Business 2.0 -  Cutting Through the Fog of War

From the Bronze Age to the Nuclear Age, military leaders have grappled with the same dilemma: How can they get enough information to make effective decisions, and how can they get those decisions implemented by the troops in the field? ...Smaller units require more decentralized decision-making and a greater need for information-sharing up and down the chain of command ...real-life decisions are made in chaotic conditions, where a commander simply doesn't have the information or time necessary for deliberation. "We felt that our doctrines had to be based on a true understanding of the nature of war and the nature of command, not what we thought they ought to be,"

Although specifically about decision making in military command and control settings, the conclusions and the design process described here are also applicable to high-pressure decisions in other contexts.  Surprisingly, the research on high-pressure decision making is pretty thin. Too much about what ought to be, and too little about what is. Fortunately, the developers here were smart enough to work with Gary Klein (if your interested in his work, check out his book, Sources of Power, which is dense but worth the time and effort).

Klein has studied how decision makers like firefighters and emergency workers make real decisions in the real world. One of his conclusions is that if information is going to be helpful, it does so by contributing to a decision makers "situational awareness." That means that the information needs to be filtered into a model of the situation, not a model of the decision. If the situational awareness is on target, the decisions are easy. If not, they're impossible. From a design point of view the only way to develop a useful model of the situation is to immerse yourself in it.  Too many designers of information systems would prefer to build models of the way the world ought to be instead of find out what it is.

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