Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions

Naturalistic decision-making research demonstrating how experienced practitioners in firefighting, intensive care, and military command make high-stakes decisions through recognition-primed pattern matching rather than analytical option comparison. Klein shows that expert judgment is largely tacit, contextual, and situation-specific — built from thousands of prior cases rather than rule-following — and that the quality of the mental model drives decision quality more than the analytical process does.

Renergence respects that people already know more than they can articulate. Klein's work validates our emphasis on surfacing existing knowledge rather than imposing external frameworks.

The Alignment domain applies Klein's Recognition-Primed Decision model in two directions. First, it validates the practitioner's trained pattern recognition as real expertise — the ability to recognize engagement mode signatures from observable behavior is a skill built through practice, not mere intuition. Second, it cautions that clients' self-assessments may be their own RPD operating in low-feedback environments, where 'recognition' reflects learned story rather than accurate self-reading. Practitioners are trained to surface their pattern recognition explicitly and test it against observable engagement evidence before drawing conclusions.

Klein's subjects are domain experts operating in high-stakes, time-compressed, feedback-rich environments where pattern recognition is sharpened by direct, immediate consequence. Personal development and engagement assessment contexts are slower-moving and have weaker feedback loops — meaning RPD expertise applies to the trained practitioner's observation skills but not necessarily to the client's own self-assessment, where 'pattern recognition' may reflect defensive narrative and social self-presentation rather than accurate reading of lived experience.