13th International Command & Control Research and Technology Symposium

C2 for Complex Endeavors

Title: The Process of Sensemaking in Complex Human Endeavors

Topic: 1 (C2 Concepts, Theory, and Policy), 4( Cognitive and Social Issues), 3 (Modeling and Simulation)

Celestine A. Ntuen

Army Center for Human-Centric Command & Control Decision Making

The Institute for Human-Machine Studies

419 McNair Hall

North Carolina A&T State University

Greensboro, NC 27411

Phone: 336-334-7780; Fax: 336-334-7729

Email:

Sensemaking process involves the understanding of many different and interdependent factors that must be reconciled with the realities and rhythms of the problem context. For example, in the battle space, the commanders’ levels of knowledge, skill, and experience vary greatly among individuals and among battle staffs, and are required to deal with processing equivocal information, or sometimes, dealing with a lack of information. Also, collaborative information processing using a team of people such as coalition force structure often lead to different interpretations, which in turn affects the team understanding of the situational information. The existing training doctrines that address the deliberate military decision making process is not adequate, or perhaps not even relevant to the training of the military sensemakers and intelligent analysts. We need a new training strategy. To do this, we need to understand the process of sensemaking in complex human endeavors.

1.  INTRODUCTION

The traditional definition of a complex system is that it involves a large number of dynamically interacting elements, leading to non-linear behaviors of the entire system or sub-systems. This is the fundamental principle of dynamic complexity.

Dynamic complexities are ubiquitous in many human endeavors and activities that experience unpredictable shifts in behaviors defined by many dynamics of human systems transformations. For example, from the domain of a peaceful social structure to an unstable cultural war (e.g., Iraq); from quite habitat of human species to catastrophic refugee immigrations orchestrated by natural calamities (e.g., Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Coast residents in USA). The human system interacts with information that can create system transformation from a stable state to a chaotic state, or a state of calm to that of panic. Interestingly, these types of system state changes can be from human designs or as a result of natural phenomena. In the first case, we may design human organizations that are subject to stress and agitations. These may be political (e.g., recent outbreak of anarchies in Burma, Darfur, and Pakistan); economic such as the economic meltdown of South Korea in the early 1980’s; socio-cultural (e.g., managing over 200 ethnic languages in Nigeria); or military, such as the on-going Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

We can also design machines with complexity; some machines inherit complex behaviors from their constituent members. Examples of these kinds of machines include, e.g., air traffic control, nuclear plants, air planes, and manufacturing systems. In the second case, complexity can be natural. Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and Tsunami in Asia are two obvious examples that define complexity in many facets of managing and controlling after effects—politically, economically, and socially. In general, the situations above are referred to as “wicked” since the state of the world is unpredictable and the information characteristics are random.

Dynamic human endeavors can best be described by how much we can predict the informational state of the world. For example, in the military environment, Alberts and Hayes[1] note that “Being able to pick a nontraditional adversary out of the noise and determine its capabilities and intentions is among the greatest challenges that we face in Information age (pp. 101).”

Predictable states of the world mean that the behavior of the system is deterministic—leading us to have some sense of the next state of the system. Unpredictable states of the world mean that we have no control of what will happen next. Dynamic human endeavor is created by a system whose state changes are either predictable or unpredictable with respect to time, location, and changing patterns of information. The pattern of information can reconfigure their interactions such that the emerging behaviors become difficult for the human to understand. Table 1 below illustrates a simple two-dimensional matrix information interaction that creates such complexities.

Table 1. The dimensions of system complexity based on information states

Information characteristics

Deterministic / Random
Predictable / Simple / Complex
Unpredictable / Complex / Wicked

The World

As used by many authors, notably, Waldrop in his text on complexity[2], dynamic endeavor is a characteristic of complex adaptive systems (CAS) and has been used anecdotally and notionally to described, explain, and represent the human conceptual congruency in understanding the way the complex system works. In our examples described earlier—whether they are human organizations (man made) or natural, dynamic complexity can be described by the following characteristics:

1.  Highly ambiguous and possible multiple information interpretations (equivocality).

2.  Changing information patterns.

3.  Possible multi-trait, multi-scale, multi-attribute information ontology.

4.  Creates an unstructured information states.

5.  Creates many forms of uncertainty.

6.  Creates multi circumstances.

7.  Cause and effect linkages are not inherently knowable

Command and control (C2) of complex systems such those described by the on-going conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are definitive points of what human endeavors look like in dynamic system. As noted by Hill and Levenhagen ( ), there are many factors responsible for this difficulty. However, the information management difficulty is the most damaging since “unexpected cues within organizational information processing can lead to missed opportunities as a result of disoriented or misaligned mental models—leading to loss of meaning and construction of a mapping model that identifies with the situation.” Here, unstructured information states must be reduced, abstracted, organized, and formalized to the level of human understanding. The organized information can be used to construct a meaningful scenario that maps what we know (mental model) to what is available, thereby creating actionable knowledge. In essence, we want to make sense of the situation before decision making. The process of sensemaking must be understood. Sensemaking increasingly involves dealing with, and gaining some workable understanding of, inherently complex, adaptive and interlinked systems, such as social and military organizations.

2.  What is Sensemaking?

Sensemaking literary means making sense. The two words can be defined individually in order to illustrate the true meaning of the word. The American Heritage College Dictionary (2002) define the word “sense” as, (1) understanding, (2) signification, (3) present of meaning, (4) a mechanism of faculty as receiving (forming) mental impression, (5) deducing from observation or unnoted stimuli in respect to a particular field or relation, (6) instructive comprehension, (7) discerning awareness, (8) opinion, view, sentiment, of something felt and held by an individual or a group of people, (9) awareness derived through interpretation of stimuli or sensory information, (10) accustomed steady ability to judge and decide between possible courses with intelligence and soundness. The definitions 1-10 above represent the epistemological aspects of sensemaking. The same dictionary define “make” to imply, (1) to frame or formulate in the mind; (2) form as a result of calculation of design; (3) enact or establish. These characteristics represent the ontological views of sensemaking. By combining the two words, the same referenced dictionary defines sensemaking as a noun – “sensible, reasonable, and predictable”. Thus sensemaking implies the ability to design, build, and derive an understanding of situated information.

Sensemaking is a process, a design, or a technique of fusing information in context to derive understanding from fragmentary pieces of information (Ntuen, 2006). Sensemaking can be viewed as a paradigm, a tool, a process, or a theory of how people reduce uncertainty or ambiguity; socially negotiate meaning during decision making events. Weick (1995) states that sensemaking refers to how meaning is constructed at both the individual and the group levels. Through the accurate construction of meaning, clarity increases and confusion decreases. For example, Leedom (2002) indicates that battle rhythms can best be understood through the sensemaking process. A poor sensemaking process often leads to poorly understood objectives, missions, and visions. This in turn can lead to poor framing of plans, and consequently, poor decisions.

Sensemaking involves the collective application of individual “intuition”—experience-based, sub-consciously processed judgment and imagination—to identify changes in existing patterns or the emergence of new patterns (Weick, 1995).

3. Sample Relevant Past Models in Describing the

Sensemaking Process

The mental aspect of sensemaking is attributed to tacit knowledge---a philosophical view of how individuals view the world based on reflexive mental models and latency lens accorded to some neural processes that control the faculty of human thinking—albeit, the mind. For example, Kelly (1955) defined this phenomenon in terms of personal constructs, an individual’s organization of unique mental models of the world that are both shaped by prior experience and are used to interpret new experiences.

Polanyi (1967) is repeatedly cited and credited for the definition of tacit knowledge and how it influences the sensemaking process. According to Polanyi, tacit knowledge is what is known but cannot be told. The reasoning behind the statement is that the knowledge has become so personal in the unconscious mind and therefore it cannot be expressed because there is no access to it through the conscious mind. Polanyi said "we know more than we can tell." Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowledge was reflected in three main theses (Leedom, 2005): (1) true discovery cannot be accounted for by a set of articulated rules or algorithms; (2) while knowledge is public, it is also to a very great extent personal or constructed by humans; and (3) the knowledge that underlies explicit knowledge is more fundamental.

Nonaka and Takeuchi's (1995) socialization-externalization-combination-internalization (SECI) model proposes that knowledge is created and expanded through social interaction between tacit and explicit knowledge. The SECI model are defined at four types of interaction: Socialization (tacit to tacit), Explication (tacit to explicit), Combination (explicit to explicit), and Internalization (explicit to tacit). The knowledge conversion occurs through the spiral of organizational knowledge creation, encompassing different organizational levels:

1. Sharing of tacit knowledge by a group of individuals

2. Conversion of tacit knowledge in teams into concepts and metaphors

3. Combination of team-based concepts with existing data and external knowledge

4. Articulation and development of concepts until they emerge into a concrete form

5. Dissemination of new knowledge to others within organization

Sensemaking is a valid way to frame aspects or map of cognitive behavior; reciprocal process of finding a frame for data and using a frame to define the data. Here, as postulated by Klein and his Associates (2004), military data will go through the military frame of reasoning, economic data will go through economic models, political data will go through political frame, and so on. The frame paradigm is therefore sensitive to context, which makes it possible to capture the dynamics and continuity of information changes in the domain context.

The frame model structures problems into a particular set of beliefs and perspectives that constrain data collection and analysis. This coping mechanism structures problems into a particular set of beliefs and perspectives that constrain data collection and analysis. The framing usually narrows information search around local outcomes as opposed to issues further distant in effect. For example, an analyst may frame a solution for short run gains, disregarding long term consequences of the decision. For instance, to frame a message, we have to identify the frame of reference—the receiver and modality of transmission. You analyze an unstructured message; look at weak spots in a message. You resolve weak spots in messages, and then do a self assessment of your own information. You identify weak spots to recognize errors in order to realize an optimum gain in the sender-receiver performance metric. Thus, in the data/frame model, each cognitive element starts with a scenario that provides a context for you (Klein, et al., 2003). Sieck, et al. (2004) have extended the earlier work of Klein (1989) on recognition-primed decision making, to define what is now referred to as a data/frame model of focal knowledge creation that consists of various mental functions performed in a recursive manner. The data/frame model—as the name might imply—hypothesizes that creating focal knowledge involves fitting available data (environmental cues) into an explanatory frame (a constructed mental model of the situation built from fragmentary mental models).

4.  The Study Rationales

While sensemaking is recently gaining a strong credo among cognitive and organizational psychologist communities, much of the discussions have centered on the attempts to define the structures of sensemaking (Leedom, Eggelston, & Ntuen, 2006 ). Little models exist that can capture the process of sensemaking. One reason can attributed to this lack—that sensemaking is cognitive task (ntuen, 2006) subject to individual perspectives, influenced by cultural lens model, and is dependent on contextual information. This paper attempts to present as a comprehensive process for sensemaking

Developing a process is like creating knowledge ontology. Creating knowledge ontology requires sensemaking activities which allows a thorough understanding of the system—through creating a common meaning, defining semantically and syntactically uniform interpretation across context, and creating a taxonomy or lexicon of common understanding—minimizing equivocality as much as possible (Weick, 1995; Choo, 1998).

The observations above often lead to the a cognitive model stance in which sensemaking starts with the fundamental assumption of phenomenology—that the actor is inherently involved in his observations, which must be understood from his perspectives and horizons (Dervin, 2003). Similar to the phenomenologist view such as advocated by Edmund Hursserl (1923), a German phenomenologist, sensemaking involves evaluation cognition based on our awareness of a context itself as disclosed in the most clear, distinct, and adequate way for something of its kind. Sensemaking, then, brings these assumptions together by asserting that—given an incomplete understanding of reality (ontology) and an incomplete understanding of what it is to know something (epistemology)—we arrive at an uncompromising situation of deciding between the “best” collection of information to support decision making.

5. The Sensemaking Process