Gary A. Klein

Dr. Gary Klein is a cognitive psychologist and the author of five books, including Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions and his most recent work, Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights. He regularly works with leaders in domains such as healthcare, military, law enforcement, petrochemical industry, social work, and business management to assist them with issues in organizational expertise and workplace insights. Dr. Klein is well known for his ability to communicate complex ideas in psychology through compelling and relatable stories from his research in expertise and decision-making. He has received praise from intellectual icon and storyteller, Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote, "No one has taught me more about the complexities and mysteries of human decision-making than Gary Klein." Dr. Klein is widely known for changing the landscape of cognitive psychology by pioneering the Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) movement in 1989. Until this point, psychologists used laboratory settings to study how people make decisions, with a heavy focus on human bias and error in judgment. Dr. Klein flipped the focus to conducting decision research in real world settings, studying how experts including firefighters, military battle commanders, and doctors use intuition and experience to engage in effective decision-making. As one would expect, Dr. Klein's radical new take on cognitive psychology research invited opposition from the traditional community. What is notable, however, is the respect Dr. Klein has received from psychologists and researchers whose perspectives have differed dramatically from his own. As Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman wrote in a recent article, "Gary Klein is a living example of how useful applied psychology can be when it is done well...Klein and I disagree on many things...But I am convinced that there should be more psychologists like him." Dr. Klein currently works as a Senior Scientist at MacroCognition LLC in Dayton, Ohio and recently started a new company in 2014, ShadowBox LLC, which develops training for organizations that allows novices to think like the experts. He is also a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), and received the 2008 HFES Jack A. Kraft Innovator Award.