Tactics, command, leadership

Through their experience, experts have also gained the ability to
improvise and are therefore not as bound to rules as novices. They
often do not feel restrained by any special conditions other than
those that apply to the current situation. In this improvisation,
some form of mental simulation is often used, i.e. the expert can
envision situations from within and mentally review the results
produced by various decisions.
What is important to keep in mind, not the least for a novice,
is that among other things, the method of assessing a situation is
often critical for the decision. Experts often create mental pictu-
res of a situation and can thereby ‘simulate’ the results of various
decisions or alternatives for taking action. It is important to un-
derstand the context in which the decision ‘lives’, i.e. the situa-
tion and the sequence of events that will result from the decision.
Decisions cannot be made as individual events; as a decision ma-
ker one must be aware of the dynamics that decisions influence
and that decisions in themselves, to a certain extent, create. One
should also emphasise the importance of solid knowledge concer-
ning the capacity and limitations of resources, and why various
types of emergencies occur. Moreover, one must take considera-
tion to people.
One cannot ignore the experience bank that experts have built
up and that they base their decisions on. A novice must therefore
try to build up an experience bank through, for example, mental
simulation, participation in experiments and research, and th-
rough coaching, and that one receives help from someone else
and together ‘thinks out loud’. As a novice, one can also attempt
to envision how one would take action or make decisions in a
given situation that someone else actually has responsibility for
or is handling.