8 ideas
Stories are a unit of expertise because they package causes, intentions, and consequences in a form people can store, transfer, and mentally replay. Decision makers reason by matching the current situation to remembered stories rather than to abstract rules or statistics.
When a person reads a situation, they form expectations about what should happen next; an event that violates those expectancies signals that the situation has been misread. This mismatch is the trigger that prompts experts to reassess and discover problems before they escalate.
Experienced decision makers size up a situation as typical of a familiar pattern, and that recognition hands them four things at once: plausible goals, relevant cues, expectancies, and a typical action. They take the first workable option that recognition produces and never generate a set of alternatives to compare.
Instead of comparing options against each other, experts test one course of action by running it forward in imagination to see where it might fail. If the simulation shows trouble, they modify the action or drop it and move to the next recognized option. The comparison is serial, not concurrent.
A lieutenant fighting what looked like a routine kitchen fire ordered his crew out of the house without knowing why. Moments later the floor collapsed, because the real fire was in the basement below. Later analysis showed his expectancies had been violated: the fire was too hot and too quiet for a kitchen fire, and that mismatch registered as unease before he could put it into words.
What looks like mystical gut feeling is the fast recognition of patterns, typicality, and anomalies built up over years of feedback-rich experience. Seen this way, intuition can be studied and trained. It can also be distrusted exactly where experience is thin or feedback is poor.
Under time pressure, shifting conditions, and ill-defined goals, experienced practitioners look for the first option that works, not the best one. Formal analytic comparison of options suits novices, cases that call for justifying a choice to others, and disputes between stakeholders. For experts in the field it is slower and often no better.
Experts perceive things novices cannot: anomalies, the absence of expected events, the recent past and likely future of a situation, and fine perceptual distinctions. They were reading subtle cue patterns that they often could not articulate.