تصمیم گیری بحرانی: اشتراک استراتژی بصری و تحلیلی Crisis decision-making: the overlap between intuitive and analytical strategies

Introduction The traditional (classical) decision-making theory dominated common understanding of how experts make decisions for decades. It assumes that people have unfailing memory and possess large computational abilities required to run complex decision calculations (Satz and Ferejohn, 1994; Scott, 2000; Bonabeau, 2003). Similar to the concept of unbounded rationality the theory suggests that people are generally exposed to a great deal of information which allows them to make the “best” decision. It is also assumes that decision makers are aware of most, if not all, available choice options alongside their potential impacts. The common prescription by the rational choice theorists is that professionals should avoid making intuitive decisions wherever possible and instead think more deliberately. However, with the emergence of a body of knowledge known as naturalistic decision making (NDM) in the early 1980s, researchers began to re-conceptualize the subject of expert decision making across a range of domains (Zsambok, 1997; Kahneman and Klein, 2009; Salas et al., 2012; Kermarrec and Bossard, 2014; Klein, 2015; Gore and Conway, 2016). Consequently, these studies began to identify inherent flaws in some of the assumptions underpinning the rational choice theory. First, the views of “rationality” and “optimality” were criticized for being unrealistic in real-life crisis environments as prior evidence consistently demonstrated the difficulty in maintaining an open mind, particularly when officers have very limited thinking time for which to make high-stake decisions (Tversky and Kahneman, 1973; Kahneman, 2003; Dunning et al., 2003; Tsoukas, 2003; Klein, 2003, p. 21; Waroquier et al., 2010). The prediction here is that operators are always likely to tweak the decision criteria, albeit unconsciously, to fit their pre-conceived and pre-determined notions. Second, the fact that in recent years crisis environments have become increasingly fast paced and relatively more dynamic than previously assumed has meant that it appeared unlikely that people would have the time to make complex calculations that evaluated different options (Tissington and Flin, 2005; Sinclair and Ashkanasy, 2005; Salas et al., 2012; Sadler-smith, 2016). Although prior evidence suggests that decision making involves more than one reasoning strategy, at least in practice, i.e. the intuitive and analytical approaches, the debate regarding the dominant thinking mode and the preferred sequence these should follow has continued to garner strength in the current literature (Dane and Pratt, 2009; Hodgkinson et al., 2009; Kahneman and Klein, 2009; Hoffrage and Marewski, 2015; Okoli et al., 2016a). Should people first draw on their intuition before engaging in analysis or is it the other way round? In what ways do the task environment influence the choice of a dominant thinking strategy at any given time?