Published in 1998, the academic book Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions has quietly amassed a substantial following, selling over 72,000 copies by June 2026. For an academic text, this milestone marks a rare level of enduring success. Yet the path from a frustrated research project to a widely recognized cornerstone of cognitive psychology was far from conventional. In fact, the book might never have been written at all were it not for a stroke of bad luck on a rocky valley trail in Jerusalem.
The journey toward Sources of Power began more than a decade earlier, in 1985. Cognitive psychologist Gary Klein and his research colleagues, Roberta Calderwood and Anne Clinton-Cirocco, secured a modest contract from the Army Research Institute to study how firefighters make high-stakes, rapid decisions under severe time pressure and profound uncertainty. Their initial methodology was straightforward: observe real firefighters responding to emergencies in the field.
However, the real world intervened in an unexpected way. Strict building codes in the Dayton, Ohio area had proven remarkably effective at preventing fires, leaving the research team with virtually nothing to observe in real-time. Faced with a methodology in crisis, Klein and his colleagues pivoted. Instead of observing active fires, they began interviewing highly experienced firefighters, prompting them to recount their most challenging and complex past cases.
These detailed post-incident narratives yielded a revolutionary framework known as the Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) model. Traditional psychological theories at the time assumed that decision-makers evaluated multiple options by comparing their pros and cons. The RPD model, however, demonstrated that experienced professionals could size up a situation rapidly and recognize a workable course of action instantly, without wasting precious time contrasting alternative choices.
The team published their initial findings in a formal academic paper in 1986. Subsequent studies involving other types of expert decision-makers provided further confirming evidence, which Klein documented in detailed research papers published in 1989. From a traditional academic standpoint, the project was complete. The research had been conducted, the data thoroughly analyzed, and the findings successfully published in specialized journals.
Yet, something vital was missing. The formal academic literature failed to capture the raw, compelling power of the stories shared by the firefighters, military officers, and other seasoned professionals. These narratives carried a depth of human experience that could not be adequately expressed through standard academic reporting. The only way to truly do justice to the material was to write a book.
At the time, however, the project seemed entirely out of reach. Klein did not view himself as a traditional writer, nor did he possess the expansive blocks of time typically required to draft a book-length manuscript. The idea languished as an improbable dream until 1992, when a fortunate coincidence intervened.
Klein’s wife, Helen, was awarded a sabbatical in Jerusalem for the 1992-1993 academic year, and Klein decided to tag along. Initially, he had few professional obligations and was content simply to sightsee. That relaxed routine changed abruptly one day while he was jogging along a rocky trail in a small valley behind their apartment building. Well aware that the rough terrain was not a proper path, Klein thought to himself that it was only a matter of time before he sustained an injury. Just ten minutes later, his prediction came true. He came down awkwardly, twisted his ankle, and fractured a bone.
Limping back to his apartment, Klein realized his sightseeing days were officially over. He was immobilized and confined to quarters.
While the injury was initially depressing, Klein soon recognized a silver lining. To salvage his sanity during weeks of immobility, he decided the enforced downtime presented a rare opportunity to finally write the book about the firefighters’ stories.
Doing the math, Klein realized he was scheduled to return to the United States in just one month. He calculated that if he could maintain a rigorous output of eight single-spaced pages per day, he could complete a full first draft of the manuscript before leaving Jerusalem. The challenge was set, and it was time to get to work.
Rather than diving straight into writing, Klein dedicated the first day or two purely to conceptualization. He mapped out an outline for every single chapter, carefully listing the specific stories he wanted to include to ensure he avoided redundancy while capturing all the most compelling material. Next, he expanded the notes into a more detailed outline. Although he considered drafting an even more granular roadmap, he realized it was becoming too tedious. Writing the actual prose proved to be the more efficient path forward.
He established a strict, disciplined daily regimen. Every night before going to sleep, Klein reviewed the specific material he planned to cover the following day. His hope was that this practice would give his subconscious mind productive material to process overnight. True to his plan, when he woke up each morning, he was eager to sit down at his laptop. By sticking closely to this schedule, he successfully completed the entire first draft within his self-imposed one-month deadline.
As the writing process unfolded, the scope of the project naturally expanded far beyond its original boundaries. Driven by the richness of the accumulated stories, the manuscript evolved from a narrow study of decision-making into a broader exploration of human cognition. Klein found himself covering related topics such as complex problem-solving, the function of metaphors, and the true nature of expertise.
Subsequent chapters ventured into how people read the minds of others, the collective dynamics of a team mind, and the phenomenon of hyper-rationality. This latter topic served as a critical examination of the excesses found within the traditional Judgment and Decision Making perspective and the Heuristics and Biases movement.
Ultimately, the manuscript transformed into a foundational text on naturalistic decision-making—a conceptual category that had not yet been fully defined when the project began. It became an early exploration of macrocognition, driven entirely by the depth of the stories he had gathered. Remarkably, only seven of the book’s seventeen chapters focused strictly on decision-making.
Beyond recounting gripping real-world scenarios, the book outlined practical methods for studying human cognition outside the controlled environment of a laboratory. Furthermore, it highlighted the formidable strengths of human decision-making, offering a vital counter-narrative to the prevailing psychological research of the era, which concentrated almost exclusively on cognitive flaws, errors, and failures.
Klein’s overarching hope for Sources of Power was simple: that readers familiar with conventional judgment and decision-making approaches would look at the world through a radically different lens after closing the back cover.
With the manuscript completed, the next hurdle was securing a publisher. Operating without a literary agent, Klein initially submitted the work to an academic press. However, the publisher demanded extensive modifications that he was unwilling to make. Fortunately, a professional connection provided a breakthrough. His friend Robert Hoffman introduced him to an editor at MIT Press, establishing a partnership that has flourished over the decades. MIT Press recently published the official 20th-anniversary edition of Sources of Power, cementing its long-term impact on the field.
That should have been the final chapter of the book’s publishing journey. However, a colleague named Mike McCloskey recognized that the insights contained within Sources of Power deserved a much broader, mainstream audience. McCloskey reached out to Tom Petzinger, a prominent columnist at The Wall Street Journal.
Petzinger was immediately captivated by the radical, counter-intuitive message of the RPD model. He subsequently wrote two separate columns highlighting Sources of Power, introducing the book to a vast readership far beyond academic circles. Not long after, author Malcolm Gladwell gave the book additional prominence by featuring its core concepts in his bestselling book Blink.
Looking back, Sources of Power remains a testament to the resilience of human adaptability. It is a book born from the harrowing experiences of firefighters, military officers, and other frontline professionals navigating high-pressure crises under conditions of intense uncertainty—and made possible, quite literally, by a broken ankle in a Jerusalem valley that forced an academic to sit down and finally tell their stories.
