The book never would have gotten written if I had not broken my ankle — truly a lucky break.

Our data collection method revolved around stories of tough cases — these rich stories have their own power.

The book concept expanded from decision-making to cover macrocognition.

Publishing the book was insufficient for getting the word out — it required additional showcasing.

I published my book Sources of Power in 1998, and as of June 2026, it had sold over 72,000 copies, making it fairly successful as far as academic books go.

But why did I write it? And how did it get published? This is a good time to describe its origins.

In 1985, I began studying the way firefighters make tough decisions under time pressure and uncertainty. My colleagues Roberta Calderwood and Anne Clinton-Cirocco and I had gotten a small contract from the Army Research Institute to study firefighter decision-making, and we planned to observe firefighters in action. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), that didn’t work out because building codes in the Dayton, Ohio area had been effective in preventing fires, so there was little to observe. Therefore, we changed our tactic and gathered data by asking highly experienced firefighters to tell us about their challenging cases. These stories generated the Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) model, which explained how firefighters could make decisions without spending time contrasting options. We presented our findings in a paper in 1986. We studied other types of decision makers and got confirming evidence, and I wrote these studies up (Klein, 1989a;........

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