When cognitive psychologist Gary Klein published his book Sources of Power in 1998, he anticipated it might find a modest home within academic circles. As of June 2026, the volume has quietly surpassed 72,000 copies sold, securing a remarkably durable legacy for a specialized scholarly text. Yet the path from a frustrated research project in Dayton, Ohio, to an enduring cornerstone of naturalistic decision-making theory involved an unlikely sequence of events, accidental injuries, and unexpected literary detours.
The origins of the book trace back to 1985, when Klein and his colleagues, Roberta Calderwood and Anne Clinton-Cirocco, secured a modest research contract from the Army Research Institute. Their mandate was to investigate how firefighters make split-second, high-stakes decisions under intense time pressure and deep uncertainty. The original research plan was straightforward: observe firefighters responding to active emergencies in the field.
Reality, however, quickly intervened. Building codes in the Dayton, Ohio area had proven remarkably effective at preventing major structural fires, leaving the research team with very few active incidents to observe. Faced with a methodological roadblock, Klein and his team pivoted their strategy. Instead of watching firefighters in real time, they began interviewing highly experienced veterans of the fire service, asking them to recount their most complex and challenging past cases.
These retrospective narratives served as the raw material for what would become the Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) model. The model challenged conventional psychological theories by explaining how seasoned professionals could make rapid, effective choices without systematically weighing multiple distinct options against one another. Instead of deliberating, experts relied on pattern matching to size up a situation and immediately execute an appropriate course of action. Klein and his colleagues formally presented these findings in a 1986 conference paper, subsequently expanding the research to other high-stakes domains and publishing academic write-ups in the late 1980s.
For a time, that appeared to be the conclusion of the project. The research had been conducted, the data meticulously analyzed, and the findings successfully disseminated through standard academic channels. Yet Klein felt a persistent sense that something vital was missing from the formal literature. The empirical papers and technical reports had stripped away the vivid, compelling narratives provided by the firefighters and military personnel. The raw stories themselves—the human element of operational stress and cognitive agility—had not been fully captured. Klein concluded that the only way to do those accounts justice was to write a dedicated book.
The practical barrier to this ambition, however, was formidable. Klein did not view himself as a traditional trade writer, nor did he possess the expansive blocks of free time required to conceptualize and draft a book-length manuscript. Under the heavy demands of academic life, the project seemed destined to remain an unfulfilled aspiration.
Then came a literal twist of fate. In 1992, Klein’s wife, Helen, accepted a sabbatical in Jerusalem, prompting Klein to accompany her abroad. With few professional obligations on his schedule, he was content to spend his days sightseeing. During a morning jog along a rocky valley situated behind their apartment building, Klein found himself contemplating the hazards of his route. He noted that the path was uneven, lacking the structure of a proper trail, and mused that it was only a matter of time before he sustained an injury. Barely ten minutes later, his prediction materialized. He misjudged a step, twisted his ankle, and fractured a bone.
Limping back to his apartment, Klein faced an abrupt reality: his days of urban exploration and sightseeing were over. He was effectively immobilized.
While the injury was initially discouraging, Klein quickly reframed the predicament as an unexpected window of opportunity. To preserve his sanity during a month of enforced rest, he decided the time had finally arrived to write the book about the firefighters’ stories. With his return flight to the United States scheduled in exactly one month, he calculated that maintaining a rigorous pace of eight single-spaced pages per day would yield a complete first draft of the manuscript.
Before putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, Klein dedicated a day or two purely to mental visualization, avoiding active writing altogether. He constructed a structural outline for each chapter, meticulously mapping out which stories belonged where to prevent repetition and ensure no compelling narrative was left out. He prepared a secondary, more detailed outline, but wisely abandoned the impulse to construct an even finer micro-outline as it quickly became tedious. The barrier to entry was lowering; it was time to write.
A strict daily regimen took shape. Every evening before retiring for sleep, Klein reviewed the precise material he intended to cover the following morning. His objective was to supply his subconscious mind with fertile ground to process overnight. True to form, each morning brought a strong eagerness to sit before his laptop and execute the plan. Adhering closely to his self-imposed schedule, Klein successfully completed the entire first draft within the allotted thirty-day window.
As the writing progressed, the conceptual scope of the manuscript naturally widened far beyond its initial boundaries. Sparked by the sheer richness of the source material, the text evolved from a narrow exploration of tactical decision-making into a broader examination of human cognition. Chapters began addressing related phenomena such as complex problem solving, the cognitive role of metaphors, and the architecture of deep expertise. Further sections probed the mechanisms of intuitive social perception—how people read one another’s minds—the dynamics of a collective "team mind," and the intellectual excesses of hyper-rationality found within traditional Judgment and Decision Making perspectives and the broader Heuristics and Biases movement.
Unintentionally, Klein had written a foundational text on naturalistic decision-making and macrocognition before those fields had even been formally consolidated under those specific banners. Out of the book’s seventeen chapters, only seven ultimately focused strictly on decision-making mechanics. The broader volume outlined practical methodologies for studying human cognition outside the sterile confines of a traditional laboratory, while forcefully highlighting the innate strengths of human expertise to counterbalance a psychological establishment that had long fixated on cognitive errors and systemic flaws.
The publishing journey that followed proved similarly unconventional. Lacking a literary agent, Klein initially submitted the manuscript to an academic press, but negotiations stalled when the publisher requested extensive revisions that conflicted with his vision. Salvation arrived through a personal connection: his friend Robert Hoffman introduced Klein to an editor at MIT Press. The partnership flourished, eventually leading MIT Press to release the landmark 20th-anniversary edition of the book.
For a long time, that milestone appeared to mark the final chapter of the book’s institutional trajectory. However, academic colleague Mike McCloskey believed the volume’s insights carried far wider commercial and professional relevance. McCloskey reached out to Tom Petzinger, a prominent columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Intrigued by the radical departures of the RPD model, Petzinger devoted two separate columns to Sources of Power, catapulting the book into the awareness of a mainstream business and general readership. Not long afterward, author Malcolm Gladwell prominently featured the book and its core concepts in his bestselling book Blink.
Reflecting on the journey, Klein observes that a project born from the dramatic, high-pressure realities of firefighters, military commanders, and professionals operating under profound uncertainty ultimately required a mundane domestic injury—a broken ankle in a rocky Jerusalem valley—to provide the quiet isolation necessary to bring those stories to the page.