"Sources of Power": How the Book Came Into Being

I published my book Sources of Power in 1998, and as of June 2026, it had sold over 72,000 copies, making it fairly successful as far as academic books go.

But why did I write it? And how did it get published? This is a good time to describe its origins.

In 1985, I began studying the way firefighters make tough decisions under time pressure and uncertainty. My colleagues Roberta Calderwood and Anne Clinton-Cirocco and I had gotten a small contract from the Army Research Institute to study firefighter decision-making, and we planned to observe firefighters in action. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), that didn’t work out because building codes in the Dayton, Ohio area had been effective in preventing fires, so there was little to observe. Therefore, we changed our tactic and gathered data by asking highly experienced firefighters to tell us about their challenging cases. These stories generated the Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) model, which explained how firefighters could make decisions without spending time contrasting options. We presented our findings in a paper in 1986. We studied other types of decision makers and got confirming evidence, and I wrote these studies up (Klein, 1989a; Klein, 1989b).

And that was it. I had done the research, analyzed the data, and published the findings.

However, there was something missing. Our method yielded a set of compelling stories, and these stories hadn’t been told in the academic publications. The only way to do these stories justice was to write a book about them.

But I wasn’t a writer, and I didn’t have time to write a book, so it seemed unlikely that the book would ever happen.

Then I had a lucky break. Literally. My wife Helen had a sabbatical in Jerusalem in 1992-1993, and I tagged along. I didn’t have much to do, but I was happy to sightsee. Then one day I was jogging in a little valley behind our apartment building, thinking that it was only a matter of time before I injured myself because it wasn’t a proper path, just a rocky trail. Ten minutes later, I did come down wrong, twisted my ankle, and broke a bone in my ankle. I limped back to my apartment and realized my sightseeing days were over. I was immobilized.

Very depressing, except that to salvage my sanity, I decided that perhaps this was the opportunity to write that book about the stories.

I was due to return to the U.S. in a month. I calculated that if I could write 8 pages a day (single-spaced), I could finish a first draft of the book. Time to get working.

I spent a day or two just imagining the book, not writing at all. I made an outline of each chapter, including the stories I wanted to include (so that I wouldn’t tell the same story twice, or leave out any of the good ones). Next, I prepared a more detailed version of the outline. I was going to prepare an even more detailed version, but that was getting tedious. It was easier to turn to the writing.

I established a regimen. Before I went to sleep, I would review the material I wanted to cover the next day. I hoped that would give my subconscious mind something to chew on while I slept. When I got up, I was eager to get to my laptop. I kept to my schedule pretty well. And I finished the draft in the month I had allocated.

In the process of writing the book, the concept expanded because of the richness of the stories. Instead of just writing about decision-making, I also covered related topics such as problem solving, metaphors, and expertise. Other chapters explored how we read minds, the concept of a team mind, and hyper-rationality as the excesses of the Judgment and Decision Making perspective and of the Heuristics and Biases movement.

It turned into a book about naturalistic decision-making, although that wasn’t my original intent. It is a book about macrocognition, although we hadn’t conceptualized that yet. The stories just had more meaning than I had expected. Only seven out of the 17 chapters are about decision-making.

The book also described how to study cognition outside of a laboratory. And it highlighted the strengths of our decision-making, thus serving as a counter to the heuristics and biases movement that concentrated on flaws and failures.

I hope that people who are familiar with the judgment and decision-making approach will see the world differently after reading Sources of Power.

So that’s how the book got written. How did it get published? I didn’t have an agent, and I submitted the manuscript to an academic press, but they wanted more modifications than I wanted to make. Then my friend Robert Hoffman connected me with an editor at MIT Press, and that has worked out very well. They recently published the 20th anniversary edition of Sources of Power.

So that should be the end of the story. However, my colleague Mike McCloskey decided that the book deserved a wider readership. He contacted Tom Petzinger, a columnist at the Wall Street Journal. Petzinger was taken with the radical message of the RPD model and wrote two separate columns about Sources of Power, and these showcased the book to a side audience. Later, Malcolm Gladwell gave it some prominence in his book Blink.

So that’s the story of Sources of Power, a book motivated by the stories of the firefighters and military officers and others who make tough decisions under time pressure and uncertainty — and a broken ankle gave me the time to tell those stories.

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