Gary Klein: Sources of Power. How People Make Decisions, MIT 1998

Very strong book on "naturalistic decision making", focusing via vividly related examples on rescue workers, the military and other professionals that have to act under severe time constraints, ambiguity, vague goals and changing conditions.

The book documents "human strenghts and capabilities that typically have been downplayed or even ignored" (p. 1). Klein presents an exciting account of the significance of experience, and the large set of capabilities that constitute its genetative force in actual decision making situations, as provider of  "sources of power".

The book is well-written and accessible, and full of insight from page to page. I personally read it as a description of some of those features of "systems intelligence" that point beyond the rational, analytic and the verbal (without denying their significance). What the author points at as "recognition-primed decision making" (and which does not first list alternatives, compare them analytically, weight the relative merits of alternatives etc) is clearly a key aspect of what Raimo Hämäläinen and I have approached as systems intelligence, highlighting as it does the expert's ability to act intelligently in the context of confusion, unclarity and dynamism beyond what can be known.

A particularly exciting element in the book is its exeptionally strong use of examples. The author's conviction is that an expert's pragmatic brilliance is revealed best when studying carefully what happens under particularly demanding specific cases, as opposed to the routines, regarding which the experts do not have that much to say (the data is is largely gathered through interviews).

In a typical case, the experienced experts (in our terminology the systems intelligent agents) "understand what types of goals make sense (so the priorities are set), which cues are important (so there is not an overload of information), what to expect next (so they can prepare themselves and notice surprises), and the typical ways of responding in a given situation. By recognizing a situation as typical, they also recognize a course of action likely to succeed. The recognitition of goals, cues, expectancies, and actions is part of what it means to recognize a situation." (pp. 25-6)

Key concepts: intuition, mental simulation, metaphor, storytelling, leverage points, patterns, situation awareness.

Key themes, expressed in terms of the book's main title: The power of intuition, The power of mental simulation, The power of to spot leverage points, The power to see the invisible (including The big picture, The way things work, Fine discriminations, Managing our own limitations), The power of stories, The power of metaphors and analogues, The power to read minds (including discussion of how to commununicate intent).- From my point of view, these are all aspects of a systems intelligent agent.

A true gem of a book.