Video of Gary Klein speaking at Noblis' Technology Tuesdays
Gary Klein's book: "Streetlights and Shadows"
Gary Klein, Ph.D.,is a Senior Scientist at MacroCognition LLC. He was instrumental in founding the field of Naturalistic Decision Making.
Dr. Klein received his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Pittsburgh in 1969. He spent the first phase of his career in academia as an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Oakland University (1970-1974). The second phase was spent working for the government as a research psychologist for the U.S. Air Force (1974-1978). The Arab oil embargo of 1973 meant that pilots needed to do more of their training in simulators, and Klein began his investigations into the way people develop expertise.
The third phase began in 1978 when he founded his own R&D company, Klein Associates, which grew to 37 people by the time it was acquired by Applied Research Associates (ARA) in 2005. During this phase, Dr. Klein developed a Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) model to describe how people actually make decisions in natural settings. He developed naturalistic models of sensemaking, replanning, and causal reasoning. He also developed methods of Cognitive Task Analysis for uncovering the tacit knowledge that goes into decision making. He was one of the leaders of a team that redesigned the White House Situation Room. He was selected as a Fellow of Division 19 of the American Psychological Association in 2006, and in 2008 he received the Jack A. Kraft Innovator Award from the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
He has written Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, The Power of Intuition, and Working Minds: A Practitioner’s Guide to Cognitive Task Analysis. Dr. Klein’s latest book, Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making, was published in October 2009.