Gary Klein spent decades studying how experienced professionals make decisions under pressure — surgeons, firefighters, military commanders — and found something that challenged the prevailing psychological model. In high-stakes, high-complexity situations, these experts were not working through systematic analysis. They were recognising patterns, drawing on a library of experienced situations to match the current problem to a familiar type, and responding with the solution that their experience associated with that type. Klein called this the recognition-primed decision model. And it worked. The experts’ intuitions were reliable, fast, and often superior to more deliberate approaches.