When organizational psychologist and researcher Gary Klein published his book Sources of Power in 1998, he anticipated it would find a modest, steady home in academic circles. As of June 2026, the volume has sold more than 72,000 copies, far exceeding typical academic publishing expectations and establishing itself as a foundational text in cognitive psychology and naturalistic decision-making.
Yet, the path from a frustrated research project to an enduring intellectual milestone was neither straightforward nor planned. It required an unexpected shift in methodology, a transformative academic sabbatical, a stroke of bad luck on a rocky foreign trail, and a rigorous, month-long writing regimen born out of absolute immobility.
The Origins of the Recognition-Primed Decision Model
The story of Sources of Power traces 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 execute high-stakes decisions under conditions of severe time pressure and profound uncertainty. Initially, the research team intended to observe active fireground operations firsthand.
Unfortunately for the researchers—though fortunately for the local community—building codes in the Dayton, Ohio area had proven remarkably effective at preventing major structural fires, leaving the team with very little live action to observe. Faced with a methodological roadblock, Klein and his colleagues had to pivot. Instead of observing active emergencies, they began gathering data by interviewing highly experienced firefighters, prompting them to recount their most challenging, complex cases from the field.
These retrospective narratives proved to be a goldmine of cognitive data. They allowed the researchers to formulate the Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) model. The RPD model challenged prevailing psychological theories by explaining how seasoned experts could make rapid, effective decisions without wasting precious time actively weighing and contrasting multiple options against one another. Instead, they recognized patterns based on experience and acted immediately.
The team formally presented these revolutionary findings in a conference paper in 1986. Subsequent studies involving other types of expert decision-makers yielded confirming evidence, which Klein documented in detailed academic papers published in 1989. With the research completed, the data analyzed, and the formal findings published in specialized journals, that should have been the end of the endeavor.
The Missing Narrative and the Accidental Catalyst
However, Klein felt a lingering sense of omission. The standard academic publishing format required sterile reporting, structured data, and compressed summaries. Consequently, the rich, compelling, human stories collected during the interviews had been largely left out of the formal literature. Klein realized that the only way to truly do justice to the experiences of these frontline operators was to write a comprehensive book dedicated to their narratives.
The primary obstacle was simple: Klein did not view himself as a writer, nor did he possess the expansive blocks of time required to draft a full-length book. A manuscript seemed an unlikely prospect.
Then came a fortuitous, if painful, twist of fate. In 1992, Klein’s wife, Helen, was awarded an academic sabbatical in Jerusalem, and Klein joined her abroad. With few formal obligations on his plate, he was content to spend his days sightseeing. One afternoon, while jogging through a narrow valley behind their apartment building, he noted to himself that the route—little more than a rocky, unpaved trail—was precarious and that an injury was likely only a matter of time.
Barely ten minutes later, his prediction materialized. He misjudged a step, twisted his ankle violently, and fractured a bone. Hobbling back to his apartment, Klein faced a stark reality: his sightseeing days were definitively over, and he was effectively immobilized.
What could have been a frustrating and depressing interruption instead provided the ultimate resource for a reluctant author: uninterrupted time. To preserve his sanity while confined to the apartment, Klein decided the injury presented a rare window of opportunity to finally write the book about the firefighter stories.
A Month-Long Writing Sprint and the Expansion of the Concept
With a scheduled return to the United States in just one month, Klein established an ambitious timeline. Calculating that producing eight single-spaced pages a day would yield a complete first draft within thirty days, he set to work.
Rather than diving straight into drafting, Klein dedicated the first couple of days to visualizing the structural arc of the book. He mapped out an outline for each chapter, meticulously cataloging the specific stories he intended to feature to ensure he neither repeated anecdotes nor omitted the most compelling examples. After assembling a detailed outline, he realized that pushing the outlining process any further was becoming tedious, signaling that it was time to put pen to digital paper.
Klein instituted a strict daily discipline. Every evening before going to sleep, he reviewed the specific material he planned to cover the following day, consciously intending to give his subconscious mind raw material to process overnight. True to his design, upon waking each morning, he felt an immediate eagerness to get to his laptop. Sticking resolutely to his schedule, he successfully completed the first draft within his self-imposed one-month limit.
As the writing progressed, the scope of the book expanded organically. Spurred by the richness of the underlying stories, the manuscript evolved far beyond a narrow treatise on decision-making. Klein found himself addressing related cognitive phenomena, including problem-solving dynamics, the use of metaphors, and the architecture of human expertise. Later chapters explored how individuals read the minds of others, the collective dynamics of a team mind, and hyper-rationality—which he framed as an excess of the traditional Judgment and Decision Making perspective and the Heuristics and Biases movement.
Ultimately, the manuscript transformed into a comprehensive exploration of naturalistic decision-making and macrocognition, fields that had barely been conceptualized at the outset. Notably, only seven of the book’s seventeen chapters focused explicitly on decision-making. The broader work detailed practical methodologies for studying human cognition outside the controlled environment of a laboratory while championing the actual strengths of human decision-making, offering a direct intellectual counterweight to the prevailing academic focus on cognitive flaws and errors.
From Academic Press to Mainstream Prominence
With a completed manuscript in hand, the next hurdle was securing a publisher. Without a literary agent, Klein initially submitted the work to an academic press, but negotiations stalled when the publisher demanded more extensive structural modifications than Klein was willing to make. Salvation came through an academic colleague, Robert Hoffman, who connected Klein directly with an editor at MIT Press. The partnership proved exceptionally fruitful, culminating in MIT Press publishing the milestone 20th-anniversary edition of Sources of Power.
That might have remained a successful, if specialized, academic publishing story had it not been for the intervention of another colleague. Mike McCloskey, convinced that Klein’s insights deserved a dramatically broader audience, reached out to Tom Petzinger, a prominent columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Petzinger was captivated by the radical, counter-intuitive message of the Recognition-Primed Decision model and subsequently featured Sources of Power in two separate columns, exposing the work to a massive readership outside traditional academic channels. Years later, author Malcolm Gladwell gave the book additional prominence by highlighting its concepts in his bestselling book Blink.
Reflecting on the long journey of the text, Klein notes that the book remains a testament to the real-world experiences of firefighters, military officers, and frontline professionals forced to navigate high-stakes environments under crushing time pressure and uncertainty—and to a mistimed jog down a rocky Jerusalem trail that gave a reluctant writer the time to tell their stories.