CONCEPT
Naturalistic Decision Making
The research movement Klein co-founded to study how people actually make decisions under time pressure, uncertainty, and high stakes — conditions that classical decision theory systematically excluded.
Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) emerged in the late 1980s as a research movement focused on decision-making in real-world settings rather than laboratory paradigms. Its practitioners — Klein, Judith Orasanu, Caroline Zsambok, and others — shared the conviction that classical decision theory, with its emphasis on rational choice among clearly defined options, had misrepresented how experienced practitioners actually operate. NDM research, conducted through field interviews and structured observation in firegrounds, intensive care units, military command posts, and cockpits, revealed that experts do not compare alternatives; they recognize patterns and mentally simulate actions. The movement's foundational 1989 conference produced the intellectual framework within which Klein's RPD model, the pattern library concept, and the research program on sensemaking developed.
In The You On AI Field Guide
NDM's core methodological innovation was the Critical Decision Method, a structured interview technique developed by Klein and colleagues that walked practitioners backward through specific challenging incidents to surface the cues they attended to, the patterns they recognized, and the decisions they