CONCEPT
Cognitive Flexibility (Klein)
The expert's capacity to abandon or restructure patterns when evidence demands — the operation that distinguishes insight from routine recognition.
Cognitive flexibility is Klein's term for the cognitive operation that separates insight from pattern-matching. Routine recognition deploys patterns as templates, matching current conditions to stored cases and applying associated actions. Insight deploys patterns as points of departure, using the expected pattern as a reference against which the unexpected can be detected, then allowing the unexpected to restructure understanding. The first operation is convergent — it narrows toward a recognized category. The second is divergent — it opens toward new interpretations. Both depend on the same pattern library, but cognitive flexibility is the capacity to use the library's contents in a fundamentally different mode. The capacity is built through the same experiential process that builds the library, but it is not automatic — experts can have rich libraries and inflexible deployment, producing confident but rigid practitioners unable to recognize when their patterns are failing.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Klein's research on the Three Mile Island accident and the Mann Gulch fire disaster identified cognitive flexibility failure as the proximate cause