**Abstract**

In numerous scientific disciplines, the decision-making process aims at choosing the most appropriate action to reach a defined objective is a central issue. Scientific literature demonstrates that a wide range of often prescriptive models is available to deal with this sequence. However, one category of situations, involving the intervention of complex, dynamic, and changeable systems (a forest fire for example) generate imprecisions, difficulties, or even incorrect decisions. This largely prospective chapter aims to study these situations from a cognitive point of view to reveal certain recurrent properties of their operation. These indicators may represent milestones for the construction of a new epistemology that would refer to the globality and the dynamism rather than to isolated and analytical entities.

**Keywords:** decision-making in systems, failures as positive indicators, epistemology and cognition, complex systems and cognitive psychology, decision-making evolution
