mine, Phil Joseph, retired senior officer in the Seattle fire department, and headed there training for many years said he was trying to get this across. And he worked hard to get it across. And he wasn't particularly successful. Only about 30% of his instructors could make that mindset shift. And so he was a little frustrated by that. But he said, in a way the next generation was picking up on it, because they had a chance to see the different instructors, the ones who would question with real genuine curiosity. And the ones who were questioning with what were you thinking, and they could see the difference. And so when they were becoming instructors, they were buying into it because they had seen the effect it had on them. Now there's another thing I want to bring up here that we've been talking about is a simple diagram that I've created and I can, I don't have to show you the diagram. I can just describe it. It's about improving performance and to improve performance. There's a two arrows one going down, one going up.
Pete Turner 29:04
Hey, this is Pete a Turner from Lyons rock productions. We create podcasts around here. And if you your brand or your company want to figure out how to do a podcast, just talk to me, I'll give you the advice on the right gear. The best plan is show you how to take the podcast that makes sense for you that's sustainable. That's scalable and fun. Hit me up at Pete at breakdown show. com Let me help I want to hear about it.
Gary Klein 29:26
improve performance. There's two arrows one going down, one going up. And you need to engage in both of those arrows. The one going down is what you have to reduce and what you have to reduce his mistakes, his errors. And organizations have lots of ways of trying to reduce mistakes. They come up with procedures and checklists and focus on that which you have to increase the up arrow which you want to increase his expertise. You want to increase insights and Most organizations don't pay any attention to the up arrow. But you, you really need both. You don't want to go home at the end of the day, just thinking about the down arrow. You don't want to go home and say, I had a great day. I didn't make any mistakes. You know that that's not a really productive day. You need to do both of these things and listening to you, Bruce, I think you're also advocating for an orientation that includes the Barrow that includes a chance for people to make discoveries, and to increase their expertise.
Pete Turner 30:33
How do you hold those discoveries and expertise, I mean, I would watch unit after unit roll in with the same level of training but not the same level of expertise and actually a disregard knowing full well that there is a trough in a unit changeover in expertise. The unit would reject this theory of learning from the unit before and convention immediately making the same money misorientation mistakes.
Gary Klein 31:04
That's an interesting observation. How do you break through that?
Pete Turner 31:08
Yeah, I mean, I had it down to a science to where I couldn't even enter into the decision making cycle with that unit for at least three weeks, like I basically would shut down, I would continue to do my regular work, but my interaction with them was just cursory, like it was I was present. I was earning my way in. But you know, I was never part of the handoff. And even when I was and they would say, Listen to what Pete says he will help you figure it out. It would still take them three weeks to three months to get to that point. And by then the amount of change that could happen was very limited, because at some point, they start bagging things up and going home,
Gary Klein 31:42
right. It's hard to do that. And I've actually written about this recently. There are many parts of our society, our culture, that are trying to question expertise and the value of expertise and trying to replace expertise. Those people in the artificial intelligence community are saying We don't need experts anymore. We're going to have super computers doing relying on machine learning. The procedure lists, everything can be boiled down to procedures, just follow the procedures and you'll be okay. And we have, you know, best practices movement, here's what the best practices are. And the best practices may sound good in theory. But if you're a physician, for example, you've got to deal with a patient and your patient may have several things that are causing problems. And you've got to figure out what makes sense for this patient not what's what's the best practice according to the literature. So expertise is under attack in many places. And it's kind of unnerving to see that spreading. And one of the ways it's under attack is the heuristics and biases movement, claiming that everybody even experts are biased, so why listen to them, and I think that's totally misguided. But that's part of the Attack on expertise these days?
bruce gudmundsson 33:02
And I think that a big part of the answer so I think that we need to do is get these heuristics people and these artificial intelligence people, give them send them through, don't copy each of one of your books. Because Because I think that the both they, each one of those movements you mentioned, the advocates fall into one of two mistakes, either they overvalue rationality or they overvalue naturalistic touristic decision making. And I think the beauty in your work if I may boil it down, and I know there's always a danger and reductionism, but it seems to me that at the essence of your work is striking the proper balance between between rationality, thinking things through using analysis using formal thought, deliberate thought and Trusting or or being informed by your instincts I use, I'm using the word instincts with the air quotes. Your intuitions has the word I'm looking for. So at these things that they exist in the healthy decision maker, they exist in harmony with each other, and they're informing each other people are telling the story of your friend and and her tires. Yes.
Pete A Turner 34:28
Yeah, so I had a friend on Facebook and she was like, trust your gut, your intuition, because today I went out before I went to work and I saw my tire and it was it was threadbare. It was about to blow it was down through two sets of thread. It was gonna blow in any moment. And so it to her in her mind, that was her gut, her woman's intuition, saving her life. And then I had to add, you know, putting the note on on the comment stream. Why didn't your gut tell you this a week ago?
bruce gudmundsson 34:56
Right, and you know that there are people you know, who sold problem in a very rational way, every week they go out they take their Penny if you can see Lincoln, you're okay you put it you put the penny in the tread, you can't see you know, or it gets we can't see LinkedIn you're okay you can see Lincoln You got a problem right there's that there's there's a rational method a procedure for checking your under obviously there's there's more to checking your tires. As a former motor transport your rating, I should know that these two things, they're they're logical opposites. But in a healthy mind, you want the the ability to do both, and not just do both, but to have the one inform the other two to two to always be, you know, challenging your intuition with analysis and challenging your analysis with intuition. \
Gary Klein 35:48
So let me react to that because I'm really glad that that you brought that point up, Bruce, because you're exactly right. And my opinion, you're exactly right. And I have this this model of decision making a recognition primary Decision model. And I can't tell you how many times I've seen people describe it as trust your gut, and just go with your gut. And it really, really annoys me because that's only half of the model. The model has two parts. There's using pattern matching, which is where your intuition comes from using your experience. But then using a process MIT usually mental simulation, to think it through consciously and deliberately to see if it makes sense in this situation. So it's a blend of intuition and analysis, exactly as you described, Bruce, and it's not just trusting your gut. Now, Pete, your tire story. I'm going to guess here. I'm just hearing the story for the first time. Yeah. I'm going to guess that the reason she didn't see it a week earlier, is she didn't look at her tire. Maybe, you know, the tires went when she got to her car. They were all straight. And maybe on this day, she had turned Steering wheel before she got out of the car. So the tires were visible in a way that they usually weren't. So I'm guessing I'm imagining that that's why she saw it this day than other days, but I've got my own tire story. Yeah. So my wife and I were on a bicycle trip across Ohio. 3000 bicycle is called a braid Ohio bicycle adventure. So we would go like 5060 miles a day. And go from town to town. We sleep at intense It was great fun. And one day or tire was it looked like it was low. We pulled off with it. And sure enough, there was there was a leak we needed to to change it. And it was it was her her rear tire right, I think. And so I'll confess I'm a klutz. So I didn't have I didn't have the capability of doing that of changing it. And somebody because it's a very nice community. Somebody stopped by and said, I can Do it. And so he got the old tire off, got the pumped it up, then try to put it in, and it couldn't get it in because it was too fat to fit it within the brakes. And he had to deflate it to get it in. And then he had to pump it up. And it was very grateful for him. And we went off. And there was an official tire changing station that we passed maybe a few miles later. And I told her, let's stop off here. And she said Why? And I said, I wanted them to check your tire. And sure enough, when he inflated it, he hadn't done it properly and part of the tube was caught, and it would have caused a catastrophic blow out. And the reason that I was nervous about what he was doing was he hadn't realized that when putting it on, he couldn't inflated fully because it wouldn't fit within the brakes. And to me that meant he hadn't done much tire changing recently, right. And so his expertise was lower. Then I wanted that, to me, that was the tell that he hadn't anticipated this. So that I think that's the kind of small QP that you're talking about the little things that we pick up,
Pete Turner 39:12
I want to change gears a little bit because you guys have said a lot of great things for your risks and, and decision making. And one of the things I learned to do is I crafted lenses and rules, you know, some voyeuristic time things like instability operations, we have to accept that instability is the norm and our mere presence creates more instability. And stability seems to act like a bow. So instability is the norm, it's the bow at rest, and then a unit will come in pull the bow back and create stability. But the moment that unit leaves, that instability is gone. And then the new one comes in and they pull the boat, you know, so it's, that's the norm. So if you look at like, everything we're going to do is going to cause instability unless we're unless we're constantly fighting that to hold that Bow is some other way. So whether it's agricultural operations or rule of law, there is an existing rule of law. It's just informal. So you're transitioning from one to the other? Well, that is not an easy thing to do. And it's very simple to think that because of my decision making in my processes, and all of my institutional knowledge, I could bring rule of law to this valley, when the reality is is no, you can't because that bow is going to relax into the normal in stable relationship that it normally has. So in part of the problem with this is that we don't develop cultural acuity at an institutional level and military units like I can't say the same for for disaster relief folks, or cops or police, but I have a sense that they have a cultural acuity problem too. So people will talk about EQ, emotional intelligence quite a bit but not CQ. In a way that displays any level of expertise. And I think that that my experience tells me that if you don't understand the goals and decision making, of the person that we're Trying to work with especially if we're in their cultural space, then we are not in the collaborative quadrant, we're in some other quadrant that gives you results like in competence, passive aggressive behavior. And then corruption would be another one because you're not in line with what they're doing. Because you haven't developed the lens to say, what is this culture? How do they do things? And what's possible here right now. So that's sort of my premise. I thought maybe I'd get you guys to kind of talk about joining culture, and finding rules of thumb to put in place so that you can give yourself because it's hard to see. You have to learn this stuff by making mistakes, and it's hard to see your own failures over and over again, equaling anything other than a bunch of failure, and nobody likes that. I'm going to shut up now. And I guess if you would start off either one of you. Let's talk about that.
bruce gudmundsson 41:49
If I may, I'll tell you a story about an imaginary opera company. We're expecting API. Okay, so here's an opera company. This is a story told by my friend Bill Lind, who was Also friend of john Schmidt's very much involved with the medieval warfare movement. And so this opera company does Aida, and it's a great Aida. Because you've got, you've got, I mean, you've got elephants. I mean, you've got the paper, Michelle pyramids, you got all the, you know, the, the the people who walked like Egyptians, you've got, you've got all the guys carrying the spheres, you've got the palm trees, and you've got elephants. I mean, how you know, and you do this great EIeta. But every time you start booking shows, people want different things. They want the Beatles tribute bands, they want musical comedy, they want everything but I eat it. And you're always frustrated by your inability to put on Aida, because that's the ideal, and that we were trained for. And this really is the history of the US Army, and to a lesser extent, the Marine Corps and the army. Right. The army has this idea that we're going to do it Yes. Right. And every back back in 1991 we had Desert Storm and we got close and it was a thing of beauty and everybody was happy I mean there were there was dancing dancing in the in the breeze dancing in the hall after Desert Storm, because finally this was something new like the world want to try ever since then and actually before then we've had all these other requirements. And we're really setting up people for failure we're staying is going to look this way. All of this pattern of not only what we're going to tell you what the pattern is, but we've worked we've got all these manuals, which tell you exactly what the pattern is yes, and these are this is the libretto for for Aida and so everybody is disappointed rather than taking starting every morning with Okay, you're in a new situation. Here's a problem, solve it and making sure you have a wide variety of problems from a wide variety of, of points of view.
Gary Klein 44:03
Okay, so I think it's a great story about what people are expecting and and our, our tendency to be oblivious to it to where they are. And I agree with that. My wife Helen Klein, wrote an article and appeared in military review, about this issue about cultural differences. One of her areas of specialty is what different ways that cultures think. And we just assume that everybody thinks the way we do and it turns out to be fairly, fairly misguided, and in some cases, very dangerous because our assumption is is wrong and and the research is clear. And the practices clear that when you encounter different cultures, you're going to be either surprised, but usually you're going to often you're going to be contemptuous. What's wrong with them right back to Bruce's question. Man, what were you thinking? You know, just become impatient with them. So we see somebody giving, you know, a leader giving jobs to relatives and we say, That's corrupt, you know, but in a different culture. It wasn't giving jobs to relatives. It would be outrageous that that's what relatives do that that's what it means to be a member of the tribe, that we have some of the ways that cultures differ. We have a very independent culture, we think about ourselves and our own decisions, as opposed to very collective, interdependent cultures, where people are trying to find out what what's going on here. And, and rather than I want to, I'm supposed to think for myself. There's differences in fatalism versus mastery, we, we have the arrogance of thinking we can solve things rather than cultures that think these problems are not going to go away and they look at us and they think this is just ridiculous. This is just childish to think you can solve all these problems by coming in and making a few interventions. And we look at them, what's wrong with them. They're so passive. They're, they're not trying to make any changes. So we get angry at them with there's a difference in achievement versus relationship where we take positions, and we want to do a good job, and we want to achieve things, regardless of whose noses get bent out of shape. Because at the end of the day, what matters is did we get the job done? But for other coaches, what matters at the end of the day? Is our relationships preserved and honored and respected? Even if the job isn't done? Have we, you know, are we we still have to, to work together and so power distance is another big one that's been cited very often. You know, we're very concerned about making sure everybody gets gets heard. And then other cultures. They're very concerned about Respecting who the leader is. And so if you've got a criticism in a high power distance culture, and there's a there's a leader, you don't just say, wait a second, I'm not I don't agree with that. I mean that that's just that's just rude that just shows that you can't be part of the team. Whereas, you know what's typical there would be either not to say anything, or quietly during a break or fight, find some way to get your, your ideas across without publicly challenging a leader. So all of these are differences in the way people think and the way they socially interact. And the problem that we were encountering is for many, many the military. They went into the military without much experience in other countries and with other cultures, and they maybe they grew up in small towns, and you know, some of them had never been more than 30 miles away from the town that they grew up in. So they would have trouble in American culture, let alone You know, bring them to Iraq, or Afghanistan at least that. That's our suspicion our claim. Pete, you can tell me if that lines up with what you were saying.
Pete A Turner 48:14
No, I think it does. I mean, you talked about the fatalism thing. And well, you have a mastery of Al ghazaliya or even know that he existed and why he would be important to fatalism and and giving up the God's will. I just wrote a paper a peer review paper with my research partner, Dr. The day, and we were challenging the ethical pitfalls of doing female engagement and empowerment in conflict zones, because there's, there's only so many ethical things you can do and continue to be ethically correct. So if a commander especially a maneuver commander, is going to deploy, they have to give their unit as much lethality training as they can. And yet here comes this other thing that has nothing to do with we follow it Who's going to tell them that? You know, they're the ones that have to write the letters home to the kids don't come back. And so when someone's like, Yeah, but we're going to go empower females over there. Well, that's great. But you know, who's going to do that training and who's going to build that proficiency here in this unit? So all of these things, you're talking about that power distance thing? Here's a great story of that and that people in the show have heard this before, but for your guys's sake, we're in a district Center, the most populous district and the governor is talking and he's having an open discussion, and let's call it a discussion be nice, but really a disagreement with the State Department representative their and their state department representative was telling the governor what he wasn't wasn't going to do with his own space. And the governor said no, I'm going to put something else over there. And then the State Department person rolled their eyes at the governor. And you know, the meeting continued so we know enough. I'm I saw Dr. Rich I took Okay, let's see where the governor goes after the screenings over and he left the Government Center. But back to the American side of the campaign. He hung out with the psyops guys because they have video games. And he wanted he was so irate. He wanted just to go kill zombie Nazis in a video game, rather than go govern his district because he was so pissed off because of this power distance violation that the Kennedy School of Government graduate had no idea he had committed.
Gary Klein 50:24
I heard a story about from Desert Storm as we were coordinating our air campaign with the various partners, including the Saudis, and it was one major meeting of top officers from each of the countries and the Saudi representative was laid coming to the meeting. You know, the the Air Force general, I think he was a three star, his aid. Colonel was talking to him and the aid you know, it was talking and standing up and then just and they said and just sit down so the aid sat down Down in the Saudi generals chair Oh, no. No. And you know, they just started, there's a chair, it's empty, just sit down, we'll talk. And the Saudi general comes in, looks around looks what's happened in his chair. And he just sort of stands there. And he doesn't leave. He doesn't. But he doesn't say anything for the whole meeting. And then the meeting is over and he leaves and the three star goes running after him because he knows something's wrong. The Saudi General said, okay, by rights, I should withdraw from this coalition, because I've been dishonored. Yeah, but because this is so important. I'm only going to disengage for a week to show my displeasure in the middle of a war and middle of a war. But you know, that's what he had been dishonored. Yeah, in a way that our our guys were totally oblivious.
Pete Turner 51:54
I want to take a second to add some more color to that too. So so when you are in a place where there's a lot of shakes, and there's a hierarchy, and it's really impossible to come in and have a mastery of that locally in any kind of reasonable timeframe. So you set out chairs, and you sort of let them sort it out, because what will happen is, is the shakes will come in, and they don't know who's coming, who's coming as a whole lot of inshallah, God willing, they'll be there. But you'll see them get up and re rank themselves into the proper order. And so you just accept that that is part of what they do. And if you happen to develop some mastery in that great, but mostly, you don't have to mess with it. They'll sort it out.
Gary Klein 52:30
It's a self organizing system. Yes. Yes.
Pete Turner 52:33
Bruce, I didn't hear from you on that. I want to make sure we leave room for you.
bruce gudmundsson 52:36
Yes, no, no, I the question I that that keeps popping into my head as we have these discussions, is how can we teach all these skills we have been describing over over the past, you know, nearly an hour now. How do we teach people or how do we help people teach themselves? How do we cultivate these virtues this balance Sick of, of rationality and intuition, this ability to avoid mistakes on the one hand and develop expertise on the other disability to do things to have these legal skills which are unforgiving right if you if you activate your hand grenade in the wrong order well that's the mistake you only make once Yeah, he is hoping that is the order right? But at the same time you want to develop all of these I I disliked the term soft skills, but these perception of, of subtleties. How do you build a system that that promotes these these skills?
Pete Turner 53:48
Boy
Gary Klein 53:48
, well, nobody really knows because it's a monumental job. I've discussed to the approaches that we've been working on and tactical decision game. She shadowbox method of using scenarios to get people up to speed and then this cognitive after action review. But another thing you can do is stop doing the wrong thing, which is protecting yourself by believing that we can proceed realize everything. And eventually it can be turned over to smart machines. And we see experiments like like the Navy, with some of their experiments with with ships with reduced staffing, so that everybody is a generalist, and everybody can quickly master other jobs. Well, they can master the procedures, but they can't take the five or 10 years that that's required to become an expert. And so we're seeing a devaluation of the importance of expertise and the convenient assumption that it can all be procedural eyes and it can all be handled and and We don't have to devote time and training that you're talking about Bruce, because that's expensive, and it's inefficient. And so people are preferring to believe, and it's not necessary.
Pete Turner 55:13
And the thing with culture is that it provides variables that you can't see, unless you have cultural acuity, which is not easy, again, 510 years of making a lot of mistakes and winnowing those mistakes down to that you have the ability to accept, and I call it miss comfort, because it's not discomfort. It's just you don't know what that comfort is. So you, you accept that. And know that while you're in that discomfort stage, you're quickly gathering the cultural sensibility for that region or that institution or that interaction that you need to be able to get to a completely different place that unlocks your ability to not only accomplish your goal, but to use their smooth established cultural paths. But you can't do that unless you can withstand a lot of discomfort and I don't know how you train for that specifically?
Gary Klein 56:02
Well, I, my suggestion is that given, say, the Marine Corps and the way the Marine Corps gets thrust into all parts of the world, there's no way to prepare training for every region or you know, every every type of culture that you might be thrust into. And if you provided all of that, it'd be no time to do anything else. Right? But what you can do is try to cure people of the belief that everybody thinks like us, and everybody relates like we do. And that is this is going to be a different environment. And what and you need to be curious that we don't know what the differences are. You're going to have to make those discoveries for yourself, but you're going to have to make discoveries rather than just dismiss people and be contemptuous of them. Because they don't act like we do.
Pete Turner 57:00
Bruce.
bruce gudmundsson 57:01
So you're saying that Walt Disney lied, it is not a small world. So this is a problem I have been, you know, engaging for for a long time. And I think that part of the solution is to us decision games, and lots of them. Some will be tactical, some will be cultural, some will will, will defy categorization. And I have a strong prejudice in favor of decision games that are based upon real events. We sometimes call these decision forcing cases. So from the point of view of the player, this is very much like a decision game. You are this person in this situation, what do you do? But at the end, you have the rest of the story, you have the reveal you have what actually happened in the real world and that provides a baseline against which people can judge their decisions. And if you draw these cases, from a wide enough variety of sources, from a multitude of cultures, in a multitude of times, of course, the past is a different country as historians like to say that if you give people a variety of these scenarios, and then show them how the person in that situation reacted, the decision that was made by somebody was actually there. They get to see big experience the curious experience of a wide variety of cultures. And that the trick is is casting the net widely and making sure that for example in I teach one of these a week, three times twice online and one in person here in Quantico, and this week, we have a tactical problem. It seems Very simple. Where do you put your artillery on a hill seems like cut dry tactical problem except that the person making this decision is a very political actor. He's actually a Nicaraguan gentleman by the name of Benjamin celadon. It's 1912. He's trained as a lawyer. He's a very young man. The term general is is an honorific. But he finds himself in command of this, this rather mixed bag of fighters, some of whom are professional soldiers, some of whom are volunteers, some of whom belong to his political party, some of whom belong to the political party of someone who until a few months ago, what's his opponent, and he's going to have a very different way of looking at this problem. So the In short, again, don't want to boil things down to reductionist, but a big way of a powerful technique for learning These skills is role play. It's not just do the decision game in your own role being yourself, or being somebody you might be in, in two or three years or 20 years or so. But saying no, you're not the commanding and American force in the present day, you're commanding a group of Nicaraguan in direct dose in 1912. Your your commanding a, you're the shake of an Iraqi tribe in 2005. Your, your Alexander the Great Pyramid Napoleon Bonaparte, you're, you're, you're somebody other than than the person you are as a person from a from a different culture. Anyway, that's, that's my partial answer to this to both the cultural problem and the problem of how do we develop people how do we promote these this pair of virtues thatThat Gary talks about in his books.
Pete Turner 1:01:02
Yeah, it's a great conversation and we've been at it for just over an hour. And I want to respect your guys's time, it seems like we might have to do more because it's just such a interesting exchange between a lot of expertise in this. It's just been such a treat. I wanted to thank you guys for.
Gary Klein 1:01:17
Thank you very much for the opportunity. I've enjoyed it very much. And I'm glad that Bruce has been in on the discussion. It's always a delight having an interaction with him.
bruce gudmundsson 1:01:26
Well, thank you and Gary is nice to see you again and talk to you again. And I hope we'll get together sometime soon. I hope so, too.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Hey, this is john Leon Guerrero. Our guest today is Gary Klein. He is a research psychologist and a pioneer in the field of naturalistic decision making. He has a BA in psychology from City College of New York, and his PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Pittsburgh. Now in 1973, and a prime example of how discomfort creates advancement, the Arab oil embargo forced American pilots to train in simulators that forced their training and decision making data into a focused, observable environment. And Dr. Klein began to investigate the way people develop expertise. In 1978. He founded his own r&d company, client and Associates, and began to study a range of topics that are now described as the naturalistic decision making framework that led to his breakthrough in the recognition prime decision model. And that describes the way people actually make decisions in natural settings this week.Search was subsequently incorporated in army doctrine for command and control and led to Dr. Klein being one of the leaders of the team that redesigned the White House Situation Room. co hosting this episode is Bruce Gudmundsson. And we owe Bruce a debt of gratitude for in instigating the interview with Dr. client in the first place. So thank you, Bruce, we really appreciate you. We appreciate your work as well and your acknowledgement of Dr. Clients influence on it. You guys really should look Bruce Gudmundsson up as well. As always, if you like what we do, please help us out by giving us at five star review and a brief rating on iTunes or Stitcher or Google Play or wherever you're listening to this fun podcast. We really appreciate the love. And I promise it will only take you a minute we think you'll be fascinated and we hope you'll learn a little something from our guest today. Dr. Gary Klein, millions rock productions
Jay Mohr 2:02
This is Jay Mohr
Jordan Harbinger 2:03
This is Jordan Harbinger
sebastian junger 2:04
This is Sebastian Junger
dexter holland 2:04
This is Dexter from the OffSpring
Unknown Speaker 2:07
, Rick Marana Stewart Copa, this is Mickey lapses and this is a skunk Baxter Gabby Reese is Rob belly This is john Leon gray and this is Pete a Turner.
Gary Klein 2:17
This is Gary Klein. I'm a cognitive psychologist I study how people make life and death decisions under extreme time pressure and uncertainty and you're listening to the break it down show
Niko Leon Guerrero 2:30
and now the break it down show with john Leon Guerrero and Pete a Turner.
Pete Turner 2:36
Yeah, so Gary is a big thinker, probably the leading thinker in these kind of topics the decision making thing, you can see his work at shadowbox training calm. You should go there. Everybody can learn more about decision makings and intuition and how these things intermingle. And you can definitely also follow him on Twitter. And so Gary, what's your
Gary Klein 2:56
Twitter handle KLEINSIGHT @kleinsight
Pete Turner 3:02
KleinSight and so make sure you guys go there. So when you have someone who's a master on teaching us about decision makings and all of the different things that go into that, you have to bring in Bruce Goodman son who's been on the show before because he absolutely trains young military people in this skill set. So, Bruce, really briefly, give us like a synopsis of how people can find you and what you do. And then we're going to get off and running and start talking about decision making.
bruce gudmundsson 3:28
Okay, yeah, I'm first of all, I'm gonna say I've been a fan of Gary Klein and his work since the 1990s. The early 1990s a phone number for you know, followed his work for a long time. It's a lot to inform my own thinking and my own work for the past now three years nearly so it's a real pleasure to be here on the break it down show with with Pete and with with Gary. So I'm thrilled to be here. So the way the best way to find me is through the military instructor gateway, that is is on blogspot. And you just type in teach us mc.blogspot.com.
Pete Turner 4:07
So what's cool about all this is Bruce is teaching, in this case, you know, young military officers how to make decisions. So he'll say, you're a Napoleon. It's this day, and this time, and what are you going to start doing? And then what Bruce does is he uses Gary's frameworks to help create that learning environment in a way so that these young officers can understand how they're making decisions. Gary, when you hear that Bruce is using these tools to train our young military officers, what are your thoughts initially off of that?
Gary Klein 4:38
I'm very excited. I'm very pleased that Bruce is putting them into action. I've known about Bruce's work for a couple of decades and I've been very impressed by the research and the writings that he's generated. So I'm delighted to have him here as part of this conversation. Bruce is one of the leaders of change in mindset and the Marines and look Like it works, it looks like it's it's it had an effect. And it's an amazing case study of changing the culture of an organization.
Pete Turner 5:10
Hey, this is Pete real quick, I just want to let you guys know we are proud to announce our official support of save the brave, a certified nonprofit 501 c three, with a charge of helping veterans with post traumatic stress. Here's how you can help go to save the brave calm, click on the link on the website. And my recommendation is this subscribe, give them 20 bucks a month. You've got subscriptions you can turn off right now that you're not using that are $20 a month, swap that out get involved. Let's help these folks out.
And it's an amazing case study of changing the culture of an organization. I'm leaving room for you, Bruce. Oh, yes.
bruce gudmundsson 5:46
Well, thank you. I this is very, very kind. I think the work the work of changing the culture continues. It's an unfinished task. But I think we have made enormous progress in the past the past three decades. That Gary also played played a role in that I know that you worked closely with with john smith. And john Schmidt continues to work with us was both the author of FM fm one warfighting, which I recommend that everyone read are all your listeners will, will gain much from it. But john Schmidt was also one of the key people in the revival of the tactical decision game, which are these simple one step games exercises that asked Marines to take on a role in a scenario and then solve a problem very, very quickly. And that done having made solve that problem quickly, and really, probably intuitively, then to reflect upon that and do an analysis of their thinking. So first, it's the what you're going to do. And then after everyone has done that, and that's been discussed, then people talk about talk about the why.
Gary Klein 6:59
Okay, so let me build on that, because I would just spend some time with john. Last week we are at the naturalistic decision making conference, we, we've been putting on these conferences for 30 years now. Every other year, we alternate between the US and, and Europe and this one we held in San Francisco just just last week. And the idea is to get naturalistic decision making researchers together to see what we've learned and and how we can do our jobs better. And john was there and he talked about a study he ran using tactical decision games just to see what kind of effect he had. So he started using tactical decision games, maybe in the early 90s. And after about four years, he wondered, am I having any effect and technical decision games are simply here's a puzzle, here's what's going on. Here's the map. Here's what your your orders are. And then this just happened. What do you do now? And so it really pushes people out of their comfort zone pushes them to have to adapt to be able to make decisions without much chance for, you know, for thinking and for analysis. JOHN never states this anywhere in the tactical decision games, but it pushes people to be prepared to give up what their orders were. And coming in the the the culture of the Marines was, if you give me an order, I'm going to carry it out that you can count on me. I'm going to carry out the order just as you described it. That's who I am. That's a powerful attitude. However, what if the situation is different? And what if people have to read what's going on? And so tactical decision games, force them out of that mindset forced them to think about how could they possibly adapt and and not follow the orders. And so, month after month, he would publish one of these tactical decision games in the Marine Corps is that every month, monthly A month, this message was get coming across subliminally because people were put in situations where the orders didn't make sense. And john wondered, after four years of this, he wondered, am I having any effect? So he took his very first tactical decision game, he reformulated it so that it wouldn't be clear that it was the same dynamic. And he ran it again, to see how people responded. And he had all the responses from the first time. And then from four years later, and he found a tremendous difference. He found that people the first time that people who responded were all over the place and some of them gave up the orders. Some of them didn't know what to do, some of them just about, you know, maybe at least half of them follow the orders, even though the orders didn't make sense anymore. And then four years later, when he presented it, just about everybody jettison the original water because Because it didn't make sense. To me, that's a triumph of, of, of changing a mindset without telling people if if john had said, I'm trying to change the way you think they would have been resistance, he didn't do that. He just month after month got that message across about the importance of being able to adapt, to use your judgment to use your experience to read the situation. And so it's very exciting to see.
bruce gudmundsson 10:28
In fact, I was I was present in John's first working group and appear in Quantico in 1989. So when we started using, we revived the TDG as a training method, and I stress the word revived because it's a very old method. I've got the oldest TDG I know about all this reference is second century BC, and that was described by Machiavelli in the 16th century. So it's been around for a long time. The trick and this is that this is where having a facilitator like john Schmidt comes in The trick is using them in the right spirit doing exactly what john did, which was to set up these problems so that the players don't merely have to go through a process but actually have to think and actually have to have to challenge at the challenge their orders, really think on their feet.
Gary Klein 11:22
And what we've been doing recently and john is working with us, he's working with my company he's he's part time with with shadowbox training, is to try to take this to the next stage. And what we're doing now is we're trying to help young officers, we're trying to help anybody really who goes through this type of training, trying to help them see the world through the eyes of experts, without the experts having to be there. And that's always been a bottleneck. You know, you can maybe identify experts, but they're experts, they're busy and they don't have time and they can't, you know, be involved and put on training. And so I learned about this shadowbox method. We didn't develop it. I learned about it from a friend of mine, Neil Hines, who was a firefighter, a battalion chief retired from New York fire department, and he developed it. And the way it works is you, you have a challenging scenario like you do with TDG tactical decision games, you have a challenging scenario. And then you have decision points on the way in that scenario, and it could be here's four courses of action. rank order which one you prefer preferred from highest to lowest, and write down your reason. But it's not just courses of action. It could be here's three goals rank order, which is your top priority, second and third, and write down your reasons or it could be here's five, cute five types of information, rank order how important these types of information are for what you do. doing now and write down your reason. So that's what you do if you're being trained. But we've also have a small group of maybe three to five experts go through the same scenario, the same decision points. They write, they do their own ranking. They write down their reasons, and then we compile it. So after I've done my ranking, you show me, here's what the experts ranked, and I want my ranking to match the experts. So that's sort of the the dramatic part, but the real learning comes in. When we show people. Here's what the experts was thinking about. Now compare it, what they wrote to what you wrote, and all of a sudden, you're realizing they're seeing things in the same scenario. That never even occurred to me. They're noticing implications. They're drawing inferences need that's completely went to bed by me. And so you go through these and then a short period of time, even a half a day, all of a sudden, your rankings are matching the expert by 25 to 30%, greater, greater match at the end of a half day, then at the beginning, you're really starting to, to see the world at least these scenarios through their eyes.
Pete Turner 14:18
That's interesting. A lot of what I did in when I would be in the combat zone was look for what the commander couldn't see, and be on the same patrol as another element and bring back a different side of that story, you know, and oftentimes, it was the Afghan side or the Iraqi side, so we could see what was possible for them. It's one thing to say, build a bridge, do this, do that, you know, all these incredible things the military can do. But what were the things that were important to do on that day for the Rockies that was possible for them. And then how did you link that to the government and it was it was really small things. But if you're not looking for small things, if you're looking for grand gestures like rebuild the bazaar or You know, start up the the multimillion dollar generator and power this, you know, Government Center, it's really hard to see those small things. And that orientation takes a while, because it's disconcerting, because you see problems everywhere. When I'm out there with my peers, and they see something different because of their institutional knowledge and their training to look for, I don't know, inoculate 1000 goats instead of what the farmers really want is x, not whatever you're providing. How do you from within that organization, nudge the dial more effectively to get the unit to be or the commander to understand where those decisions need to change and how they can lead the people that are not on task for they're not wrong, but they're not right?
Gary Klein 15:45
Well, this ties into something that my colleagues and I've been doing recently, which is what we call a cognitive after action review.
Pete Turner 15:54
Okay
Gary Klein 15:55
, actually, we call it cargo cognitive after action review guide for observers. And and the notion here, having watched, you know, marine exercises and army exercises, there's after action reviews, and typically the after action reviews, and maybe they've changed since I've seen the last one. Typically it's you went left and you should have gone right? You did axiom should have done why, but it's not what were you noticing? What were you picking up? In hindsight? What could you have been paying more attention to? Because if we can't be smart in hindsight, we can never be smart. And so I think in terms of building up your units so that they acquire the sensitivity that that you just described, Pete, you could give lectures and things, but I think it has a greater impact. If you talk about what happened in the last patrol. And what will people noticing and what could they have been noticing, and you keep doing that it's really about the cognitive part of what they're doing, rather than just You went left and you should have done right.
bruce gudmundsson 17:03
What were you thinking?
Gary Klein 17:09
That's what motivates you, Bruce. But you don't want to say it that way. Because that doesn't encourage discussion that that might encourage defensiveness.
bruce gudmundsson 17:19
Yeah, no, no, I'm I'm being deliberately ironic here. It's It is interesting that we have this cultural baggage when somebody says, What were you thinking? It can be seen as an accusation. But if you do it right, then, you know, you're actually saying that question, but in a very different tone of voice. So, Pete, Gary, what was on your mind when you made that decision? What did you see?
Gary Klein 17:41
Right? We once had an experience where we were providing cognitive skills training for the Los Angeles County Fire Department. And we had their training officers in the workshop and it was a three part workshop because I prefer not to do like one one workshop or arrangements where people are excited, then they walk out, then they get overtaken by events and they never think about it before. So we have them come back a second time A month later to see how's it going? And then maybe then a third time, two months later, for sure to workshop to see how's it going? So the first one, this one senior firefighter battalion chief said, can you use this with people who are attitude problems? And to me that sounded like clinical psychology and I don't do clinical psychology. So I said, No, it's not for attitude problems, or people who have psychological problem. It's really about training, decision making skills. And he said, he sort of, you know, shook his head. And he came back a month later and he said, You guys are wrong. Let me tell you what happened. I was asking last time about attitude problems because I have this one guy in my unit, and he's a real jerk, and I don't know how he got through the training. Now. He's in my and my department. And I really just think we have to wash them out. He's always doing he's not never doing what he's supposed to do. And so after the last workshop, we had a run we went out to, to put out the fire. And I gave him some direction. And he didn't follow orders the way I expected him too. And I said, at the end come into my office when we all get back and get cleaned up. And he came into my office. And I had just I've we had given them a poster and he was, he said, I was about to read them out, like I always do, because I keep writing them up. And eventually we'll, we'll wash them out. But before I did, I looked at the poster about how to do this kind of work. And I thought, let me give it a try. Then I'll read them out and do the What were you thinking? So instead of saying, what were you thinking? I said, So when this happened, you handled it in a way that I I wasn't expecting, tell me, tell me what, what, what was on your mind. And then this senior firefighter told our class A said, you know, he explained what he was thinking about. And it made a lot of sense. And it wasn't what I expected but it was actually pretty clever. And at that moment I realized he wasn't the attitude problem. I was the attitude problem. So you can question people but the way your question and and whether you're sincerely interested in what was in their mind that that's the essence of doing a cognitive after action review.
bruce gudmundsson 20:31
So this this sounds very Socratic to me. I mean, genuinely Socratic, you're not trying to lead someone to a conclusion. But really what you're asking an open ended question out of genuine curiosity about his his point of view.
Gary Klein 20:47
Exactly. Yes.
Pete Turner 20:50
brings up a lot of questions. Let me go back to the shared experience analysis stuff. So when you go out you can say what were you thinking? In all honesty, when you're deployed as a battalion, you've got these attached enablers, you don't really do that you don't really sit back and say, What did we all see, you know, we all go back, we write our individual reports, we shoot them out. And in my case, I shoot and everybody's like, this is what I saw. And I don't mind you guys questioning my analysis, because I expect that and I want that need that, but you can't question what I saw. What I often got back were rejections on what I saw, because we're in the same patrol, but I'm looking for different things because of my unique experiences staying through unit after unit after unit and scenes, you know, the same institutional base mistakes I had, you know, the unfortunate fortune of seeing a lot of my own and the unit mistakes. So when you can't practically have an after action review and all the reports have been written, you know, you can have one but it's down with the platoon level, you know, it's it's immediate, and then it's over. And then let's be honest, most after actually Your reports or reviews really go nowhere. It doesn't change institutional behavior. It's just something that you have to ensure that you've done so that nobody above you gets mad at you for not checking that block, right? We want Did you see?
Gary Klein 22:18
Right? So I'm thinking about these is having the primary value for the members of your platoon.
Pete Turner 22:24
Right, okay
Gary Klein 22:25
to take it to get the advantage of what you saw that they missed.
Pete Turner 22:30
Mm hmm.
Gary Klein 22:30
And so that's what you are providing to them. And the next step would be for them to take your reports, and circle, all the things that you picked up on. That was that were all the things that were in front of their eyes, sure that when zooming past them, that's where I see the value.
Pete Turner 22:49
the thing that would happen and this is the internet, you know, because the officers usually are, you know, they're picked because they're the best amongst their peers. That's why they're leading in a combat zone. You know, the colonel gets the report as well as As the brigade commander, you know, they're getting the full report still at this point. And they're able to slowly nudge the unit through their own leadership, whether it's the specific enabler or the unity. I remember one brigade commander saying we're going to stop doing as many things wrong. And we're going to get more things right. I don't want a big pile of he said the word shit. I don't want a big pile of shit in the middle of room that we didn't got wrong. I want a few things that we got right that are going to last. And so you know, that was based on our reports slowly nudging this unit away from this leaf will focus to more of a state building focus, quite frankly. So so that it worked in that it didn't work in this somebody in the after action review angle because it was just too hard to swallow. But when the commander started giving out his intent, the pens went up people started writing and changing how they approach these problems. Bruce, when you hear that, like that lesson from the field, come down. How does that hit with you when you're trying to give because the lieutenant or the captain in this case, he's Running a platoon is standing next to another Captain who's running an enabler team and one of them gets it and the other one doesn't.
bruce gudmundsson 24:06
I'm drawn back to the idea of Socratic conversation,
Pete Turner 24:11
okay,
bruce gudmundsson 24:11
of asking questions in a spirit of openness in spirit of genuine inquiry, not rhetorical questions, not questions that are there are punitive. But genuine questions that ask about, you know, what's really going on here. One of the great teachers of tactical decision games from the early 20th century Ferdinand fash like to say the quest says UTM, what's going on here? What's really going going on here? Let's forget our theories. Let's forget previous experience. Let's just focus on what actually happened. So, you want to be able to ask that question. Another way of looking at it is using the word Pete very carefully critique as the idea off inding fault. But I think there's another definition of critique and much more useful one that that Clausewitz provides for us and the fifth chapter of of on war, where he talks about the application of abstract thought, deliberate thought to particularly particular events. And again, you're asking, what's going on here? How does this relate to what I already know? How does this relate to the way I'm making sense of the world? How does it relate to my cognition? You know, what, what, in fact, was I was I thinking this broader deeper view of critique is something that I think I'd like to see more of in, in our military culture.
Gary Klein 25:48
So let me provide my perspective on what you just said, Bruce. For me, it boils down I hate to when people say boils down because that always gets ridiculous but it does. boil down to two, one word. And that word is curiosity. Okay. And I remember a very senior instructor in the petrochemical industry told me at the beginning of his career, as you know, a tech leader and an instructor, he was just waiting for people to make mistakes, and then he would slam. And that's the way they would have better performance because they would reduce the number of mistakes. And after a while, he realized he wasn't getting very far. And then he started instead of looking for mistakes to slam. If somebody made a mistake, instead of slamming the person, he wondered, why did the person this is a smart person who wants to do a good job. So why did the person go down that road? And he would be genuinely curious to see what he could learn? And maybe there was a good reason for it. So it was the switch from the punitive to to the curious, and I think that that's what I'm hearing and, and what you're describing Bruce in that, you know, that To initiate that kind of curiosity, during critiques and during responses would be, I think, extremely powerful of mindset shift.
bruce gudmundsson 27:09
Yes, yes. And say it's a very hard thing to do. Because so much of our schooling, I won't use the word education, but I'll say schooling is about producing the right answer at the right time. And and reproducing it in a way that's unequivocal. That the you have to be able to say the same things with confidence. You You give the solution to the math problem with confidence. You don't say, Well, you know, maybe I could be wrong. Maybe I've missed a step here. You just give a number. And if you're right, you're right. If you're wrong, you're wrong. And we reward people for this kind of certainty, as opposed to rewarding them for curiosity.
Gary Klein 27:50
Now, a friend of mine, Phil Joseph, retired senior officer in the Seattle fire department, and headed there training for many years said he was trying to get this across. And he worked hard to get it across. And he wasn't particularly successful. Only about 30% of his instructors could make that mindset shift. And so he was a little frustrated by that. But he said, in a way the next generation was picking up on it, because they had a chance to see the different instructors, the ones who would question with real genuine curiosity. And the ones who were questioning with what were you thinking, and they could see the difference. And so when they were becoming instructors, they were buying into it because they had seen the effect it had on them. Now there's another thing I want to bring up here that we've been talking about is a simple diagram that I've created and I can, I don't have to show you the diagram. I can just describe it. It's about improving performance and to improve performance. There's a two arrows one going down, one going up.
Pete Turner 29:04
Hey, this is Pete a Turner from Lyons rock productions. We create podcasts around here. And if you your brand or your company want to figure out how to do a podcast, just talk to me, I'll give you the advice on the right gear. The best plan is show you how to take the podcast that makes sense for you that's sustainable. That's scalable and fun. Hit me up at Pete at breakdown show. com Let me help I want to hear about it.
Gary Klein 29:26
improve performance. There's two arrows one going down, one going up. And you need to engage in both of those arrows. The one going down is what you have to reduce and what you have to reduce his mistakes, his errors. And organizations have lots of ways of trying to reduce mistakes. They come up with procedures and checklists and focus on that which you have to increase the up arrow which you want to increase his expertise. You want to increase insights and Most organizations don't pay any attention to the up arrow. But you, you really need both. You don't want to go home at the end of the day, just thinking about the down arrow. You don't want to go home and say, I had a great day. I didn't make any mistakes. You know that that's not a really productive day. You need to do both of these things and listening to you, Bruce, I think you're also advocating for an orientation that includes the Barrow that includes a chance for people to make discoveries, and to increase their expertise.
Pete Turner 30:33
How do you hold those discoveries and expertise, I mean, I would watch unit after unit roll in with the same level of training but not the same level of expertise and actually a disregard knowing full well that there is a trough in a unit changeover in expertise. The unit would reject this theory of learning from the unit before and convention immediately making the same money misorientation mistakes.
Gary Klein 31:04
That's an interesting observation. How do you break through that?
Pete Turner 31:08
Yeah, I mean, I had it down to a science to where I couldn't even enter into the decision making cycle with that unit for at least three weeks, like I basically would shut down, I would continue to do my regular work, but my interaction with them was just cursory, like it was I was present. I was earning my way in. But you know, I was never part of the handoff. And even when I was and they would say, Listen to what Pete says he will help you figure it out. It would still take them three weeks to three months to get to that point. And by then the amount of change that could happen was very limited, because at some point, they start bagging things up and going home,
Gary Klein 31:42
right. It's hard to do that. And I've actually written about this recently. There are many parts of our society, our culture, that are trying to question expertise and the value of expertise and trying to replace expertise. Those people in the artificial intelligence community are saying We don't need experts anymore. We're going to have super computers doing relying on machine learning. The procedure lists, everything can be boiled down to procedures, just follow the procedures and you'll be okay. And we have, you know, best practices movement, here's what the best practices are. And the best practices may sound good in theory. But if you're a physician, for example, you've got to deal with a patient and your patient may have several things that are causing problems. And you've got to figure out what makes sense for this patient not what's what's the best practice according to the literature. So expertise is under attack in many places. And it's kind of unnerving to see that spreading. And one of the ways it's under attack is the heuristics and biases movement, claiming that everybody even experts are biased, so why listen to them, and I think that's totally misguided. But that's part of the Attack on expertise these days?
bruce gudmundsson 33:02
And I think that a big part of the answer so I think that we need to do is get these heuristics people and these artificial intelligence people, give them send them through, don't copy each of one of your books. Because Because I think that the both they, each one of those movements you mentioned, the advocates fall into one of two mistakes, either they overvalue rationality or they overvalue naturalistic touristic decision making. And I think the beauty in your work if I may boil it down, and I know there's always a danger and reductionism, but it seems to me that at the essence of your work is striking the proper balance between between rationality, thinking things through using analysis using formal thought, deliberate thought and Trusting or or being informed by your instincts I use, I'm using the word instincts with the air quotes. Your intuitions has the word I'm looking for. So at these things that they exist in the healthy decision maker, they exist in harmony with each other, and they're informing each other people are telling the story of your friend and and her tires. Yes.
Pete A Turner 34:28
Yeah, so I had a friend on Facebook and she was like, trust your gut, your intuition, because today I went out before I went to work and I saw my tire and it was it was threadbare. It was about to blow it was down through two sets of thread. It was gonna blow in any moment. And so it to her in her mind, that was her gut, her woman's intuition, saving her life. And then I had to add, you know, putting the note on on the comment stream. Why didn't your gut tell you this a week ago?
bruce gudmundsson 34:56
Right, and you know that there are people you know, who sold problem in a very rational way, every week they go out they take their Penny if you can see Lincoln, you're okay you put it you put the penny in the tread, you can't see you know, or it gets we can't see LinkedIn you're okay you can see Lincoln You got a problem right there's that there's there's a rational method a procedure for checking your under obviously there's there's more to checking your tires. As a former motor transport your rating, I should know that these two things, they're they're logical opposites. But in a healthy mind, you want the the ability to do both, and not just do both, but to have the one inform the other two to two to always be, you know, challenging your intuition with analysis and challenging your analysis with intuition. \
Gary Klein 35:48
So let me react to that because I'm really glad that that you brought that point up, Bruce, because you're exactly right. And my opinion, you're exactly right. And I have this this model of decision making a recognition primary Decision model. And I can't tell you how many times I've seen people describe it as trust your gut, and just go with your gut. And it really, really annoys me because that's only half of the model. The model has two parts. There's using pattern matching, which is where your intuition comes from using your experience. But then using a process MIT usually mental simulation, to think it through consciously and deliberately to see if it makes sense in this situation. So it's a blend of intuition and analysis, exactly as you described, Bruce, and it's not just trusting your gut. Now, Pete, your tire story. I'm going to guess here. I'm just hearing the story for the first time. Yeah. I'm going to guess that the reason she didn't see it a week earlier, is she didn't look at her tire. Maybe, you know, the tires went when she got to her car. They were all straight. And maybe on this day, she had turned Steering wheel before she got out of the car. So the tires were visible in a way that they usually weren't. So I'm guessing I'm imagining that that's why she saw it this day than other days, but I've got my own tire story. Yeah. So my wife and I were on a bicycle trip across Ohio. 3000 bicycle is called a braid Ohio bicycle adventure. So we would go like 5060 miles a day. And go from town to town. We sleep at intense It was great fun. And one day or tire was it looked like it was low. We pulled off with it. And sure enough, there was there was a leak we needed to to change it. And it was it was her her rear tire right, I think. And so I'll confess I'm a klutz. So I didn't have I didn't have the capability of doing that of changing it. And somebody because it's a very nice community. Somebody stopped by and said, I can Do it. And so he got the old tire off, got the pumped it up, then try to put it in, and it couldn't get it in because it was too fat to fit it within the brakes. And he had to deflate it to get it in. And then he had to pump it up. And it was very grateful for him. And we went off. And there was an official tire changing station that we passed maybe a few miles later. And I told her, let's stop off here. And she said Why? And I said, I wanted them to check your tire. And sure enough, when he inflated it, he hadn't done it properly and part of the tube was caught, and it would have caused a catastrophic blow out. And the reason that I was nervous about what he was doing was he hadn't realized that when putting it on, he couldn't inflated fully because it wouldn't fit within the brakes. And to me that meant he hadn't done much tire changing recently, right. And so his expertise was lower. Then I wanted that, to me, that was the tell that he hadn't anticipated this. So that I think that's the kind of small QP that you're talking about the little things that we pick up,
Pete Turner 39:12
I want to change gears a little bit because you guys have said a lot of great things for your risks and, and decision making. And one of the things I learned to do is I crafted lenses and rules, you know, some voyeuristic time things like instability operations, we have to accept that instability is the norm and our mere presence creates more instability. And stability seems to act like a bow. So instability is the norm, it's the bow at rest, and then a unit will come in pull the bow back and create stability. But the moment that unit leaves, that instability is gone. And then the new one comes in and they pull the boat, you know, so it's, that's the norm. So if you look at like, everything we're going to do is going to cause instability unless we're unless we're constantly fighting that to hold that Bow is some other way. So whether it's agricultural operations or rule of law, there is an existing rule of law. It's just informal. So you're transitioning from one to the other? Well, that is not an easy thing to do. And it's very simple to think that because of my decision making in my processes, and all of my institutional knowledge, I could bring rule of law to this valley, when the reality is is no, you can't because that bow is going to relax into the normal in stable relationship that it normally has. So in part of the problem with this is that we don't develop cultural acuity at an institutional level and military units like I can't say the same for for disaster relief folks, or cops or police, but I have a sense that they have a cultural acuity problem too. So people will talk about EQ, emotional intelligence quite a bit but not CQ. In a way that displays any level of expertise. And I think that that my experience tells me that if you don't understand the goals and decision making, of the person that we're Trying to work with especially if we're in their cultural space, then we are not in the collaborative quadrant, we're in some other quadrant that gives you results like in competence, passive aggressive behavior. And then corruption would be another one because you're not in line with what they're doing. Because you haven't developed the lens to say, what is this culture? How do they do things? And what's possible here right now. So that's sort of my premise. I thought maybe I'd get you guys to kind of talk about joining culture, and finding rules of thumb to put in place so that you can give yourself because it's hard to see. You have to learn this stuff by making mistakes, and it's hard to see your own failures over and over again, equaling anything other than a bunch of failure, and nobody likes that. I'm going to shut up now. And I guess if you would start off either one of you. Let's talk about that.
bruce gudmundsson 41:49
If I may, I'll tell you a story about an imaginary opera company. We're expecting API. Okay, so here's an opera company. This is a story told by my friend Bill Lind, who was Also friend of john Schmidt's very much involved with the medieval warfare movement. And so this opera company does Aida, and it's a great Aida. Because you've got, you've got, I mean, you've got elephants. I mean, you've got the paper, Michelle pyramids, you got all the, you know, the, the the people who walked like Egyptians, you've got, you've got all the guys carrying the spheres, you've got the palm trees, and you've got elephants. I mean, how you know, and you do this great EIeta. But every time you start booking shows, people want different things. They want the Beatles tribute bands, they want musical comedy, they want everything but I eat it. And you're always frustrated by your inability to put on Aida, because that's the ideal, and that we were trained for. And this really is the history of the US Army, and to a lesser extent, the Marine Corps and the army. Right. The army has this idea that we're going to do it Yes. Right. And every back back in 1991 we had Desert Storm and we got close and it was a thing of beauty and everybody was happy I mean there were there was dancing dancing in the in the breeze dancing in the hall after Desert Storm, because finally this was something new like the world want to try ever since then and actually before then we've had all these other requirements. And we're really setting up people for failure we're staying is going to look this way. All of this pattern of not only what we're going to tell you what the pattern is, but we've worked we've got all these manuals, which tell you exactly what the pattern is yes, and these are this is the libretto for for Aida and so everybody is disappointed rather than taking starting every morning with Okay, you're in a new situation. Here's a problem, solve it and making sure you have a wide variety of problems from a wide variety of, of points of view.
Gary Klein 44:03
Okay, so I think it's a great story about what people are expecting and and our, our tendency to be oblivious to it to where they are. And I agree with that. My wife Helen Klein, wrote an article and appeared in military review, about this issue about cultural differences. One of her areas of specialty is what different ways that cultures think. And we just assume that everybody thinks the way we do and it turns out to be fairly, fairly misguided, and in some cases, very dangerous because our assumption is is wrong and and the research is clear. And the practices clear that when you encounter different cultures, you're going to be either surprised, but usually you're going to often you're going to be contemptuous. What's wrong with them right back to Bruce's question. Man, what were you thinking? You know, just become impatient with them. So we see somebody giving, you know, a leader giving jobs to relatives and we say, That's corrupt, you know, but in a different culture. It wasn't giving jobs to relatives. It would be outrageous that that's what relatives do that that's what it means to be a member of the tribe, that we have some of the ways that cultures differ. We have a very independent culture, we think about ourselves and our own decisions, as opposed to very collective, interdependent cultures, where people are trying to find out what what's going on here. And, and rather than I want to, I'm supposed to think for myself. There's differences in fatalism versus mastery, we, we have the arrogance of thinking we can solve things rather than cultures that think these problems are not going to go away and they look at us and they think this is just ridiculous. This is just childish to think you can solve all these problems by coming in and making a few interventions. And we look at them, what's wrong with them. They're so passive. They're, they're not trying to make any changes. So we get angry at them with there's a difference in achievement versus relationship where we take positions, and we want to do a good job, and we want to achieve things, regardless of whose noses get bent out of shape. Because at the end of the day, what matters is did we get the job done? But for other coaches, what matters at the end of the day? Is our relationships preserved and honored and respected? Even if the job isn't done? Have we, you know, are we we still have to, to work together and so power distance is another big one that's been cited very often. You know, we're very concerned about making sure everybody gets gets heard. And then other cultures. They're very concerned about Respecting who the leader is. And so if you've got a criticism in a high power distance culture, and there's a there's a leader, you don't just say, wait a second, I'm not I don't agree with that. I mean that that's just that's just rude that just shows that you can't be part of the team. Whereas, you know what's typical there would be either not to say anything, or quietly during a break or fight, find some way to get your, your ideas across without publicly challenging a leader. So all of these are differences in the way people think and the way they socially interact. And the problem that we were encountering is for many, many the military. They went into the military without much experience in other countries and with other cultures, and they maybe they grew up in small towns, and you know, some of them had never been more than 30 miles away from the town that they grew up in. So they would have trouble in American culture, let alone You know, bring them to Iraq, or Afghanistan at least that. That's our suspicion our claim. Pete, you can tell me if that lines up with what you were saying.
Pete A Turner 48:14
No, I think it does. I mean, you talked about the fatalism thing. And well, you have a mastery of Al ghazaliya or even know that he existed and why he would be important to fatalism and and giving up the God's will. I just wrote a paper a peer review paper with my research partner, Dr. The day, and we were challenging the ethical pitfalls of doing female engagement and empowerment in conflict zones, because there's, there's only so many ethical things you can do and continue to be ethically correct. So if a commander especially a maneuver commander, is going to deploy, they have to give their unit as much lethality training as they can. And yet here comes this other thing that has nothing to do with we follow it Who's going to tell them that? You know, they're the ones that have to write the letters home to the kids don't come back. And so when someone's like, Yeah, but we're going to go empower females over there. Well, that's great. But you know, who's going to do that training and who's going to build that proficiency here in this unit? So all of these things, you're talking about that power distance thing? Here's a great story of that and that people in the show have heard this before, but for your guys's sake, we're in a district Center, the most populous district and the governor is talking and he's having an open discussion, and let's call it a discussion be nice, but really a disagreement with the State Department representative their and their state department representative was telling the governor what he wasn't wasn't going to do with his own space. And the governor said no, I'm going to put something else over there. And then the State Department person rolled their eyes at the governor. And you know, the meeting continued so we know enough. I'm I saw Dr. Rich I took Okay, let's see where the governor goes after the screenings over and he left the Government Center. But back to the American side of the campaign. He hung out with the psyops guys because they have video games. And he wanted he was so irate. He wanted just to go kill zombie Nazis in a video game, rather than go govern his district because he was so pissed off because of this power distance violation that the Kennedy School of Government graduate had no idea he had committed.
Gary Klein 50:24
I heard a story about from Desert Storm as we were coordinating our air campaign with the various partners, including the Saudis, and it was one major meeting of top officers from each of the countries and the Saudi representative was laid coming to the meeting. You know, the the Air Force general, I think he was a three star, his aid. Colonel was talking to him and the aid you know, it was talking and standing up and then just and they said and just sit down so the aid sat down Down in the Saudi generals chair Oh, no. No. And you know, they just started, there's a chair, it's empty, just sit down, we'll talk. And the Saudi general comes in, looks around looks what's happened in his chair. And he just sort of stands there. And he doesn't leave. He doesn't. But he doesn't say anything for the whole meeting. And then the meeting is over and he leaves and the three star goes running after him because he knows something's wrong. The Saudi General said, okay, by rights, I should withdraw from this coalition, because I've been dishonored. Yeah, but because this is so important. I'm only going to disengage for a week to show my displeasure in the middle of a war and middle of a war. But you know, that's what he had been dishonored. Yeah, in a way that our our guys were totally oblivious.
Pete Turner 51:54
I want to take a second to add some more color to that too. So so when you are in a place where there's a lot of shakes, and there's a hierarchy, and it's really impossible to come in and have a mastery of that locally in any kind of reasonable timeframe. So you set out chairs, and you sort of let them sort it out, because what will happen is, is the shakes will come in, and they don't know who's coming, who's coming as a whole lot of inshallah, God willing, they'll be there. But you'll see them get up and re rank themselves into the proper order. And so you just accept that that is part of what they do. And if you happen to develop some mastery in that great, but mostly, you don't have to mess with it. They'll sort it out.
Gary Klein 52:30
It's a self organizing system. Yes. Yes.
Pete Turner 52:33
Bruce, I didn't hear from you on that. I want to make sure we leave room for you.
bruce gudmundsson 52:36
Yes, no, no, I the question I that that keeps popping into my head as we have these discussions, is how can we teach all these skills we have been describing over over the past, you know, nearly an hour now. How do we teach people or how do we help people teach themselves? How do we cultivate these virtues this balance Sick of, of rationality and intuition, this ability to avoid mistakes on the one hand and develop expertise on the other disability to do things to have these legal skills which are unforgiving right if you if you activate your hand grenade in the wrong order well that's the mistake you only make once Yeah, he is hoping that is the order right? But at the same time you want to develop all of these I I disliked the term soft skills, but these perception of, of subtleties. How do you build a system that that promotes these these skills?
Pete Turner 53:48
Boy
Gary Klein 53:48
, well, nobody really knows because it's a monumental job. I've discussed to the approaches that we've been working on and tactical decision game. She shadowbox method of using scenarios to get people up to speed and then this cognitive after action review. But another thing you can do is stop doing the wrong thing, which is protecting yourself by believing that we can proceed realize everything. And eventually it can be turned over to smart machines. And we see experiments like like the Navy, with some of their experiments with with ships with reduced staffing, so that everybody is a generalist, and everybody can quickly master other jobs. Well, they can master the procedures, but they can't take the five or 10 years that that's required to become an expert. And so we're seeing a devaluation of the importance of expertise and the convenient assumption that it can all be procedural eyes and it can all be handled and and We don't have to devote time and training that you're talking about Bruce, because that's expensive, and it's inefficient. And so people are preferring to believe, and it's not necessary.
Pete Turner 55:13
And the thing with culture is that it provides variables that you can't see, unless you have cultural acuity, which is not easy, again, 510 years of making a lot of mistakes and winnowing those mistakes down to that you have the ability to accept, and I call it miss comfort, because it's not discomfort. It's just you don't know what that comfort is. So you, you accept that. And know that while you're in that discomfort stage, you're quickly gathering the cultural sensibility for that region or that institution or that interaction that you need to be able to get to a completely different place that unlocks your ability to not only accomplish your goal, but to use their smooth established cultural paths. But you can't do that unless you can withstand a lot of discomfort and I don't know how you train for that specifically?
Gary Klein 56:02
Well, I, my suggestion is that given, say, the Marine Corps and the way the Marine Corps gets thrust into all parts of the world, there's no way to prepare training for every region or you know, every every type of culture that you might be thrust into. And if you provided all of that, it'd be no time to do anything else. Right? But what you can do is try to cure people of the belief that everybody thinks like us, and everybody relates like we do. And that is this is going to be a different environment. And what and you need to be curious that we don't know what the differences are. You're going to have to make those discoveries for yourself, but you're going to have to make discoveries rather than just dismiss people and be contemptuous of them. Because they don't act like we do.
Pete Turner 57:00
Bruce.
bruce gudmundsson 57:01
So you're saying that Walt Disney lied, it is not a small world. So this is a problem I have been, you know, engaging for for a long time. And I think that part of the solution is to us decision games, and lots of them. Some will be tactical, some will be cultural, some will will, will defy categorization. And I have a strong prejudice in favor of decision games that are based upon real events. We sometimes call these decision forcing cases. So from the point of view of the player, this is very much like a decision game. You are this person in this situation, what do you do? But at the end, you have the rest of the story, you have the reveal you have what actually happened in the real world and that provides a baseline against which people can judge their decisions. And if you draw these cases, from a wide enough variety of sources, from a multitude of cultures, in a multitude of times, of course, the past is a different country as historians like to say that if you give people a variety of these scenarios, and then show them how the person in that situation reacted, the decision that was made by somebody was actually there. They get to see big experience the curious experience of a wide variety of cultures. And that the trick is is casting the net widely and making sure that for example in I teach one of these a week, three times twice online and one in person here in Quantico, and this week, we have a tactical problem. It seems Very simple. Where do you put your artillery on a hill seems like cut dry tactical problem except that the person making this decision is a very political actor. He's actually a Nicaraguan gentleman by the name of Benjamin celadon. It's 1912. He's trained as a lawyer. He's a very young man. The term general is is an honorific. But he finds himself in command of this, this rather mixed bag of fighters, some of whom are professional soldiers, some of whom are volunteers, some of whom belong to his political party, some of whom belong to the political party of someone who until a few months ago, what's his opponent, and he's going to have a very different way of looking at this problem. So the In short, again, don't want to boil things down to reductionist, but a big way of a powerful technique for learning These skills is role play. It's not just do the decision game in your own role being yourself, or being somebody you might be in, in two or three years or 20 years or so. But saying no, you're not the commanding and American force in the present day, you're commanding a group of Nicaraguan in direct dose in 1912. Your your commanding a, you're the shake of an Iraqi tribe in 2005. Your, your Alexander the Great Pyramid Napoleon Bonaparte, you're, you're, you're somebody other than than the person you are as a person from a from a different culture. Anyway, that's, that's my partial answer to this to both the cultural problem and the problem of how do we develop people how do we promote these this pair of virtues thatThat Gary talks about in his books.
Pete Turner 1:01:02
Yeah, it's a great conversation and we've been at it for just over an hour. And I want to respect your guys's time, it seems like we might have to do more because it's just such a interesting exchange between a lot of expertise in this. It's just been such a treat. I wanted to thank you guys for.
Gary Klein 1:01:17
Thank you very much for the opportunity. I've enjoyed it very much. And I'm glad that Bruce has been in on the discussion. It's always a delight having an interaction with him.
bruce gudmundsson 1:01:26
Well, thank you and Gary is nice to see you again and talk to you again. And I hope we'll get together sometime soon. I hope so, too.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
