Naturalistic Decision Making

2016 The Naturalistic Decision-making approach

NDM is the research tradition begun in the 1980s to study how people actually make decisions — people such as firefighters, military commanders, nurses, design engineers, pilots, and petrochemical unit managers. NDM examines the kinds of decisions they make in the course of their work, and how they use their experience to cope with challenging conditions such as time pressure, uncertainty, vague goals, high stakes, organizational constraints, and team coordination requirements. The NDM approach is thus a contrast to judgment and decision paradigms that use pre-defined tasks given to naïve subjects under controlled laboratory conditions.

In addition to trying to understand more aspects of thinking in complex settings, NDM researchers are also seeking ways to improve performance: better decision making, better sensemaking, quicker and more accurate problem detection. In contrast to the behavioral decision making community which focuses on human limitations and tries to reduce biases, NDM researchers try to understand human capabilities. While it is important to cut down on mistakes, good performance is not just the absence of mistakes — it consists of discoveries and achievements. It depends on the strengths of decision makers. Unlike research approaches that seek to debunk experts, NDM practitioners are impressed by experts, whether they are expert firefighters or physicians or pilots or military commanders. And so NDM practitioners are seeking ways to bring people up to speed more quickly.