Sources of Power

Klein, G. (1998). Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. MIT Press.

Type

Book

Intellectual base

Review or monograph

Year

1998

Link

https://archive.org/details/sourcesofpowerho0000klei_u6x1

Cited from

behavioral_economics, cognitive_science, literature_literary_theory, organizational_management, philosophy, psychology

Cited by

16 citations across 16 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Bounded Rationality
  • Klein's recognition-primed decision-making describes expert judgment under time pressure.

    This sourceRecognition-primed decision-making; expertise under time pressure in firefighting, emergency medicine, and military command; directly supports the tactical-military example and the recognition-primed-matching claims.

• Cognitive Entrenchment
  • After correctly diagnosing thousands of cases matching a prototype, the clinician's recognition-primed decision system (

    This sourceCited inline in the medical-diagnosis example (marker 089's paragraph); support confirmed, link added.

• Collective Systemic Learning

  • This sourceDevelops recognition-primed decision making — how experienced practitioners detect patterns and act under time pressure.

• Decision
  • This asymmetry explains why decision-makers often face a speed-quality trade-off: more time enables better information but costs the option value of deciding quickly, a dynamic Klein (1998) documented in his recognition-primed model of expert decision-making under time pressure.
• Evidence
  • The transfer the prime promises is literal: chain-of-custody discipline imported from law becomes data-lineage instrumentation (attest each hand-off in the pipeline), and adversarial examination becomes the pre-mortem or red-team that surfaces defeaters before the fix is shipped.

    This sourceTreats pre-mortem and adversarial review as disciplines for surfacing defeaters before acting, the engineering/organizational analogue of cross-examination.

• Exemplar Retrieval
  • In management, case-based decisions and case-method teaching retrieve specific prior situations rather than apply abstract rules.

    This sourceRecognition-primed decision model showing experts and managers act by retrieving and matching prior cases rather than comparing options against abstract rules.

• Formal vs. Informal Structures

  • This sourceFoundational statement of naturalistic decision making, based on fieldwork with firefighters, nurses, pilots, and other experts under real-world constraints.

• Heuristic
  • Medical triage: sepsis early-warning rules. Clinical heuristics encode patterns learned from high-frequency cases into decision rules (elevated lactate + hypotension + altered mental status → sepsis alert).
• Mental Model
  • Deliberately building shared models is a high-leverage management practice.
• Narrative
  • Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.
• Pattern Recognition
  • Structural tension:
• Sensemaking
  • Mature practice distinguishes situation classes (routine: trust rapid frame-application; familiar-novel: permit structured rapid deliberation; genuinely novel: demand explicit slow-down and reframe) and builds capacity for each

Mechanisms

• Expert Case Recall Checklist
  • An Expert Case Recall Checklist targets the moment an experienced practitioner thinks "I've seen this before" — a recognition that is fast, powerful, and almost entirely tacit
• Field Decision Card
  • Its strength is availability at the moment of action: a card is usable exactly when a full matrix cannot be consulted, and it works with, rather than against, how experts actually decide under time pressure — matching the situation to a recognized pattern

    This sourceDescribes recognition-primed decision making in which experienced people under time pressure recognize a familiar situation pattern and generate a workable action.

• Playbook Creation
  • It presumes the reader is competent and choosing, not a novice being walked through steps.

    This sourceDevelops recognition-primed decision making from studies of experienced practitioners choosing through pattern recognition and mental simulation.

• Scenario Training
  • Rotating scenarios plus disciplined debriefs is how experts build the pattern library behind recognition-primed decision making, reading a situation and knowing what to do without deliberating through options.

    This sourceDescribes recognition-primed decisions as matching a situation to experience and acting from a workable script without comparing many alternatives.

Verification

Does it exist? Not checked yet. This entry carries no identifier to resolve. It was extracted from the citation as written in the article, normalized, and deduplicated against the rest of the registry.

Does it back the claim? Not recorded. Neither this nor any other of the 16 citations of this work carries a recorded support check.

Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.

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Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 4 other ways.

• https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262611466/sources-of-power/ ×5
• https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262112277/sources-of-power/ ×3
• https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/3647/Sources-of-PowerHow-People-Make-Decisions ×1
• https://openlibrary.org/books/OL21196907M/Sources_of_power ×1

Registry ID ref:a2ede17227e8 · see in the full table