Books about experienced judgment and intuition at work

An experienced colleague notices a problem before anyone can name it. Another person is equally confident about an unfamiliar business. Both may call their judgment intuition, but the experience behind the confidence matters.

Start with Infinite Upside for the boundary of an owner's competence. Gary Klein's Sources of Power studies decisions in real working situations. His Streetlights and Shadows questions common advice about deciding under complexity and ambiguity. The specialist choices share an author and give the reading different emphases.

1. Infinite Upside: asking where the experience applies

   By Vijay Sheth.

   Chapter 13 recognizes that knowledge of customers, assets and operating a company can be useful without making the owner an expert in every part of a new undertaking. The boundary can run through a project, with some parts familiar and others needing specialist examination.

   The chapter also asks for the basis of an objection. An experienced person may know something important, but their experience may be outdated or their concern may protect an arrangement they prefer.

   Read the memoir first when the discussion has become a choice between trusting experience and rejecting it. It keeps the more useful questions open: experience of what, in which setting, and with what bearing on this decision?

   The memoir is not a research account of intuition. Its contribution is the owner's responsibility to understand what experience can support before borrowing confidence from a different situation.

2. Sources of Power: studying experienced decisions in real settings

   By Gary Klein.

   MIT Press's twentieth-anniversary edition of Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions appeared in 2017. The publisher describes Klein's naturalistic approach: studying how people use experience, intuition and analysis under real working constraints.

   Investigate Klein when your question concerns the judgment people exercise in situations they know well. This is a different emphasis from treating every rapid decision as an error waiting to be corrected.

   Imagine a fictional maintenance supervisor noticing that an apparently ordinary job is developing differently from the team's usual work. The owner wants to understand experienced judgment more fully before deciding how to evaluate that concern. This is an editorial situation, not one of Klein's cases.

   The book ranges across working settings with time pressure and changing conditions. Those settings belong in the comparison. A study of experienced people does not establish that the fictional supervisor's concern is correct or that the owner's own confidence rests on comparable experience.

3. Streetlights and Shadows: questioning the advice around a difficult decision

   By Gary Klein.

   MIT Press describes Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making as an examination of conventional decision advice under complexity and ambiguity. The original hardcover appeared in 2009; the linked paperback dates from 2011.

   Choose this later argument when your question concerns advice that assumes the situation is clearer than it is. The available information may be incomplete, the meaning of a change uncertain and the next useful action still emerging.

   For the fictional maintenance team, a reader might want to study why a rule written for an ordinary job no longer settles the unusual one. That is a reason to investigate Klein's critique, not permission to discard procedures whenever someone dislikes them.

   The relationship between the books is part of the choice. Sources of Power introduces the experienced-decision perspective; Streetlights and Shadows develops a challenge to familiar advice. Neither title should become a slogan that experience always outranks analysis.

Choose the judgment question

Begin with the boundary of competence, the way experienced decisions are made or the advice used in an ambiguous situation. Keep the experience behind the judgment open to examination.

The competence-boundary explanation follows an unfamiliar acquisition question. The team-judgment selection concerns what happens when people deliberate together.

Read Infinite Upside for an owner's account that values operating experience while examining where it stops. Try the opening passage before following its later reasoning about unfamiliar opportunities.