Individuals mobilize cognitive heuristics in dynamic situations such as crisis management exercises, which are fast and automatic processes that reduce task complexity by relying on simplified judgments rather than reasoning. However, identifying this thinking mode during naturalistic observation of crisis management exercises represents a complex challenge, which is a reason for the lack of measurements in real investigation parameters. To overcome this issue, we propose a methodology based on the identification of linguistic markers of cognitive heuristics, to provide a reliable means to identify each cognitive heuristic in situ. We present a final taxonomy of these markers as well as the associated heuristics that we developed thanks to the observation of 15 crisis management exercises at the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). Seven types of cognitive heuristics involved in crisis management exercises were identified. This research showed that our methodology provides a suitable framework to highlight cognitive heuristics during real work activity.