When behavioral scientist Gary Klein published his book Sources of Power in 1998, he anticipated it would find a standard niche within academic circles. As of June 2026, the volume has sold more than 72,000 copies, far surpassing typical expectations for specialized scholarly texts and establishing itself as a foundational touchstone in cognitive psychology. Yet, the path from initial field research to published manuscript was anything but conventional. It involved a frustrating lack of active fires in Ohio, an accidental fall on a rocky hillside in Jerusalem, and a desperate race against the clock to salvage sanity during a month of forced immobility.
The intellectual journey began back in 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 study how firefighters execute high-stakes decisions under intense time pressure and severe uncertainty. The original research design called for direct observation of firefighters actively responding to emergencies.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortuitously, the practical reality of urban planning intervened. Building codes in the Dayton, Ohio area had proved remarkably effective at preventing major structural fires, leaving the research team with very little live action to observe. Forced to pivot, Klein and his colleagues altered their methodology. Instead of watching firefighters in real time, they began interviewing highly experienced veterans of the fire service, asking them to recount their most challenging and complex operational cases.
These detailed narratives laid the groundwork for what would become the Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) model. The model fundamentally challenged traditional notions of cognitive processing by explaining how experienced professionals could make rapid, effective decisions without wasting precious time weighing multiple options against one another. The team published their initial findings in a formal paper in 1986, subsequently expanding their scope to study other types of high-pressure decision-makers and gathering consistent, confirming evidence across various domains. Klein documented these expanded studies in academic publications throughout 1989.
From a traditional academic standpoint, the project was complete. The research had been executed, the data rigorously analyzed, and the findings successfully published in peer-reviewed outlets. Yet, Klein felt a persistent sense that something vital was missing. The formal research methods and academic papers had captured the structural data, but they had stripped away the compelling, human-element stories that brought the cognitive processes to life. Those stories had never found a proper home in the rigid formats of academic journals. Klein concluded that the only way to do the material true justice was to write a comprehensive book.
The obstacle, however, was practical and formidable. Klein did not view himself as a traditional book author, and his demanding professional schedule left him with virtually zero spare time to undertake such a massive writing project. For a long time, the idea remained an improbable aspiration.
Then came a literal twist of fate. In the 1992-1993 academic year, Klein’s wife, Helen, was awarded a sabbatical in Jerusalem, and Klein decided to tag along. With few professional obligations pressing on his time during the trip, he was content to spend his days as a tourist. That routine changed abruptly one afternoon while he was jogging through a little valley behind their apartment building. He was acutely aware that he was running on a rough, rocky trail rather than a proper path, thinking to himself that it was only a matter of time before he sustained an injury. Just ten minutes later, his prediction materialized. He came down awkwardly on his foot, twisted his ankle, and fractured a bone.
Hobbling back to his apartment in pain, Klein realized instantly that his sightseeing days were over. He was entirely immobilized.
The prospect of weeks stuck indoors was initially depressing, but in an effort to salvage his mental well-being, Klein realized his forced confinement offered a rare window of opportunity. Perhaps, he reasoned, the broken ankle was the universe’s way of finally granting him the time he needed to write the book about the firefighter stories.
With a scheduled return trip to the United States just one month away, Klein established an ambitious metric for success. He calculated that if he could produce eight single-spaced pages every single day, he could successfully complete a full first draft of the manuscript within his remaining four weeks abroad. It was time to get to work.
Rather than diving straight into frantic typing, Klein dedicated the first day or two entirely to conceptualization and mental mapping. He crafted a structured outline for each chapter, meticulously mapping out which stories belonged where to ensure he avoided redundancy while capturing every compelling narrative he had gathered. He prepared a more detailed secondary outline, but quickly realized that pushing the granular detailing any further was becoming an administrative chore. It was far more productive and efficient to pivot directly to the writing process.
To maintain momentum, Klein instituted a strict daily regimen. Every night before going to sleep, he deliberately reviewed the specific material and themes he planned to tackle the following day, hoping to prime his subconscious mind to process and organize the thoughts overnight. True to his plan, when he woke up each morning, he felt an eager drive to get to his laptop. Sticking rigorously to his schedule, he accomplished his goal, finishing the complete first draft within the exact one-month window he had allocated.
As the writing progressed, the scope of the project naturally expanded far beyond its original boundaries, enriched by the sheer depth of the source material. Instead of remaining a narrow text focused exclusively on decision-making, the manuscript evolved to encompass related cognitive phenomena, including complex problem-solving, the use of metaphors, and the architecture of human expertise. Subsequent chapters ventured into territory exploring how humans read the minds of others, the collective dynamic of a "team mind," and the intellectual excesses of hyper-rationality found within traditional Judgment and Decision Making perspectives, as well as the Heuristics and Biases movement.
Without consciously intending to do so at the outset, Klein had written a definitive book on naturalistic decision-making. It was an early exploration of macrocognition before the scientific community had even formalized or conceptualized the term. The underlying field research simply carried far more profound implications than he had initially anticipated; notably, only seven of the book’s seventeen chapters dealt directly with decision-making.
Furthermore, the finished manuscript detailed practical methodologies for studying human cognition outside the controlled environment of a traditional laboratory. It highlighted the genuine strengths and adaptive capabilities of human decision-making, serving as a direct and necessary counterweight to the prevailing heuristics and biases literature, which remained overwhelmingly focused on human cognitive flaws, errors, and failures. Klein’s primary hope for the book was that readers deeply familiar with traditional judgment and decision-making frameworks would walk away seeing the world through a fundamentally different lens.
With the manuscript completed, the next hurdle was securing publication. Operating without a literary agent, Klein initially submitted his work to an academic press. However, the publisher demanded a series of substantial structural modifications that he was unwilling to make. Salvation arrived through professional networking, when his colleague Robert Hoffman connected him with an editor at MIT Press. The partnership proved to be an exceptional fit, culminating years later in the release of the press’s 20th-anniversary edition of the book.
Ordinarily, that would have marked the conclusion of the book’s publishing trajectory. However, the narrative took another unexpected turn when Klein’s colleague Mike McCloskey became convinced that the insights captured within Sources of Power deserved a much broader public audience. McCloskey reached out to Tom Petzinger, a prominent columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Petzinger was immediately captivated by the radical, counter-intuitive message of the Recognition-Primed Decision model and subsequently dedicated two separate columns to reviewing and discussing the book, exposing its core concepts to a massive mainstream readership. Not long after, author Malcolm Gladwell gave the book additional prominence by featuring its central ideas in his best-selling book Blink.
Thus, Sources of Power cemented its place in scientific literature—a book fundamentally motivated by the compelling, high-stakes accounts of firefighters, military officers, and frontline professionals who make critical choices under severe time constraints and profound uncertainty. And ironically, it was an unfortunate misstep on a rocky valley trail in Jerusalem that finally provided the time required to bring their stories to the world.