CONCEPT
Critical Decision Method
Klein's structured interview technique for surfacing the cognitive processes of expert decision-making through retrospective walkthrough of specific challenging incidents.
The Critical Decision Method (CDM) is a cognitive task analysis technique developed by Klein and colleagues in the 1980s that became the methodological engine of the Naturalistic Decision Making movement. The method involves walking experienced practitioners backward through specific non-routine incidents, using probe questions to surface the cues they attended to, the patterns they recognized, the options they considered, the mental simulations they ran, and the decisions they made. CDM is iterative — multiple passes through the same incident, each focused on different aspects — and it relies on specific probes designed to elicit tacit knowledge practitioners cannot articulate spontaneously. The method produced the empirical foundation for Klein's RPD model and has been adopted across dozens of research programs studying expertise in high-stakes domains.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The method emerged from Klein's early fire commander interviews, where he discovered that standard interview approaches produced thin descriptions of how experts decided. Practitioners would give abstract accounts that corresponded poorly to the rich cognitive processes the incidents actually involved. CDM's structured iteration,