A review of naturalistic decision making research with some implications for knowledge management

In the last decade naturalistic decision making has been pursued by cognitive psychologists. The focus is on how human experts make decisions under conditions of time pressure and complexity; how they organize and use their knowledge is expected to provide principles for the emerging science of knowledge management. This paper surveys this research and discusses results, which indicate more attention needs to be given to: problem formulation; asking the right questions; use of teams; organization of knowledge; expanding scope of expert systems and case‐based reasoning. Also the method, cognitive task analysis, which is generally used in naturalistic decision making is readily adaptable to business knowledge management.