Gary A. Klein quotes:

Rigor is not a substitute for imagination.

Society's epitome of credibility is John Wayne, who sizes up a situation and says, "Here's what I'm going to do" - and you follow him.

You shouldn't trust the judgments of stock brokers picking individual stocks.

If you mean, "My gut feeling is telling me this; therefore I can act on it and I don't have to worry," we say you should never trust your gut.

You need strategies that help rule things out. That's the opposite of saying, "This is what my gut is telling me; let me gather information to confirm it."

By the time executives get to high levels, they are good at making others feel confident in their judgment, even if there's no strong basis for the judgment.

I love rainy and bad-weather days because this type of weather gives me a mental advantage, especially when I'm fishing in a tournament. When the weather is inclement, most fishermen start thinking of reasons why they can't catch bass. But, because I fish so often in bad weather, I'm thinking of all the reasons I can catch bass in bad weather conditions.

I worry about leaders in complex situations who don't have enough experience, who are just going with their intuition and not monitoring it, not thinking about it.

If a situation is very, very turbulent, it has low validity, and there's no basis for intuition.

Many business intuitions and expertise are going to be valuable; they are telling you something useful, and you want to take advantage of them.

Most corporate decisions aren't going to meet the test of high validity. But they're going to be way above the low-validity situations that we worry about.

My research suggests that when people get rebuffed they become frustrated and angry, but they would do better to become curious about the reason for the rejection. I also found that people assume that others are like them, operating under the same knowledge, beliefs, constraints and priorities. This mirror assumption makes it easier to speculate about why others act in the way they do, but sometimes the mirror assumption is wrong.

Slow adaptation is driven by forces such as evolution. Fast adaptation is driven by forces such as insight.

There needs to be a certain structure to a situation, a certain predictability that allows you to have a basis for the intuition.

You need to take your gut feeling as an important data point, but then you have to consciously and deliberately evaluate it, to see if it makes sense in this context.