Interesting story on Intuition. Highlights:
“Experienced decision makers see a different world than novices do,” concludes Klein. “And what they see tells them what they should do. Ultimately, intuition is all about perception. The formal rules of decision making are almost incidental.”
“We used to think that experts carefully deliberate the merits of each course of action, whereas novices impulsively jump at the first option,” says Klein. But his team concluded that the reverse is true. “It’s the novices who must compare different approaches to solving a problem. Experts come up with a plan and then rapidly assess whether it will work. They move fast because they do less.”
The best decision makers that Klein has seen are wildland firefighters, who are force-fed a constant diet of forest fires…and rapidly build a base of experience. And they are relentless about learning from experience. After every major fire, the command team runs a feedback session, reviews its performance, and then seeks out new lessons.
“We sometimes think that experts are weighed down by information, by facts, by memories — that they make decisions slowly because they must search through so much data. But in fact, we’ve got it backward. The accumulation of experience does not weigh people down — it lightens them up. It makes them fast.”