In the 1980s the U.S. Army noticed that, although it had been teaching the classic decision making model to its leaders for years, almost none of them used it in real situations. When asked, most leaders could not explain how they made decisions; they just made them. So, the army hired a company called Klein Associates to study decision-making.

What Gary Klein and his company did was examine the way decisions are made by highly proficient personnel, under conditions of extreme time pressure, and where the consequences of the decisions could affect lives and property. Since experienced combat leaders are hard to come by they turned to the Fire Service. They conducted interviews with 26 officers in 7 professional urban fire departments in the Midwest. The officers had an average of 23.3 years of experience, with a range of 12 to 37 years.

They thought they would find that these officers would come to decision points and have to choose from two or more options. That is how the classical decision making model works. Instead what they found was that very few officers reported ever considering more than one option. They saw the problem and knew what to do.

If you examine your own experience with making decisions you will probably find the same holds true. You see a problem and you just seem to know how to handle it. Some experts have called this natural decision-making. There are many different models out there to describe what is happening but I think the one developed by Gary Klein is the most accurate one I've seen. He called his model Recognition Primed Decision Making.

The classic decision making model has been taught for years and it is very good in the right circumstances. When you have the time and information necessary to use the classic model it is one of the best ways to come to a decision. The classic model is a four-step process. It includes;

• Aim
• Factors
• Courses
• Plan

Aim

The aim is what you want to accomplish. Sometimes it is given to you and sometimes you have to define it yourself. Either way, it is the final outcome you want to achieve.

Factors

The factors are anything that effects the decision. In firefighting it would include the list of critical fireground factors but it might also include other items as well. You must be able to weight the various factors and assign the proper level of importance to each. For example the factor of people trapped in the burning building must be given more importance than the factor of the door being locked. One factor outweighs the other but both are considered when you make your plan.

Courses

When you consider courses you come up with three (or more) ways of accomplishing your aim based on the factor you have evaluated. You look at each of the courses and try to determine the strengths and weaknesses in each.

Plan

The plan is where you choose the course of action that best fits the situation and then make a plan on how to implement it.

The strength of this decision making model is in the way it considers all factors and allows you to examine more than one way to do things. It is designed to lead you to the best possible decision. The weakness of it is that it is unnatural and it is time consuming. It also breaks down when you don't have enough factors to plug into it. You can't make a decision it you don't know what you are dealing with.

Although many of the fire officers Gary Klein interviewed reported that they "just knew" what to do, he analysed their thought processes and found a four step approach to decision making. He called it Recognition Primed Decision Making because it is triggered by recognising key elements in a given situation. The steps are;

• Prototype Match
• Expectations
• Evaluation
• Implementation

Prototype Match

A current situation is matched to a prototype, based on similarity of goals, perceptual cues, and knowledge of casual factors. In firefighting the prototype may be a previous call, a known SOG or a training scenario. The fire officer looks at a situation and quickly recognizes it as being similar to something in his/her experiences.

Expectations

The prototype generates expectancies and also a set of options with the most typical option generated first. We tend to do things the way we've seen them work in the past. If we see what we expect to see we follow the course of action we are familiar with.

Evaluation

The course of action is evaluated for plausibility. This does not look for a "best solution" it looks for a "workable solution".

Implementation

If the course of action has a reasonable chance for success, it is implemented. If it does not have a reasonable chance for success it is modified to better fit the situation. If a modification is not possible the course of action is rejected. If the course of action is rejected, the next most available and/or similar course of action is selected for evaluation.

The last two steps happen almost at the same time. The whole process is very fast. Garry Klein was quite insightful to break it down into four stages because it flows together so well most people are unaware of what they are doing. In a nutshell, you see a problem, you recognize clues in the problem that match a previous experience, your experience tells you what to expect and how to handle it. If what you see matches what you expect to see, you follow your course of action. If what you see does not match what you expect to see you modify your course of action or you reject your prototype match and find a new one.

Klein describes a fire officer who was making an interior attack. He found the seat of the fire and hit it with a stream of water. The water did not have the expected effect, so he backed off and hit it again. At the same time, he began to notice that it was getting intensely hot and very quiet. He suddenly ordered his crew to evacuate the house. Within a minute after they evacuated, the floor collapsed. It turned out that the seat of the fire was in the basement. This was why his stream of water was ineffective, and it was why the house could become hot and quiet at the same time. He attributed his decision to a "sixth sense." Klein was less poetic and inferred that the mismatch was a cue. The pattern of the cues deviated from the prototypical patterns of what happens when you direct a stream of water onto the seat of a fire. When his expectations were not met, the fire officer modified his course of action and then rejected it completely. Fortunately, when faced with a problem with no prototype match he went into a safety mode and got everyone out of the building.

The strengths of the RPDM model are its speed and its ability to provide a decision even with very few factors known. The weakness in this model is that it does not find the best solution and it doesn't work if you have no past experiences to go by.

How Do the Two Models Work?

Let us take a firefighting situation and use each of the models to make some decisions.

You are the Captain of a pumper truck. You get a call for a car on fire on a rural road where there are no fire hydrants. You arrive to find a car with the front right wheel in the ditch and heavy flames coming from the engine and passenger compartment. What will you do? (If you have been to a few car fires you probably know already what your actions will be.)

Aim

To extinguish the fire.

Factors

Fire

- in engine and passenger compartment, free burning, probably burning several minutes, moving from the front to the back, materials burning are rubber vinyl plastics and maybe some gasoline, we have access

Building

- N/A

Occupancy

- no one inside

Life Hazard

- none

Arrangement

- front wheel in ditch

Special Circumstances

- minor traffic

Resources

- have a pumper and crew, should have a tanker truck, need police

Action

- no victims, fire not stopped, beware of bumpers and airbags

Courses

Option 1 - First Firefighter pulls a preconnected line and advances to the back corner of the vehicle. Flow 1% F-500 to extinguish the fire in the passenger compartment then move to the engine compartment. Second Firefighter takes halogan bar and waits until engine compartment is knocked down. Use the bar to open the hood and allow the first Firefighter to extinguish the fire.

• Pros - Keeps fire away from fuel tank, conserves water, hood open ASAP to complete extinguishment
• Cons - No back up line for safety, may take longer to extinguish, does not comply with SOG

Option 2 - First Firefighter pulls a preconnected line and advances to the back corner of the vehicle. Second Firefighter pulls the other preconnected line and advances it to a position to protect and back-up the first Firefighter. Flow 1% F-500 in the first line only. The second line is charged but not used. First Firefighter extinguishes the fire in the passenger compartment then moves to the engine compartment and knocks it down. Second Firefighter lays down the back-up line and gets the halogan bar. Second Firefighter opens the hood. First Firefighter extinguishes the fire.

• Pros - Keeps fire away from fuel tank, conserves water, provides back-up line for safety
• Cons - Will take longer to extinguish

Option 3 - First Firefighter pulls a preconnected line and advances to the back corner of the vehicle. Second Firefighter pulls the other preconnected line and advances it to the other back corner of the vehicle. Both Firefighters flow 1% F-500 and advance along each side of the vehicle pushing and extinguishing the fire as they go. When the engine compartment is knocked down, the second Firefighter gets the halogan bar and opens the hood. First Firefighter extinguishes the fire.

• Pros - Keeps fire away from fuel tank, rapid extinguishment, complies with the SOG
• Cons - May run out of water, No back-up line for safety

Plan

Choose Option 2 because having a back-up safety line outweighs the longer extinguishment time. The vehicle cannot be saved anyway. Issue orders to each Firefighter and the Pump Operator. Observe and co-ordinate as the incident progresses. Continue to conduct size-up.

You could probably put out a car fire in less time than it took you to read this. The biggest drawback to this decision making model is that it takes time.

If you knew what you wanted to do as soon as you read the description of the car fire you probably used Recognition Primed Decision Making. Here is the model as it applies to this scenario;

Prototype Match

Car on fire in the ditch, heavily involved.

Expectations

1 line will put it out. Use F-500. Go from back to front. Stay clear of the bumper. A back-up line is good.

Evaluation

Plan fits with experiences in car fires.

Implementation

Issue orders to Firefighters and Pump Operator. Watch conditions closely to detect anything that doesn't match expectations.

Your experiences may have led you to different expectations than mine, but I'm sure the process was just as fast.

The problem with using the RPDM model is that you tend to use it for all decisions. It is so natural and quick that it is basically your default setting and you want to go to it all the time. That can be a very bad way to do things in certain circumstances.

The model works well when you have experience to draw on. If you have no experience, your prototype match will be so poor that it generates the wrong expectations. Or, you may not be able to make a prototype match at all. Have you ever been in a new situation where you just had no clue what to do? That's because you couldn't make a prototype match with your experiences. Some people seem to be able to get a prototype match in any situation. They can find clues in the current problem that somehow line up with a seemingly unrelated experience that leads them to a course of action. I think this is what we call wisdom. It is the ability to figure out what to do when everyone else is lost. Old people are wise because they have so many experiences to get a match from.

The model should only be used when there is an extreme time pressure on you. The difficulty I have with RPDM is that I use it too often. So do most people I've met. If you've ever made a hasty decision or an impulse purchase you've fallen victim to this phenomenon. RPDM does not provide you with the best solution it only gives you a workable solution. If in hindsight you can see where you might have done things better it is because you "jumped to conclusions" using the RPDM model. If there is no time pressure you should resist using RPDM and work your way through the classic model instead.

Most of the decisions we face have no time pressure to them. Klein found that most people could work through the classic decision-making model if they had the time required. When the time allowed dropped bellow one minute people started having difficulty. On the fireground we face extreme time pressure regularly, but off the fireground we usually don't. As much as possible we should restrict our use of RPDM to the fireground.

Some situations on the fireground are too complex to use the RPDM model. A classic example is a Haz-Mat situation. There are so many factors that must be considered and such a high need to find the best solution that RPDM must be abandoned. Haz-Mat specialists recognize this and always stress that fire officers must slow down and think things through. By that they mean use the classic model to make your decisions.

Similarly, when dealing with personal problems, we need to find the best solution not just one that will work. This is especially true when a Firefighter brings a problem to you as a Fire Officer. If you use RPDM you run the risk of saying the first thing that comes into your head. That usually only delays the problem or sometime it make it worse. It certainly does not give the Firefighter the time and respect he/she deserves.

Before you make an important decision you should ask yourself these two questions;

Is there extreme time pressure on me?
Do I have experience in this area to draw on?

If the answer to either of these questions is no, then you should resist your first impulse and go through the process of the classical decision making model. If the answer is yes to both of the questions then get on with your task and watch out for cues that don't match your expectations.

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