Recognition Primed Decision Making: Dr. Gary Klein

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Gary Klein, renowned cognitive psychologist and pioneer of the Recognition-Primed Decision Model, takes us deep into the minds of experts operating under the most demanding conditions. Drawing from decades studying firefighters, law enforcement officers, and military personnel, Klein reveals the surprising truth about expertise - it's not about comparing options or following procedures, but rather recognizing patterns developed through years of experience.

What makes this conversation exceptional is Klein's ability to demystify the seemingly magical "gut instincts" of experts. He explains how professionals don't simply follow intuition blindly but engage in rapid mental simulations to test their responses before acting. This blend of pattern recognition and analysis enables split-second decisions in life-or-death situations where traditional analytical methods would take far too long.

Klein's insights challenge conventional thinking about bias and expertise. While academia often emphasizes the flaws in intuitive thinking, Klein's research demonstrates how heuristics and expertise-driven pattern matching serve as powerful tools in real-world settings. His Shadowbox training method, which allows novices to see through expert eyes, offers a revolutionary approach to accelerating expertise development.

The conversation explores fascinating concepts like tacit knowledge (expertise that can't be easily articulated), the importance of curiosity in developing expertise, and why voluntary compliance techniques are crucial for law enforcement. Klein also discusses his ongoing work on developing more effective training methods and his continued fascination with the phenomenon of insight.

For anyone who makes decisions under pressure, works in high-stakes environments, or simply wants to understand how expertise truly functions, this episode provides invaluable wisdom from one of the field's most influential thinkers. Listen, share with colleagues, and discover how training your cognitive skills might be more important than any checklist or procedure.

More information about Gary Klein:

https://www.shadowboxtraining.com/courses/masterclass-in-practical-decision-making/

https://www.shadowboxtraining.com/courses/the-cognitive-dimension/

Naturalistic Decision Making

https://naturalisticdecisionmaking.org/

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More about Greg and Brian: https://arcadiacognerati.com/arcadia-cognerati-leadership-team/

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello everyone and welcome to the Human Behavior
Podcast.
In today's episode, greg and Ihave the distinct pleasure of
sitting down with Dr Gary Klein,one of the most influential
figures in the world ofdecision-making research.
Dr Klein pioneered theRecognition Prime Decision Model
, or RPD, a groundbreakingapproach to understanding how
experienced professionals, fromfirefighters to law enforcement
and military leaders, makecritical decisions under extreme

(00:21):
stress and uncertainty.
In this conversation, we unpackhow intuitive expertise truly
works, how high-stakes decisionsare shaped by deep pattern
recognition and why trainingyour cognitive skills might be
more important than masteringany checklist.
We'll explore Dr Klein'sinsights on why real-world
experience matters, thepractical ways you can train
your mind to think like anexpert, and how to recognize and
navigate complex situationsfaster and more effectively.

(00:44):
Whether you're in a professionthat operates in uncertain and
chaotic environments or you'resimply fascinated by how humans
perform under pressure, thisconversation is something
powerful for you.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
We hope you enjoyed the episode.
Don't forget to check out ourPatreon channel for additional
content and subscriber-onlyepisodes.
If you enjoyed the podcast,please consider leaving us a
review and, more importantly,sharing it with a friend.
Thank you for your time andremember training changes

(01:06):
behavior.
Dr Gary Klein, thank you somuch for joining us here on the
Human Behavior Podcast.
We're excited to talk to you.
We've got some mutual friendsand mutual people we've worked
with before in the past, so Ijust want to start by saying
thank you so much for coming onthe show.
Thank you for inviting me, Iappreciate it, yeah, so we're

(01:29):
going to jump right into it.
For those of our listeners whoyou know, I gave a little intro
on Dr Klein, but he's got a hugebody of work and kind of really
kind of came up a while ago interms of a greater kind of area
of study of naturalisticdecision-making, and then you
kind of develop this what youcall the recognition prime
decision, and you've beenstudying subject matter experts.
You've been studying intuitivedecision-making your whole

(01:49):
career and you kind of startedwith this RPD model and I know
some of our listeners aredefinitely familiar with it.
But for those who aren't, couldyou give us just a background
on what it is, how you cameabout it and kind of what this
came from?

Speaker 2 (02:03):
how you came about it and kind of what this came from
.
Okay, so this all started inthe mid-1980s, 1985.
And we got a contract from theArmy to try to understand how
people can make tough decisionsunder time pressure and
uncertainty.
And it was a competitivecontract and I imagine most of
the people who were sending inproposals said time pressure,

(02:28):
uncertainty, we'll just take alaboratory task, we'll vary the
time pressure, we'll vary theuncertainty and see what the
relationship is.
But we didn't want to do thatbecause it seemed like an
important question and to run astandard laboratory task with
college sophomores seemedfraught, seemed questionable,

(02:53):
and we said we don't know howpeople can make tough decisions
under those circumstances.
Let's study some people who doit and see what we can learn
from them.
And we decided to studyfirefighters.
We had other possible groups wecould examine but we picked
firefighters.
We figured they're a helpfulcommunity and when they're not

(03:18):
fighting fires we can talk tothem back in the fire station,
in the firehouse and they'llhave time for us and they were a
great population to work with.
I still have a number of goodfriends who are firefighters.
So we didn't think under timepressure that you could generate

(03:38):
a large set of options andevaluate them on a standard set
of dimensions.
We didn't think there was timefor that.
I mean, the fire is growingexponentially.
So we thought that maybe theyonly looked at two options one
and they compared one to theother.
One was sort of a favorite, theother was a contrast.

(04:01):
And that's how they made theirdecision.
And I'll never forget the firsttime, the first firefighter I
talked to before we even startedcollecting actual data this was
just background.
And I said I'm here to studyhow you make tough decisions
under time pressure anduncertainty.
And he looked at me with acertain amount of contempt I get

(04:22):
a lot of those kinds of looksin the work that I do, with a
certain amount of contempt.
I get a lot of those kinds oflooks in the work that I do.
And he said you know, I've beena firefighter for 16 years,
I've been a captain for 12 ofthose years and all that time I
don't think I've ever made asingle decision.

(04:43):
That's interesting that'sinteresting real back in my
chair, because we had justgotten, we had won the contract,
we got it awarded, we had sixmonths to to try to figure it
out and here, right off the bat,he's telling me he doesn't make
decisions.
And I thought this is going tobe a total failure.
So I said oh, you don't.

(05:05):
And he said I said what do youdo?
And he said it's justprocedures, you just follow the
procedures.
Oh, not good, not good.
I said before I leave, can Isee the procedure manual?
I figured maybe there'ssomething in the manual I could
learn from.
And he said he looked at mewith contempt again, I get a lot

(05:30):
of that.
And he said, oh, it's notwritten down, you just know.
And I thought well, maybethere's something else going on
here, something else ishappening that I need to
investigate.
And so we interviewed severaldozen firefighters and we heard

(05:51):
the same thing that they never,when they talk about making
decisions.
They thought what we meant wascomparing one option to others
to see which was the best, andthey never did that.
But instead what happened isthey had expertise over five,
six, 10, 12 years, sometimes 20years.

(06:13):
They just built up a whole setof patterns of how things look,
and the patterns were tellingthem.
And the patterns were tellingthem.
Here are the important cues tonotice, to pay attention to.
Here's what you can expect, andif the expectancy is violated,

(06:37):
that means maybe you'remisidentifying the situation,
you got the wrong pattern.
Here's the kind of goals youcan expect to accomplish and
here are the kinds of actionsthat should work for you.
And so, within a short periodof time seconds because of this

(06:57):
pattern matching, they alreadyhad an idea of what to do.
That's what their expertise wasbuying them.
However, that led to anothermystery how do you evaluate a
single option?
Because the only way we knew ofto evaluate options is to

(07:18):
compare two or more, to seewhich comes out on top.
And if you only have one option, how do you do that?
You can't do that.
So we looked through all theinterview notes.
We had to see what they weretelling us.
What they were telling us wasthey evaluated the option by
imagining it, by running itthrough their mind.

(07:40):
We call that mental simulation.
They played it through and ifit worked, then they could carry
out the option.
If it almost worked, but therewas some flaws, some glitches,
they could modify the option sothat it could do a good job.
And if they couldn't figure outa way to overcome the problems,

(08:02):
then they said forget thatoption.
What else do I have?
What else is the pattern matchtelling me is a possibility here
, like they had a repertoire andthey were just going down the
repertoire until they found onethat would work.
So that explained why theynever compared options, because

(08:23):
they just wanted the first onethat would work.
They weren't trying to come upwith the best, because in their
situation who knew what was thebest and who cared?
They wanted to get the job done.
And how do you evaluate anoption?
You imagine it, and thisimagining is done deliberately.
The pattern matching is sort ofunconscious.

(08:44):
The pattern just pops in theirmind because of their experience
.
This mental simulation,imagining part is done
consciously and deliberately.
So this isn't just going withyour gut, going with your
intuition.
It's a blend of your intuitiongiving you the pattern and an

(09:04):
analysis.
But the analysis is not settingup a matrix.
The analysis is doing theimagining part.
And then there's a third partof trying to sort out what's
going on in a complicatedsituation where you don't have
any obvious patterns, whereyou're trying to build a story

(09:26):
of what's going on, and that'salso done consciously and
deliberately, and it's a storybuilding activity to come up
with a plausible explanation forwhat you're seeing in front of
you.
So we call that a recognitionprimed decision, because it's
primed by your pattern, matchingby your recognition.

(09:49):
But it's not just intuition,it's not just going with your
gut how this?

Speaker 1 (09:58):
and that was sort of my first sort of comment on
their follow-up question, Iguess.
So you know what you're doingwith these folks.
Obviously I've.
I've seen that before.
Someone's like what are youtalking about?
I just I don't make decisions,I just do what I'm trained to do
and it's like, well, no,there's a whole bunch of stuff
going on unconsciously thatyou're unaware of.
So is what you're what you hadto do with that?

(10:20):
You know, kind of at thebeginning, there is, take some
of that unconscious, tacitknowledge and then map that out
in a meaningful way to give it aprocess for them.
Is that kind of what, what the?
What you came up with then?

Speaker 2 (10:34):
well, what we came up with was was a model, a
recognition prime decision model.
But then we were stuck becausewhat do you do with the model?
If I were to train you, I'm notgoing to waste your time by
saying here's a model, followthis model, because the model
simply describes what you do.
And I can try to do cognitiveinterviewing and these were all

(11:00):
in-depth cognitive interviewingto identify what you were
noticing, and all of that butevery situation is different, so
that's not going to help.
So for a long time we didn'tknow where to go with this, how
to follow it up.
And then, in 2010, I was at aconference in New York City and

(11:22):
I met a guy named Neil Hines whowas with the New York Fire
Department.
He was a battalion chief and hehad just finished doing a study
for a mattress project on howto train people to handle

(11:43):
unexpected, one-off, challengingsituations in the aftermath of
9-11.
And so Neil and I collaboratedand I really liked his method
and developed something we calla shadowbox method for training
people.
And the shadowbox method is notto teach people.

(12:08):
Here's a model ofdecision-making or here's cues
that you might attend to.
Instead, I come up with,following Neil's lead a bunch of
scenarios, tough cases, and Ican present the scenarios to you
in person.
I can present it in a booklet.

(12:29):
We have online versions so wecan do the training online.
And you run through the scenarioand then we stop the action and
we say at this point Brian,here's four different options of
things you can do Rank, orderthem, which are you the most

(12:50):
likely to do to the least andwrite down your reason.
And then we continue thescenario and then we'll stop it
again.
And this time we might ask youhere's three goals you might
pursue at this point in thesituation Rank, order them and
write down your reasons why yourank, ordered and rank them that

(13:13):
way.
And then we continue, and thenwe might stop it a third time or
a fourth.
We could ask you here's fivedifferent pieces of information
you could pursue, rank whatever,you write down your ranking and
you write down your reason.
But we've had a small group ofpeople who have more expertise,

(13:35):
people who are highly respectedwe might call them experts, but
that's sometimes a loaded termThrough the same scenario you
have, and Well, through the samescenario you have, and they've
done the same ranking you didand they've written down their
reasons.
So when you come to the firstdecision point and you rank them

(13:56):
and write down your reason,then we show you here's what
these subject matter experts,how they ranked them, and you
really want your ranking tomatch theirs, but more I mean,
that's the game part of it.
You want to align with them tothe extent you can, but the real

(14:16):
learning comes in looking attheir rationale.
Here's what they were noticing.
Here are the inferences theywere drawing.
Here are the things thatworried them.
Here's what they liked abouteach option.
Here's what they were noticing.
Here are the inferences theywere drawing.
Here are the things thatworried them.
Here's what they liked abouteach option.
Here's what they didn't.
And now you're seeing the worldthrough the eyes of experts.
But the experts aren't therebecause experts are bottleneck

(14:36):
in training.
Now the experts have alreadymade their input and everybody
else can benefit their input andeverybody else can benefit.
And so we will have maybe, say,three experts and we'll just
synthesize their ranking andshow you how they came out.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
So that's.
I hope that, especially for ourlaw enforcement listeners who
are trainers, just go back andjust listen to the last five or
six minutes on how you set up atraining scenario, because I
think you could pull a lot awayfrom that.
There's a lot of issues we seewith training.
Where it's reallywell-intentioned, you've got
experts that know what they'redoing.
But when it comes to setting upthings like that with

(15:15):
decision-making involved,everyone's sort of looking for
this binary.
It's like in law enforcement,is it a shoot or don't shoot?
It's like, well, that's not howthe world is, right that this
you can't.
If it was that simple, wewouldn't be talking, we wouldn't
be having this conversation,right, we wouldn't need to go

(15:36):
into the detail about that.
And part of you know what Ilike and was interested in one.
You said right off the bat,with everything with with that,
it to the streets, right, yougot to take to the streets, see
what people are doing and seeand unpack how they do that.
But one of the things is likethere's this sort of pattern
recognition versus patterncreation almost right.

(15:58):
So if recognition primedecision making emphasizes like
how these experts match asituation to a known pattern or
prototype in their minds.
You know, the problem is, likeyou said, like in these complex
environments, maybe new patternscan appear or or new novel
threats or something.
And if I don't have as much ofthat experience right to draw on

(16:21):
, like what?
What sort sort of can I do?
Or does that same sort ofprocess still work for me versus
?
You know, I got Greg here.
Who's the expert?
Greg can walk in and go.
It's Colonel Mustard in thestudy with the pipe wrench, you
know.
But I'm sitting here going likeyou know, something doesn't
seem right.
You know, why is there a pipewrench there and why that guy

(16:42):
seems important.
What's he's he doing?
I haven't put it together yet,but there's still some sort of
recognition that there'sincongruence in the situation or
there's some pattern here.
I just can't put my finger onit yet.
Does that work?
You see?
Does that work?
From how do I go?
From that subject matter expertdoing that and taking what they
know and unpack it so that Ican, the new guy walking in,

(17:03):
taking?

Speaker 2 (17:04):
what they know and unpack it so that I can the new
guy walking in.
Okay, so when we prepare peoplelike Greg to provide inputs as
subject matter experts, we don'tjust want to come up with
Colonel Mustard in the studywith the pipe wrench.
We want to probe Greg and hiscomments and provide that
material.
What are you noticing?

(17:25):
What is it about ColonelMustard?
What was it about the pipewrench and where it was located?
So we are trying to extract theexpertise that Greg has and
make it more visible for thetrainee.
So what we're trying to do wecall our method a shadow box

(17:47):
method.
What we're trying to do is havethe trainee shadow the experts
and learn from them and build anexperience base.
So we're not trying to teachyou what's the right answer.
We're trying to give you anopportunity to build a stronger
mental model as you go from onescenario to the other, to the

(18:08):
next one.
All of a sudden we think andwhat we find?
After a half hour, people arematching the experts, usually
about 25% more accurately thanthey were at the beginning.
And just that, what did I say?
A half day of training.
We see that kind of an impactand we've demonstrated this in a

(18:34):
number of areas and it's veryexciting to us.

Speaker 3 (18:38):
Well, let me go back.

Speaker 1 (18:39):
Yeah, I was going to say Greg, I want to go ahead and
let you jump in here.

Speaker 3 (18:42):
No, no, it's fine, I want to give some historical
perspective and first of all,feel free to to say, greg, I
want to go ahead and let youjump in here.
No, no, it's fine, I want togive some historical perspective
and first of all, feel free tokeep talking about Greg.
There's nothing better thanhearing that repeated over and
over during the podcast.
I love it.
Look.
So in the 80s I was traininglaw enforcement in the Detroit
metropolitan area Wayne Oakland,macomb Police Academies, and I

(19:04):
have read absolutely everythingthat Gary's written.
I wrote to people like CarolRoss and said tell me more.
You know, marty Seligman, thething was that there wasn't
anything written on psychology,sociology and physiology for law
enforcement that was outside ofhow to kill somebody, how to
shoot, how to maim, how to useyou know, use less than lethal
force, and those things werevery definitive because they had

(19:26):
to fit the law.
So there was already anarchitecture that they had to
make sure that their decisionmetric and matrix fit into, and
so I said there's got to besomething outside of that.
So you know, looking atBernoulli and Kahneman and
Pascal and Bayes and thinkingabout the Pareto optimality and
the game theory and all thoseother things.

(19:47):
When I would go into theleadership of the police agency
and the prosecutor's office andstart talking about that, they'd
laugh right in my face.
They'd go we have no idea whatyou're talking about and that's
too big and cops will never needto know any of that stuff.
And I knew there was somethinghidden there.
And I knew that when I wasreading about the recognition,
prime decision making.

(20:08):
The one link that screamed outto me from a lot of the work
that you were doing at the timewas heuristics.
There's heuristic templatematches and heuristic prototype
matches.
And when you talk about expertthinking, those people can
assimilate much more quickly inan environment.
Hey, when these things coalesce, when these patterns repeat,

(20:31):
something is up.
And that's all I tried to do atthe very beginning is get them
to see that.
And I feel that you probably Idon't want to presuppose I think
that maybe in academia you hada little bit easier time
convincing people than I did inpolice work, because nobody was
listening at that time.

(20:51):
It was a vast wasteland Over.

Speaker 2 (20:54):
Just the reverse, greg, I have a much easier time
convincing practitioners, peoplewho are out on the street, than
the academics.
The academics that I'veencountered are fairly well
captured by the notion of biasesand captured by the notion of

(21:19):
decision analysis and aresurprisingly contemptuous of
experts and of expertise.
And they think experts are justas biased as the rest of the
people and they don't have muchpatience for it, because how do

(21:42):
they do their studies?
They do their studies withcollege sophomores and they
don't develop much expertise.
I once gave a presentation to amixed audience where a lot of
academics and I said and thebasis of the recognition, prime
decision model is expertise.
That's what the people havedeveloped, that's what they're

(22:03):
using to do the pattern matchingso effectively.
And one guy raises his hand andsaid I do laboratory studies.
I really disagree with you.
I do laboratory studies and Igive my subjects lots of
experience.
And I said how much?
And he said we give them I'llgive them 10 hours of training

(22:23):
before we start collecting.
And I'm thinking 10 hours, 20years, right?
I don't even know what thedifference is here, plus the
fact that the laboratory studiesare all done in controlled
environments with minimalcontext, minimal ambiguity,
don't get me started.

Speaker 3 (22:43):
Oh, no, no.

Speaker 2 (22:46):
I'd love to get me started.

Speaker 3 (22:46):
Oh, no, no, I'd love to get you started based on the
fact that I think look on theshoulders of giants.
If it wasn't for your work,there was no way for my work to
proliferate.
Because when I went in andtalked to Jim Mattis, the call
sign for Jim Mattis was chaos,actual, and chaos came from how
we were thinking at the time.
We didn't fully understand thewar that we were involved in.

(23:08):
We didn't fully understand howthe culture was context in Iraq.
We didn't understand that itwas a different playing field in
Afghanistan, even though therewere both insurgent-based
terrorist activities that weregoing on.
And so what happened is theywere trying to draw expertise
from Vietnam or draw expertisefrom Korea, and you know what

(23:28):
Round peg square hole.
It wasn't fitting and there wasa lot of body bags getting
filled.
So, had it not been for and itwasn't me, it was people like me
in a lot of different places,pushing your work up in front
and saying, hey look, these guysare onto something.
And that's why, like Office ofNaval Research, people like Joan
Johnson, that's why people likeLeah DiBello, those type of

(23:50):
people when those leaders thatwere so single-minded to purpose
and had the blinders on whenthey started reading those
studies and reading the workthat you were doing.
That, I think, was Saul on theroad to Damascus, scales falling
from the eyes when they said wehave to embrace a different way
.

Speaker 2 (24:07):
Right, thank you, thank you.
So I think we're in agreementhere that the operational
community was hungry for abetter way.
Yes, yeah, absolutely.
They were open, whereas theacademic community doesn't
really care about a better waybecause they're not trying to

(24:29):
accomplish anything that reallyis going to make a significant
difference out on the streets.

Speaker 3 (24:35):
Yep, yep.
And just briefly, brian.
I think the fire departmentlook the angle is.
Fires are highly complex,rapidly evolving situations
where no two are the same, butthe methodology and the tools
and the mannerisms of policeagencies are very similar
worldwide, and that's why, whenyou take a look at police work

(24:59):
and military, it's the samething.
There's a very regimentedsystem, there's rank structures,
there's rules that go alongwith things, and then, when it
comes down to it, it's physicsand math.
Sorry about that, brian.
I wanted to make sure that thepeople listening to us right now
that are trainers, understandthat when it comes down to it,
at the end of the day, this isscience.

Speaker 1 (25:21):
And that's why it works every time and you did
bring it up, gary, aboutespecially in academia and
people talking about thedifferent cognitive traps you
can fall into confirmation biasand recency bias and all that
and how it can disrupt sensemaking, can disrupt recognition,

(25:41):
and it can.
But but I, what you know, thisis no different than I got my,
my brother.
Now he's a project manager, bigconstruction company that does
commercial construction and youknow big dollar stuff.
You know all the latestsoftware and tech that they have
and all the experience and allthis and they'll plan something
out.
And then it's one guy walks upwho's been pouring concrete for
25 years and goes, yeah, itain't going to work.
And they're like what he's likethat's not going to work.

(26:03):
And let me tell you why.
And so all of that planning andstuff they try to do beforehand
, this one guy walked up andsaid I know that's not going to
work, and here's why I knowthat's not going to work and
here's why I saw that.
You know, back in 1989, someonetried doing that and this is
what happened to the bill.
You know they can draw on that.

(26:23):
So those biases are, can beincredibly powerful, incredibly
good.
But you know what have youfound when it comes to sort of
the practitioner versus theacademia side of it and how?
You know what, what's therelevance and how effective are
these cognition biases?
Like, how much do they reallyaffect decision-making at that
matter?
Cause remember this is and forpeople listening like we're
talking about complex,potentially volatile, deadly

(26:44):
situations with the, with the,with the temporal element,
there's a time element in therewhich increases the level of
stress, increases the level ofcomplexity and it kind of
narrows the bandwidth of thepotential possibilities in a
sense, but it really forces thatdecision that has to happen
right now.
So you don't have the time andthe luxury of doing the

(27:05):
construction planning right.
You're just boom, the 911 callcomes in.
Here's what you got.
You're going on a littleinformation.
So do those really affect us asmuch you think when you're in
those elements, when you'regoing on a little information?
So do those really affect us asmuch you think when you're in
those elements, when you're inyour area of expertise?
Do these biases really play asbig of a role that people think
that they do?

Speaker 2 (27:24):
Okay.
So I know in many communities,especially academic ones, there
is a high degree of riskaversion that you don't want
people to take actions thatmight be incorrect.
So people are worried aboutusing your intuition, using the

(27:45):
patterns you have, you might getit wrong.
However, in these situations,with the confusion, the
ambiguity, the complexity andthe time pressure, you don't
have time to set up a decisiontree.
You don't have time to set up amulti-attribute utility
analysis.
A friend of mine, danny Zakai.

(28:05):
Many years ago, zakai andWiller said how long does it
take to set up one of thesedecision analyses?
And they found it takes about30 minutes to set up one of
these kinds of matrices.
Well, out on the street, ifyou're a firefighter, a police
officer, a military leader, youdon't have 30 minutes.

(28:26):
So let's not pretend otherwise.
So should we be worried aboutdecision biases?
Many people are, and I say forthe most part, this is the
dominant view that we shouldworry.
I don't want to mislead yourlisteners.
I happen to think that it'soverblown and not something to

(28:49):
worry about, because what theycall biases are essentially
heuristics.
Because what they call biasesare essentially heuristics and
heuristics are rules of thumbthat are generally right but not
always right, and so they'renot perfect.
But that's why what we learnedwith the recognition prime

(29:10):
decision model if you call itwrong at the beginning, you
still have this mentalsimulation, this imagining part
to be like the guy inconstruction who comes in and
says this doesn't feel right.
I have some worries about it,based on what I saw in the 1990s
.
So you're not simply going withyour gut, you're starting with

(29:31):
your gut instinct, because it'sof tremendous value.
I have made this offer todecision researchers who think
that emotion and biases are aproblem.
We know the part of the brainwhere the emotions affect the

(29:53):
decision-making brain, where theemotions affect the
decision-making.
We know it because of the workof Damasio where he studied
people with brain lesions, and Ithink it's the ventromedial
frontal cortex.
I may have that garbled, Iprobably but he knows.
And then it is written down.
It's knowable because peoplewho have a lesion in this area

(30:15):
it's not very often, veryinfrequent but very rare
condition If they have a lesionall of a sudden their
decision-making is disconnectedfrom their emotions.

Speaker 1 (30:28):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (30:29):
This would be nirvana .
This is perfect.
Yeah, purely rational decisions, unaffected by your emotions.
Now you're Mr Spock and you'recruising, but Damasio found
these people.
Even though their IQ wasn'taffected, their lives were
destroyed because it took themforever to reason out what to do

(30:53):
, what restaurant to go to.
I mean, everything had to bereasoned out because they had no
emotional basis for helpingthem along.
So I've offered people in thecommunity I said I'll pay for it
myself.
If you're worried about youremotions and biases clouding
your decision making, youremotions and biases clouding

(31:17):
your decision-making, we canartificially lesion this area in
your brain using lasers,converging beams, and just burn
out this area and you'll beperfectly rational.
And you know something no onehas ever taken up my offer.

Speaker 1 (31:30):
Yeah, it sounds like you wouldn't be able to get
through your day if that werethe case.

Speaker 3 (31:34):
It's similar to the old Phineas Gage studies.
It's not unlike that.
See, here's a conundrum.
So you've got police trainers,law enforcement trainers, courts
, corrections, that are tryingto do the right thing, and they
still default to the lowestcommon denominator, which is
force.
Default to the lowest commondenominator, which is force.

(31:55):
When I'm faced with a decision,I'm not sure of all of the
principles that are going intoit.
What I'm going to do isescalate force, raise my voice
and use commands, and so I haveto be the voice of reason on the
ground.
It's my decision, my way or thehighway, and you know,
sometimes that paints us into acorner.
So what Brian and I teach?

(32:23):
What we do at Arcadia, whatI've been doing my entire career
, is called the gift of time anddistance, because we make much
better decisions.
You know when we're behind coverand we're observing and we're
testing our feedback loops aswe're solving problems, and what
happens sometimes is we getinto a trap at the police
academy that, look, you've gotthe badge, you understand the
law, you have to go in there andfix things.
We've even given you red lightsand a siren to get there more

(32:45):
quickly.
But what happens then is I haveto make tough choices with less
time and less information, andthat's when heuristics can be
horribly wrong.
And that's when heuristics canbe horribly wrong and that's
when you know the cell phone inthe pocket turns into a gun and
when my default is to increaseforce to gain compliance.

(33:06):
Then that can again get me intoa legal or an ethical or a
moral quandary.
So what I'm hoping is that, withall the work that Brian and I
have been doing, with all thework that's out there now, with
the incredible work that you'vebeen doing I think you just got
back from, like Australia or NewZealand where you were teaching
down there.
So your stuff is global, ourstuff is international.

(33:28):
What I'm hoping is that thegroup of people responsible for
training up-and-coming lawenforcement will embrace the
idea that we have to lower thecognitive load, we have to
increase the ability ofperception and pattern match,
and if we don't do that, thenwe're going to keep.
It's going to be inevitablethat we keep running into the

(33:50):
things that we see on the newsall the time, with cops getting
into the trick bag Over.

Speaker 2 (34:04):
Okay, but there's another approach is to build the
repertoire of the policeofficers, and this is something
that my colleague, john Schmidt.
My friend and colleague JohnSchmidt and I have been working
on.
We were involved in a programfrom DARPA, defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency, and itwas called the Good Stranger
Project and it started duringthe time of American involvement

(34:27):
in Iraq and Afghanistan and therealization that you have all
these soldiers who are highlyefficient at fighting an
adversary, at conducting warfare, but not all that good at
interacting with civilians, andtheir approach to getting
compliance was force,intimidation and that was making

(34:48):
enemies and that was makingthings worse and that was making
things worse.
So our part of the project wasto interview people we had
identified as good strangers,people who could gain compliance
voluntarily and learn from themand see what their tricks were.

(35:10):
And we heard amazing ideas andthe kinds of repertoire they had
were just really staggering andit's captured in some places in
police circles.
There's a book, verbal Judo andthings like that, but these
guys were going beyond verbaljudo.
So I think what we had and Johnand I put together a workshop

(35:35):
on training voluntary complianceso that police officers have
other techniques than other thansimply trying to gain
compliance through intimidation.

Speaker 3 (35:49):
Right, right.
And you see, the problem isthat good ideas like that don't
immediately get embraced becauseof the historical perspective
of law enforcement.
And when you give an aluminumflashlight and extra magazines
and a bullet-resistant vest,then there's this warrior
mentality that sneaks in and weforget that we work for the

(36:10):
people, that the laws are tohelp the people.
And so I'm in absolute violentagreement.
Violent, there we go with yourcommentary.
But the problem is like to getcertified in Michigan, michigan
Law Enforcement Officer TrainingCouncil.
They didn't have the bookVerbal Judo.
But to get my credentialsaccepted in Colorado I had to go

(36:31):
through Colorado Police OfficerStandards and Training and they
made you read Verbal Judo.
But you know what?
There's no part of the academywhere they do that.
And when we look at AI and VRand we look at interacting with
a computer screen, it's moreabout the hey, the guy's got a
gun.
Hey, how fast did you shoot andhow accurately.
And I think that cognitionplays a huge role in that

(36:54):
pattern recognition and analysisand extremis.
And if we focus more there, wewould see that we would get a
better quality officer on thestreet that would want to remain
longer and is closer to thecommunity.

Speaker 2 (37:10):
Right, and where does the expertise come in into the
environment?
I mean, you can look at thelast inch shoot, no shoot.
But you can dial back a minuteor two, even just a minute or
two earlier about what'shappening.
What do I see?
What's the context?
And you find that people whoare the good strangers, who are

(37:34):
the ones who are ready to managesituations they don't want to
put themselves in danger,certainly, but they're putting
up signs that this may not be asthreatening an environment or
there may be ways of diffusingthis environment other than
shooting.

Speaker 1 (38:09):
Yeah, absolutely.
Because then you're forcingthat this is training that.
Because now we've sort of gonefrom like all right, we know
what the science is, we've donethe analysis, we've talked to
these people, here's what it is.
Now putting that into atraining program is another sort
of hurdle on its own.
It's another process on its ownand in some ways it's more
complex than people realize, butin other ways it's actually a

(38:30):
lot simpler.
It's you just described allright, stop, what are you seeing
what?
What do you?
What would you likely do nextand tell me why?
And then now I'm working inbuilding those file folders,
building those mental models togo.
I can correct back there and,just like you had said, we try
to get these folks like well, ifit turns into a shooting
situation, we we've lost likethat's you know, just

(38:52):
recognizing and seeing a gunfaster.
You know, hey, I'm a half asecond faster on my pistol.
Draw Like, okay, there's anentire world.
That happened before.
You got that to that decision.
And and so I think peoplealmost focus on the wrong part
of recognition, where, whereit's not recognizing this is a
threat or not a threat, it's,it's no.
Wind the tape back.

(39:13):
And we got to get someunderstanding right and some
comprehension of the context ofthe scene in order to recognize
the potential likely outcomes ofwhat's going to happen.
Then I have a better sort ofintervention strategy and that's
been sort of our biggest or thehardest thing to kind of get

(39:33):
across to folks, of our biggestor the hardest thing to kind of
get across to folks, because weall default to this Well,
everyone's got guns.
It's like, yeah, I get thatwe're in the United States,
right, there's more guns thanpeople here, but so do you and
so does your partner and so dothese other people.
Like we get hyper-focusedbecause it becomes very primal
and it becomes very, you know,survival oriented that we don't
see this entire world.

(39:54):
So I'm curious if you've hadthat experience maybe not with,
maybe not seeing that withpractitioners, like you said,
the guy came up and goes.
I've never made a decision, butbut getting them to recognize
all that stuff sooner ratherthan at the, at the very end
where a decision is forced uponthem rather than them making a
more clear decision, I don'tknow if you, if you've seen that

(40:14):
like where it comes to thatrecognition and what that means
to people.

Speaker 2 (40:18):
And that's one of the things we try to do in the
shadow box is picking up theearly signs and reading the
situation early, when it hasn'tescalated, and noticing the
subtle cues and putting them inour scenarios so that people who
were training goes right pastthem and then they see that the

(40:39):
experts picked it up right away.
We even have a visual versionof shadow box and expert eyes
where we have a video versionwhere people can zero in on what
they think is an important cue.
Then they see what the expertspicked up and how much sooner
the experts noticed it.
So a lot of this is reallypicking up on the early sign.

(41:00):
But I want to go back to theissue about voluntary compliance
.
This isn't just a nice ideathat we came up with that.
It would be good if policeofficers can get voluntary
compliance.
This is something we learnedfrom our interviews with the
police officers who had thatskill and the military personnel

(41:24):
who had that skill.
I remember one interview I didwith this police officer.
He was pretty massive and itwas a small office barely
squeeze in and his arms werebigger than than my thighs.
And and and and he and he saidhe wanted to.

(41:45):
He became a policeman becausehe liked the action and he liked
the idea of of of taking downbad guys and getting into fights
and that was part of theexcitement.
But after about three, four,five years he said I won most of
the fights I was in, but it wastaking a toll.
I was starting to get a littlebit of physically beaten down.

Speaker 1 (42:09):
This sounds like probably 1990s, Greg right here
1980s.

Speaker 3 (42:13):
Greg, exactly, we're back to that, aren't we?
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:18):
And then he looked at some of his colleagues who were
able to get people to do whatthey wanted without fighting
them, and he began to listen tothem and he listened to what
language they used and he triedto collect what their phrases
were and I called them.

(42:39):
You know the golden words.
So he's building his repertoireof being able to get voluntary
compliance.
But he also changed his mindsetRight and he had a mindset that
he evolved by himself, whereanytime he was in an encounter
with a civilian or even with acriminal, he wanted that person

(43:03):
to trust him more at the end ofthe encounter than at the
beginning.
And that's how he carriedhimself.
And that struck me as such apowerful mindset shift that even
if I'm dealing with a criminal,I'm going to do it in a careful
and respectful way.
The person has broken the law,needs to be arrested, but that

(43:27):
doesn't mean that I can becontemptuous of the person or I
can humiliate the person.
It's still a person and he justwanted the trust level to go up
because of the way he harriedhimself.
And this is a tough policeofficer who got into it because
he wanted fights.
So we heard these things fromthe police officers, we didn't

(43:51):
just make it up.

Speaker 3 (43:53):
Right no and that's exactly right.
There's a point of time thatcomes in every soldier or
Marine's life and every copper'slife.
Where they go, I just can'tpunch another bad guy.
I just can't tackle somebodyelse.
I just can't ram another car.
There's got to be a better way,and the idea is there is a
better way, but the ideas ofembracing that is still really

(44:15):
hard because there's so muchpressure pushing back from a
much larger community thatthinks there's only one way of
doing things.
And I would throw this at you,because you've dealt with a lot
of fire departments.
We cultivate curiosity.
One of the greatest gifts thatyou can be given is being
curious with your environment,because there's cues abound

(44:35):
within your environment that aregoing to tell you what's likely
to occur next.
And so, for example, withfirefighters.
A firefighter is going toanswer alarm, go down the pole,
get in the truck and go to thescene.
Firefighters don't normallypatrol an area looking for early
signs of fire.
So what we do is we tell themhey, listen, you really do.

(44:56):
Because when you go and check abuilding and you talk about the
alarms and the fire exits andthe capacity of how many people
that are in there, what you'redoing is you're saying, hey, I
can operate left of the event, Ican operate before the critical
event, and if you pick up onthose cues early enough, there
won't be a fire.
So we do that same thing withlaw enforcement and say, hey, if

(45:18):
you're curious with yourenvironment and you play with it
, you drop the rock in the pond,you take a look at how entropy
is acting on the people in thecommunity and you can feel when
things are right and you canfeel when things are wrong and
therefore you have a betterchance of not going kinetic.
Like in the military.

(45:39):
They have a term that's calleda permissive environment.
Well, every city in Americashould be a permissive
environment.
It shouldn't be semi ornon-permissive, but we can make
it that way with uniforms thatlook paramilitary and graphics
packages and those types ofthings that give this element of
control and force.
And we're past that now.

(45:59):
We've learned so many greatlessons If we would just embrace
the fact that people look aperson wants to talk it out
rather than fight it out.
When you get that rare personthat does want to fight it out,
there may be mental healthissues, there may be something
that's going on that you don'tknow, and then we got to call in
another expert.
But you can't do it all.

(46:20):
And when a copper is beingtrained that, you have the trick
bag, you have the bat belt andyou have to solve all the
problems.
I think that puts a an unduestress on them to perform at a
level that we're not trainingthem to meet.
Does that make sense?

Speaker 2 (46:37):
Makes total sense, I agree.

Speaker 1 (47:00):
Does that make sense?
Decision making and you've gota course about the cognitive
dimension.
So I've seen a lot now of folkscoming out with even cognitive
divisions in their trainingprogram and cognitive this and
cognitive that, and it's like,okay, is this the new word we're
using right now?
But could you help define thatfor what that is?
What is cognitive training andwhat does it really mean to you?
Because obviously you'refocused on decision-making, the

(47:23):
outcomes of what's happening,which is where people should be
focused on.
But what do you mean bycognitive training or the
cognitive dimension?

Speaker 2 (47:31):
Okay, what I mean is the ability to use your
experience and your expertise inorder to handle tough
situations and to understandthem, to appreciate the
implications, to anticipate therisks and to be able to identify
reasonable ways forward.

(47:51):
And one way to think of thecognitive dimension is to
contrast it with a proceduralapproach.
Mention is to contrast it witha procedural approach which says
here's a checklist and you gotto follow all these steps and
here's a playbook, and you justwant to have a playbook for
every situation and just followall that, which is kind of
mindless because there are noplaybooks that can handle the

(48:16):
kinds of complexity that lawenforcement gets into and you've
got to be able to readsituations and to use concerns.
That here's the standard play,but I'm worried about it, like
your construction worker wasable to push back.

(48:37):
So the problem with thecognitive dimension is that it's
invisible.
If I give you a proceduralchecklist, I can determine did
you follow all the steps?
And that's visible.
The cognitive dimension is notvisible.
It involves something we calltacit knowledge, knowledge that

(48:58):
isn't readily described.
Your ability to make perceptualdiscriminations that might be
invisible to somebody else.
The mental model.
The sophistication of yourmental model about how things
work is probably different nowthan it was five or 10 years ago
, and the patterns that you'veacquired through your experience

(49:23):
is part of the cognitivedimension, your sense of
typicality, which is soimportant.
You go into a situation andthings look fairly standard,
fairly typical, except, hmm, younotice something that isn't all
that typical.
So our ability to recognizetypicality, which only develops

(49:47):
through experience, is essentialfor us to notice anomalies that
is not typical.
Something happened that I didnot expect and I better pay
attention to it.
So all of those are parts oftacit knowledge and parts of
expertise that feed into thecognitive dimension.

(50:08):
When you start to learn toexercise this cognitive
dimension, the world becomesdifferent.
You're seeing things, you'renoticing things you haven't
noticed before, and that'stremendously powerful and
tremendously exciting.

Speaker 1 (50:28):
It is and especially in some of these fields, like
you know, you're talking about alot of the firefighters you
work with and law enforcement'sthe same thing.
You know we train a lot of lawenforcement and you know it's
like I.
You's like I was never a lawenforcement officer.
I had time in the military andworked for the government for a
while, but doing other thingsand the same thing.
I was like you guys have moretacit knowledge than you realize

(50:49):
and I don't care how manycall-outs you've been on or
chases you've been ininteractions you have with
people, have built up thisRolodex of information and
potential.
You know pre-event indicationsand potential anomalies and
things that are incongruent,signals that you're not even
really aware of it.

(51:09):
Like those are the things thatreally matter.
If I can get good at focusingon, like you just said, like
what's normal, what's typical,like get really really good at
defining this is what normalshould be in this context, then
all the things that aren'tnormal, that are incongruent,
the situation, like you said,they just pop out at you like
there's a whole world there andit's laying out in front of you
and then those patterns sort ofemerge on their own, in a sense

(51:33):
based on your experience, ifthat makes sense, kind of it's
how I try to tell people right,it makes perfect sense.

Speaker 2 (51:40):
the only thing I want to add to that is that there's
a common belief that you'regoing to be developing all of
this as you have more experience, and experience doesn't
automatically translate intoexpertise, right.
Somebody who's Okay, go ahead.

Speaker 3 (52:02):
No, doc.
Let's go just one step deeperon that and make sure that we
define that for our audience.
So there are coppers out therewith 35 or 38 years of
experience that have never beeninvolved in a situation yet
they're the training officer.
They've never made a felonyarrest or been involved in a
high speed pursuit.
There are people that are inthe business that have one

(52:26):
combat deployment or no combatdeployments, that call
themselves a subject matterexpert on school shootings
because they wore a uniform.
We have to be really careful ofhow we gauge expertise, really
careful of how we gaugeexpertise and when we allow
those people to raise to a levelwhere now they're not
peer-reviewed and they use thefake terms like evidence-based

(52:48):
studies rather than actuallyhaving been studied.
You know, I think you're ontosomething there, sir, because
just your time in rank and timein grade doesn't mean that
you've got the experiencenecessary Over.

Speaker 2 (53:01):
Right.
I remember when I did the firststudy I ever did with
firefighters, we went to thecity of Dayton, talked to the
head of the fire service thereand I said we want to interview
some of your firefighters and hesaid fine, who do you want to
talk to?
I said your most effective,you're most skilled firefighters

(53:22):
.
He said the ones with the mostexperience or the ones who are
the most skilled, becausethey're not the same thing.
If it's your house on fire, whodo you want to be in charge of
the crew that's going to becalled out to douse the flames?

(53:43):
And he said okay, we have somefive or six years who can
outperform some of these 20-yearexperience?
So simple years of experienceisn't enough.
It's how many tough cases haveyou handled and also how many

(54:04):
mistakes have you made?
We learn from mistakes, but weonly learn about mistakes if we
have a chance to get feedback,and we can only learn from
feedback if we have a chance tomake sense of it and to figure
out what it's telling us.
So you see, this is a much morecomplex situation than simply

(54:27):
years of experience.

Speaker 3 (54:29):
Exactly, Brian and I had just this discussion on
another podcast and with anotherclient where we were talking
about look, when somebody dials911, it's the luck of the draw.
You get whoever is in the stacknext to come to your call.
It doesn't mean you're gettingthe most experienced person, it
doesn't mean that person's everdone that kind of call, they
just happen to be next, andthat's scary and we can fix

(54:51):
those type of things.
And then the feedback loop isso essential, brian and I tell
our law enforcement clients look, on-duty roll call is a chance
before your coppers go out onthe street where you can take a
knee and you can give them someof this input.
You can play the imaginationgame.
You can take some of theirstored experience and put them
in a conundrum and get themprimed to go out on the street

(55:14):
so they'll be better criticalthinkers and we don't see that
happening as often.
Better critical thinkers and wedon't see that happening as
often.
Well, after they take ourtraining, of course, or if
somebody's reading your work, ofcourse, but it's not industry
standard yet.

Speaker 2 (55:26):
Right.
It kills me that there are somany great opportunities that go
floating by.
One of them is when you havethese kinds of team situations
you can set up a story circlewhere people tell about any
tough cases they had.
In the last two or three dayswe ran a story circle in a

(55:49):
petrochemical plant with a bunchof experienced panel operators
and one newer operator, and thenewer operator at the end said
everybody in our unit shouldhave been in this session
because I learned so much fromyou guys just listening to your
experiences and what you did.

(56:09):
Another thing that really grateson me tremendously is the
squandered use use of on-the-jobtraining.
We all know that most of theimportant things people learn.
Many of them, maybe most, theylearn on the job, not in the

(56:30):
academy.
But how are they learning?
For the first year they ridewith an FTO and after that
they're on their own.
But even the field trainingofficer who trains the field
training officer right on thejob training to say look at that
, you know.

(56:51):
Here's what I'm seeing.
We're asking the person how areyou sizing up this problem and
why do you think that you know?
Why are you making thatinference?
And to create a dialogue wherethe trainee can ask oh, what are
you picking up here, right,what am I missing?

Speaker 3 (57:10):
Right, right, what am I missing?
Exactly, exactly.
It's such an important standard.
Look, there's some people outthere working in FTO now.
The San Jose model is dated inage, but it was a great initial
shot over the bow and it's beengetting better in many agencies
and you've got critical thinkerslike Mike Warren and Brian
Willis and Dr John Black, whoyou know John Black, john Peters

(57:33):
those guys are doing their bestto improve that level of
training with the FTO.
I remember I won't attribute aname, but I had a few years on
and I had a midnight supervisorjump in the car with me and say
by the way, I'm going to ridewith you for the first hour.
And I said, oh, this is amazing, I absolutely love it.

(57:54):
I got three or four years on,I'm drawing longevity checks and
now the cops are finally goingto check on my work.
And the first thing he said isdrive over here, drive over
there.
And what we did is we went andpicked up his lunch for midnight
shift and I said why are wedoing this?
And he said well, I can't driveright now because I had my eye
test, my glaucoma test, todayand you're going to be driving
me around.
We call this government work andI lost all faith at that point.

(58:14):
Here he had set the bar highand I thought this is going to
be a great night and then all ofa sudden he pulled the rug out
from under me.
We still repeat errors at largeand we have to understand that
we don't have repeated chancesin law enforcement and
corrections and in fire in thosedomains and extremists in the

(58:35):
military.
And look, the largest point ofcontention now is medical
malpractice.
So these are exactly the peoplethat would benefit most from
this type of training andcertainly, gary, from the body
of work that you spent yourentire life refining.

Speaker 2 (58:51):
Thank you I agree.

Speaker 1 (58:53):
So what you know?
You've been studyingdecision-making and experts for
decades.
Now You've got another book outtoo, I believe.
What's it?
I'm sorry I can't remember.
I had it written down Snapshotsof the Mind.
I know that's your latest book.
I've read a few of yours beforein the past, but one of the
things I want to ask you is whatdon't you know about

(59:14):
decision-making?
What are you still looking for?
What interests Gary Klein aboutsomething like what?
What you know as you dig deeperand deeper and deeper over the
decades and years ago?
Matt, we're all looking forthat nugget, that piece of
wisdom, the drop on the tongue.
That's what everyone wants,even though it doesn't really
exist.
But but what is it that that'sstill interests you, then, and
that you don't know about this?

Speaker 2 (59:35):
Oh, there's so much that I don't know, and that's
what makes it all so exciting.
So one of the things that I'mtrying to learn is how to
develop more effective trainingprograms.
I'm going to be putting on acouple of workshops in a few
weeks and I'm going back throughexisting training materials I

(59:58):
have from five years ago, sixyears ago and I'm cringing Like
why would I have?
I can't believe that this iswhat I was teaching.
We can do much more.

Speaker 3 (01:00:10):
Right, that's so great.
That's so great.
I love the fact that you'reiteratively growing as well, and
Brian's question was loaded,but I love that.
What are you going to dotomorrow?
What's on the horizon, you know?
Because there's so much that weall don't know, and I think
it's incumbent upon us to createa legacy and leave behind a
legacy of thinkers.

Speaker 2 (01:00:33):
Right, I think we have that opportunity and that
obligation, and so I'd like tolearn how to develop more
effective training programs.
I am fascinated I continuallyfascinated by the topic of
insight and where it's come from.
I wrote a book about it back in2013.

(01:00:56):
That's over a decade ago, andthe publisher wants me to come
up with a new edition.
And I'm looking at the book andI'm thinking I don't believe
much of it.
I mean, I believe most of it,but I can do much better now.
So I'm eager to upgrade thebook and update the book.

(01:01:17):
Upgrade the book and update thebook.
So that's another area thatinterests me is the notion of
insight and how it applies andhow it develops and how to help
people work on themselves tobecome insightful.
And both of you mentioned acritical issue here of curiosity
, which is really behinddeveloping expertise, is

(01:01:43):
wondering about things.
And it's behind insights thatthe people who we've seen
situations where two differentpeople with the same exact
information one gets the insight, the other one doesn't the
person who gets the insight is aperson who had an active
mindset, was looking around,wondering about things, but you

(01:02:04):
can't just tell people have anactive mindset, right, it takes
expertise to notice.
What's strange about this,what's unusual?
What leverage point has justpopped up?
So there's a strong connectionbetween expertise and using

(01:02:25):
curiosity effectively.
I'm also disturbed by how manysituations we put people in
where their curiosity is stifled, exactly blindfolded in the
training and the instructor isjust trying to get through all
the PowerPoints, doesn't want totake questions from the class

(01:02:47):
and is oriented towards thenotion there's a right answer
and you're going to have to find, you know, remember, what the
right answer is.
With our shadowbox approach, wehave two or three subject matter
experts go through the scenarioand you know something they
don't always agree and when wepresent the material to trainees

(01:03:09):
, we don't gloss over that.
We say here's the majorityposition, but there's a minority
view.
And here's where they're comingfrom, because you're dealing
with situations where there'snot a minority view.
And here's where they're comingfrom because you're dealing
with situations where there'snot a right answer.
But let's look at what theirthinking is and see what we can
take away from their thinking,what we can learn from their

(01:03:30):
thinking.
And that's a lesson we havewhen we I've dealt with police
veterans of 25 years and we do ashadow box exercise and they
didn't get it exactly the waythe experts, the subject matter
experts, did, and their firstreaction is who are these

(01:03:51):
experts there?

Speaker 3 (01:03:52):
you go.

Speaker 2 (01:03:52):
Exactly and I can try to say well, we really picked
them fairly carefully, they'rewell-respected or I can say
we're not claiming that theyhave the right answer, but they
are respected.
And look at what theirrationale is and see what you
can learn from it if you want tolearn.

Speaker 3 (01:04:12):
If you want to learn, and that's the key.
The key is that you have tohave, in addition to a baseline
and environmental curiosity, youhave to have intellectual
curiosity and you have to sayI'm in this to advance this
field, that I'm in no matterwhat field that may be, and I
think that like-minded folks.

(01:04:32):
That's why look, you have noidea how long we've wanted you
on the show and the idea is thatyou're hard to pin down because
you're busy all the time.
And the reason you're busy allthe time is that you've got some
great answers.
But I would add that we don'talways disagree, and that's
healthy.
And what's healthy is thediscourse that comes out of that
, because it's only a fraction.

(01:04:54):
You know a very small marginbetween that and the expert
model.
That's where you learn the most, I think.

Speaker 2 (01:05:01):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:05:04):
When you're kind of looking back at this and you
know you talk about finding moreeffective training and you know
you look back at stuff youtaught before and I've done the
same thing where you're like, ohman, I guess, well, why did I
spend so much time on this part?
It's really this is the mostimportant.
Really, I got to make itsimpler and or you know how do I
get this more relevant?
You know, people are kind ofhungry for this stuff and what

(01:05:24):
I've seen change is people areseemingly more informed.
They're reading a lot of thesedifferent books or reading these
theories, but it's just, it'sagain.
It's that the practicalapplication of it is where it's
sort of fall short.
Like especially when we weretalking about law enforcement
and I've worked with sometrainers and different law and
they've read every book onpsychology and decision-making
and human behavior and they'relike they just they have this

(01:05:45):
thirst for knowledge and they'renot finding.
They're like, yeah, it wasgreat, but like how do I, how do
I take that and then use thatwhen I go walk up in contact to
the person?
I'm like that's the difficultpart.
We can, we can write about this.
So we're always trying tosimplify it in a sense that how
do I get the?
What's the minimum effectivedose of this content that's

(01:06:05):
going to get in there, which isreally difficult.
Because then there's the debate.
Well, we got to train thetrainers this way and the people
with more experience should getthis and the people with less
experience should get this.
And it's like, well, if you'retalking about human behavior or
you're talking about decisionmaking, it's like what does it
matter?
Like they're all going to getsomething out of it.
Maybe the experienced peoplemight get more or might refine

(01:06:28):
their perceptions, or maybe thenewer people are going to get
more because they had no idea ofthis.
But it should be able to bepalatable and be understood by
everyone.

Speaker 2 (01:06:47):
I don't know what your view is on that or how you
approach those situations, butI'd be curious to know.
That leads perfectly into avideo course that we just put
online called A Masterclass inPractical Decision Making, and I
developed the idea about two,two and a half years ago and I
looked at all the standardadvice on how to make decisions
and I said this isn't reallyhelpful.
This is way too academic.

(01:07:08):
This is not connected to thereal world.
I've been doing this stuff fora couple of decades.
Have I learned anything useful?
I wasn't sure that I had.
I mean, I may not have learnedanything useful, but if I have,
can I boil it down and put itinto a video course?
And I came up with 15 lessonsand I created a video script for

(01:07:37):
each one that's only fiveminutes long, and so that's the
essence of the course.
If I've got something useful tosay, one tip that people can
put into action immediately.
Let me describe what's wrongwith people's current thinking,

(01:08:00):
why this new approach is better,what it looks like.
Give them a story and have themfinish the five minutes with
something that they can takeaway and put into practice
immediately.
And I have 15 lessons and eachof them the five minute lessons.

(01:08:21):
It was a tremendous workout forme to see if I can consolidate
what I knew.
Yeah, there's something thatcould be useful.

Speaker 3 (01:08:31):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:08:32):
It goes back to yeah, you know, if I had more time I
would have written a shorterletter, you know, I mean it's
it's that that's always thehardest part is going.
What's the key thing?
What's this one thing that theycan take away?
Because one it's.
You got to capture everyone'sattention and that can be tough.
We're so distracted now ingeneral.
You know you got to capturethat and then it's like I got to

(01:08:53):
give it something that they cango do.
The second they walk out thisdoor.
That's going to be impactfuland meaningful and it'll work.
It's that sort of balance andso it's at least.
I'm a little relieved hearingthat from you, that you're
struggling with the same thing.
So I guess that's the constantstruggle for a lot of folks who
have a deep understanding ofsomething and want to get it out

(01:09:16):
to people.
But it's also frustrating ifyou're on the other side of that
.
And I remember I was actually ina course one time and it was a
great instructor, and then hesaid hey, remember, look you
guys, at any time you can ask mequestions.
And there, there, there's nosuch thing as a stupid question.
And you know, half the classraised their hand.
Then he looked at how manyquestions he had and he went but
there are stupid people andthen so half of it.

(01:09:37):
So a lot of those people thenput their hands down like man
maybe I don't want to soundstupid and he was like all right
, I got it and it was such agreat learning moment for me and
for that person who's like ohman, I don't have time to get
through all these questions, butalso I got to keep this
atmosphere.
So when you're taking, goingfrom theory to practical
application to a trainingprogram is incredibly complex

(01:10:01):
and sometimes we skip over.
We'll get stuff from class.
What I love getting feedbackfrom people is when they say hey
, when you said this or when youtalked about this.
I went home last night.
We had a guy.
It was at a college course.
Every semester we teach acourse at Liberty University and
we were doing some other workwith them and with their
criminal justice program.
But they invite other peoplefrom within their community with
this.
You know 80 year old guy inthere and he came up to me.

(01:10:23):
He's, like you know, sittingthere thinking about last night.
You know I used to own allthese car dealerships and I was
in sales and over the years andhe's like man, that thing that
you guys talked about, with thisfunnel approach to it and the
time and distance and thoseincongruent like I just realized
I could use that for everysituation in life and I was like
that was the best feedback I'dever gotten.

(01:10:44):
Here's this 80 year old guy whoyou know had horse stables, was
a car dealer owner, was doingall those things his whole life,
and then he just got oneconcept that we talked about and
said I can use that foreverything in my life.
I was like thank you, like yes,and then you had the 18-year-old
student who's the first timeout of their small town, is at
college and they're sittingthere in this course going like

(01:11:05):
what is all this?
So it's just a differentperspective, but it's great to
see that and that's always justa struggle to do.
So I don't know what you'veseen typically works in those
situations or what you try tofocus on when you're having that
problem works in thosesituations or what you try to
focus on when you're having thatproblem.

Speaker 2 (01:11:23):
So I go back to a guy that I had a ton of experience
as a trainer, a guy named IkeBracken who owned a ranch in
Texas but his day job waspetrochemical industry and he
was very good and became atrainer.
And he told me and he was atrainer for several decades he

(01:11:43):
said early in his trainingcareer he knew how to train
people because he'd been trained.
There's a way to do things,there's a right way, and you
watch the trainee and you waitfor them to make a mistake and
then you slam them so thatthey'll remember.

(01:12:03):
And that's the job of a traineris to stamp those lessons in.
So that's the way he'd beentrained.
That's the way he trainedpeople who were assigned to him,
signed to him, and after aboutfive, six years he kind of woke
up and he thought this reallyisn't getting me anywhere and

(01:12:27):
this slamming business is fun.
I mean, it's emotionallysatisfying.
He didn't want to deny that part.
But the people he's training,he said they're motivated.
Motivated, they want to do ajob and they're smart.
If they weren't smart enoughthey wouldn't have been selected
.
So if they're making a mistake.

(01:12:48):
Instead of slamming them, youcan become curious and that's
the word that you mentionedbefore and work with them and
say, when you you did thatthat's a surprise, what were you
thinking about?
Why did you do that?
And sometimes they might have agood idea.
But he switched from thisaversive, abusive model into a

(01:13:15):
curious, collaborative model andhe said it made all the
difference.

Speaker 3 (01:13:20):
That's so amazing.
You know there's a section ofexpertise out there that people
refer to as the natural and Icaution people because they're
few and far between and they'reso remarkable.
They make movies about it.
So you aren't.
You know.
So right away.
If you think you're natural,you're not.
So start buying more books orgoing to more classes.
Then you've got the other end ofthe spectrum, where you've got

(01:13:43):
the expert that wants to wow youwith their expertise.
So they engage in S2obfuscation and write just
everything and have all thesedramatic graphs and have, you
know, demystified John Boyd'sOODA loop to the point that you
point that you can use it in asecond.
And then right in the middle isthat person that you meet that

(01:14:04):
can not dumb it down, but theystreet it up and they can show
you and tell you and point tosomething and all of a sudden
the epiphany moment happens andtrue learning occurs.
So whenever we find that, weembrace it, Brian, and I embrace
it, Arcadia embraces that, andit's rare.
When we find that, we embraceit, Brian and I embrace it,
Arcadia embraces that, and it'srare when you find that.
But when you do, man, you got toexploit that.

(01:14:25):
You got to tell that personyou're on the right track and
you know, keep going, you knowforward and and I also love it
because I always learn fromthose folks as well so, if we
can get the charlatans and andwe can get the you know, the
people that are just on the booktour constantly to take a
breath and look around them, Ithink that together, like you

(01:14:46):
know what a dream for me wouldbe To be able to collaborate in
the future with you on somethingwhere, jointly, we can make a
bigger difference than you'vealready done in the decades that
you've been involved in this,and you know I got a couple of
good things that I can point to,that I did, but it's not enough
.
Tomorrow I got to get up againand say what am I going to do
this week?
That's going to change, that'sgoing to move the dial, and

(01:15:08):
that's why I love working withBrian and our team.
I hope that you always stay asmotivated and as intrigued by
this work as you are right now.
To motivated and as intriguedby this work as you are right
now.

Speaker 2 (01:15:20):
To me, this is a bucket list moment being on a
podcast with you and being ableto share some ideas with you.
I feel fantastic about it.
Thank you very much for thosereally kind words and it would
be exciting to see if we canfind something to collaborate
about, I think that could bepowerful.

Speaker 3 (01:15:40):
That is so much.

Speaker 1 (01:15:43):
So, brian, write that down, yeah, yeah.
So I'm going to put the linksto those courses and stuff that
you have in all the episodedetails and everyone will get it
and they can check it out.
I mean, you don't have to doany much more than just Google,
gary Klein, and it's going to beall over with everything your
work on there.
It's really just fascinatingstuff.

(01:16:03):
I was always drawn to itbecause you're one of the people
that I appreciate in terms of,hey, we got to go out here and
figure this stuff out, not sithere in academia that has its
place for everything and do itin a lab and get some students
and do some studies.
No, let's's take it to thestreets and then let's sort of
reverse engineer this to see ifwe can replicate it.
And it's hard, it's really hardto do, especially when you're

(01:16:26):
you know you got someone who'slike what do you mean?
I just, I just know it's likewell, you know, for a reason and
I'm trying to figure out thatreason and I another great one,
we had this.
You know we did an intro tocourse.
I mean this, this guy come up.
It was a mix of, like you know,local, state and federal law
enforcement officers.
And this guy was, you know, itwas a city cop for a while.
Then he was at differentfederal agencies and I was

(01:16:47):
higher up in, like you know,homeland Security investigations
, I think it was.
But he just came up and he'slike hey, where was this my
first day on the job?
First day on the job.
He's like you just took, Ican't do that.
Like I know what you said, Iknow all of that stuff, but I
can't say it in that way and Ican't translate it to another
person.
And he was like grabbing me bythe shirt, like teach me how to

(01:17:09):
do it.
I'm like that's what we're herefor.
That's what we're here for.
Like don't worry, we're goingto give your folks something,
and like it was really cool tosee that when it's validating
for what you're talking about,it's obviously resonating with
the audience.
But when you get that experiencelevel where people go, you know
there's so much that we learnthat.
You know even in school youlook at what you all the
different subjects you learn inschool, growing up, through high
school, college, whatever yougo through like how much of that

(01:17:30):
have you actually used?
And so I always go back to youknow what's you look for.
Everyone has a teacher, amentor, an uncle, a neighbor or
someone that, like, talked tothem or taught them something
and they were just enamored withit, and it's like everyone has
that sort of mental model forthat person.

(01:17:50):
It's like what?
Find out what it was that youlove so much about the way that
person taught, or they spoke, orthey taught you know they, they
trained you, and then that'swhat you can emulate.
And we we all have what wronglooks like right, everyone's
seen the oh God, I don't want tobe, but it's good to have that.
You need the comparison, right,you know, or at least you know,
what not to do, right, whatdoesn't work.
But but I always try to lookback and so you know you, being

(01:18:14):
out there doing this on a on apractical level, is extremely
helpful and I love it because Ican nerd out on all the science
behind it and really get into it, but still have some actual
takeaways that I can use.
I mean even the HPP, rna andthe stuff we teach, like I'm
using that to help.
It's making me a better father.
I got a little two-year-old.
Now he's almost two years oldand I'm teaching him.

(01:18:35):
He's not even speaking fullsentences, only knows so many
words, and it's like we canstill go through and we'll
compare this to that.
Why is that different?
What is it?
Oh, and he's seeing differencesin things, so he's learning to
compare.
So now he's going head tiltingall the time and I'm like, okay,
he's learning, here's this andso it's fun.
And I'm like, if I can getthrough to a two-year-old, I
should be able to get through tothe toughest sage, gray beard

(01:18:57):
copper, who's been on the roadfor 30 years and seen and done
it all.
So that's always my challenge,but I'll give you any last words
that you have, gary.

Speaker 2 (01:19:06):
Okay.
So I appreciate theseopportunities for dialogue with
fellow practitioners, fellowinvestigators.
It's always exciting for me tosee what other people have been
trying to do and and to create alarger community.
I should say that, for folkswho are interested in the things

(01:19:29):
that I do, there is a wholeassociation called naturalistic
decision making association andwe have several hundred people
who are part of that and we meetevery two years.
The last one was in New Zealandand the next one is going to be
in June 2026 in Charlottesville, virginia.

(01:19:51):
But there's also a website forthe Natural Electric
Decision-Making Association.
So for people who want to pluginto my community, I welcome you
to join us as we try to moveforward.
Yep, and.

Speaker 1 (01:20:09):
I'll put the links for all that.
I'll put the links for yourcourses for the Naturalistic
Decision-Making Association.
I'll have that all in theepisode details so folks can
check that out and go rightthere.
But we always recommendconnecting with Gary and reading
up on his work.
And so, greg.
Any final words before I closethis out here.

Speaker 3 (01:20:27):
Quickly thanks to Dr Joan Johnson and Dr Leah DiBello
.
Both of them reached out toGary and Gary was so gracious to
come on.
I hope we didn't bore you.
I hope we intrigued you enoughthat we can have you on the show
again in the future, sir.

Speaker 1 (01:20:43):
We appreciate it.
Dr Klein, thank you so much forcoming on.
Everyone, there's always moreon our Patreon site.
You can check that out.
If you enjoy the episode, shareit with someone.
That's all we ask.
If you can't sign up forPatreon, we get it.
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more reach, even if you don'tlike it, but I'll take it, let

(01:21:06):
us know.
You guys can always reach outto us at the
humanbehaviorpodcast at gmailcom.
Thanks everyone for tuning inand don't forget that training
changes behavior.