Works
- Rapid Decision Making on the Fire Ground, Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 30th Annual Meeting, with Roberta Calderwood and Anne Clinton-Cirocco, 1986
- Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, MIT Press, 1998
- Performing a Project Premortem, Harvard Business Review, 2007
In Tactics of Organizational Politics
Ideas
The premortem. Before a project starts, team members assume it has already failed and each generates plausible reasons for the failure. The exercise makes it safe for knowledgeable people with reservations to raise them during planning, when the plan can still change. Kahneman discusses Klein's premortem approvingly in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), chapter 24.
What it explains
Klein explains how a sponsor can draw out objections early by inviting them in a form that does not read as disloyalty. Doubts surfaced during planning cost less than the same doubts raised after commitment.
Tactics that draw on Gary Klein (1)
In Thinking Tools
Known for
A pioneer of naturalistic decision making who studied how fireground commanders and other experts decide under time pressure. His recognition-primed decision model holds that experienced people recognize a situation as typical, take the first workable option it suggests, and test it by imagining it played out, instead of comparing options side by side. He also devised the premortem, in which a team imagines that a project has failed and explains why.