13th ICCRTS

“C2 for Complex Endeavors”

What is difficult in sensemaking?

Cognitive and Social Issues, Multinational Endeavors, Civil-Military Endeavors

STUDENT Christofer Waldenström

Christofer Waldenström

SwedishNationalDefenceCollege

Department of War Studies

Division of Command and Control Science

PO Box 278 05

SE-115 93 Stockholm

Sweden

Office: +46 8 553 425 00

Cell: +46702 99 70 97

What is difficult in sense-making?

Christofer Waldenström

Abstract

This articleis concerned with what decision makers perceive as difficult during military sense-making.To answer this question interviews with 9 Swedish navy officers were conducted using issues from military planning models together with mission activities as basis for the questions. The results show that the respondents perceive difficulties in mainly three areas: the mission (what must be accomplished, freedom of action and rules of engagement), the enemy (enemy forces, enemy courses of action) and own courses of action. Looking at the reason to the perceived difficulties, uncertainty emerged as a major cause andthe difficulties were linked to uncertainty intwo ways: they were either causedby uncertainty or they could cause uncertainty.Even though the study focused on difficulties the respondents did not perceivedthem as paralysing.Difficulties are a natural ingredient in military decision making and part of the profession is handling those. The respondents also emphasized that the difficulties regarding the mission were substantially reducedif all commanders met in person before embarking on a mission.Another issue that was stressed was the relation between the importance of mission and level of risk that own forces can be subjected to when executing it.

Introduction

Sensemaking is what people do in order to decide how to act in the situations they encounter (Weick, 1995). Deciding how to act is the main task for the military command function, suggesting that sensemaking should be a major factor here.This article views sensemaking as it is described in the model of C2, the DOODA-loop (Brehmer, 2006) ,developed by Brehmer who builds on the framework by Weick. The model describes the requisite functions that must be met for successful C2 and the model views sensemaking as the central function. The sensemaking function is then further broken down into lower functions:“Understand the mission”, “Understand the preconditions”, “Find a way to accomplish the mission” (a course of action, COA) and “Evaluate the situation” (Jensen 2007). Studies show that when planners devise a COA they tend to iterate back and forth between understanding the mission, understand the situation, devising of tentative COAs and evaluation of the tentative COAs (Smith & Klein, 1999). What details that each of these activities consider, is prescribed in military planning models.

If we are interested in how to support sensemaking a pragmatic approach is to start investigating theaspects of sensemaking that the decision makers experiences as difficult. An initial exploration of this would consequently be to answer the question: “What is difficult in sense-making?”

Method

The study was conducted as an interview study. The respondents were chosen using a combination of purposive (sampling according to purpose) and convenience (the respondents were easy to get in contact with) sampling (McBurney, 1994). The interviews were performed with 9Swedish navy officers with ranks from Lieutenant Commander to Vice Admiral, age ranging from 34 to 70, the criteria for selection being that they must have been in command of a unit comprising of more that one navy vessel (preferably on more than one occasion). Seven officers were specialized in ASuW[1] and/or ASW[2] and one officer in MCW[3]. They had led between 10 to 100+ military planning processeson the tactical level or above, and they had led between 10 and 100 naval missions (exercise and/or live). All respondents were men. At the occasion of the study none of the respondents were in service in the area that the interview actually covered.

The duration of the interviews varied from 30 minutes to 1½ hour and was conducted using an interview guide as aid. The interview guide contained the details that were to be covered during the interview in bulleted form. During the first interview the details were structured according to the activities in the sense-making model, the purpose of this being to put the questions in a context that was relevant to the model of sense-making. This approach did not turn out so well. The sense-making model as described here is quite new and the respondents were not familiar with the concepts in the model. In response to this the bullets were restructured in to two topics: planning and execution, two categories deemed more familiar to the respondents. This structure turned out to be more natural and the following interviews were conducted using the latter interview record.

The interviews were conducted between 2006-10-17 and 2006-11-14 either at a place decided by the respondent or at the office of the interviewer. All interviews were recorded on a voice recorder (standard mp3-player). On the occasion of the interview the respondents werefirst introduced to the purpose of the interview and were given the opportunity to ask some general questions. After the introduction the interview began and the respondents were asked question according to the bullets in interview record:How do you generate own courses of action and what is difficult with that? The respondents answered and whenever the interviewer needed clarification complementary questions were asked. When giving an answer the respondents tended to skip back and forth between different issues on the interview record so the interview was continued until the interviewer deemed that all issued had been covered.

Analysis

The voice recordings were transcribed verbatim, leaving out pauses, humming et cetera. After that the recordings were coded; whenever the respondent described a perceived difficulty the time, topical question and a brief transcription of the statement were recorded. All codes were located in the transcriptions and a portion of the transcription was transferred to the coding. A total of 119 occurrences of perceived difficulties were coded.Three of these contained more than one difficulty (“it is difficult if there is […] or there is […] or there is […]”) andwhen they were elaborated, a total of 123 difficulties were further analysed.

Since the respondents shifted back and forth between subjects during the interview it was sometimes hard to distinguish where an issue listed both under “planning” and “execution” belonged; did the respondent mean during execution or did he mean during planning? To solve this all occurrences of “enemy courses of action” and “own course of action” were sorted together.

To identify the parts of the sense-making function that were perceived difficult; each code was sorted under corresponding issue from the interview guide and was presented on a diagram. In this process 103 of the codes could be sorted under an issue on the record aid.

The remaining 25 were discarded from further analysis during this step - they either were to general or dealt with another subject e.g. “It is difficult because we don’t have those IT-systems” or “Another thing that is difficult is group-think”.

Toidentify how the perceived difficulties were distributed among the respondents each code was sorted under corresponding issue under the constraint that only one code from each respondent may occur under each issue.

To identify what caused the difficulties the 119 codes was re-examined. To every code the cause to the perceived difficulty was noted e.g. “If there is time pressure, there is difficult to perform the necessary dialogs” was categorised “Time pressure”. During this process 10 categories were identified. After that the codes were sorted according categories.7 codes were discarded due to problems of assigning them to a category (i.e. figuring out what caused the difficulty).

To assess the validity of the categorisation 32 of 112 codeswere randomly selected. For each of these codes the transcription for that code together with the identified categories was given to a second rater. The second rater was given instructions of how to interpret the different categories both through explanation as well as trough example (1-3 for each category from the codes not included in this part of the analysis) and then assigned each code to a one of the categories presented. Two assignments were discarded due to ambiguities (the second rater assigned the code to more than one category).

Results

A total of 103codes of perceived difficulties could be sorted under the questions on the record guide. Table 1shows how the codes were distributed among the questions together with distributionof codes under the constraint that only one code from each respondent may occur under each issue.

Table 1. Distribution of codes

During the categorization 10 categories were found (with number of codes in parenthesis):freedom of action (3), mental limitations[4](14), mental adjustments[5](7), military-civil cooperation(7), uncertainty(69), difficulties to choose COA (4), complexity (2), information management (2), technology (2), time-pressure (2). The inter-rater-validation resulted in agreement on 24 of 30 (80%) codes (assigning one code to one of the ten categories).

Discussion

Listening to respondents it comes to mind that no one actually experiences their work as particularly difficult, more of a challenge. Difficulties are looked upon as a natural ingredientin military activity and part of the profession is handlingthose. Looking at Table 1 according to number of entries, three areas with perceived difficulties can be distinguished:

  • “Mission”; an aggregation of “What must be accomplished” and “Freedom of action, Constraints, Rules of Engagement”. Out of 20 perceived difficulties in this area 16 was categorised as “Uncertainty”
  • “Enemy”; an aggregation of “Enemy forces” and “Enemy course of action”. Out of 26 perceived difficulties in this area 22 were categorised “Uncertainty”.
  • “Own courses of action”; out of 16 perceived difficulties in this area, 8 were categorised “Mental limitations”, 4 was categorised “difficulties to choose COA”.

Uncertainty emerged as the major cause to difficulties (except in “Own courses of action” discussed later). The codesin this study is related to uncertainty in two ways: Either the perceived difficulty was caused by uncertainty: “What does the enemy want, what is his capacity, what is his view of the world, that is what I want to get at…and what are his weaknesses and strengths…“ or they express difficulty due to that they could cause uncertainty: “The further down conflict scale you get, the more difficult it gets. When you have to consider ROEs, civilians, economy and opinion, it is one thing dashing forward in armed combat. It is also more difficult to formulate the mission and to understand the mission”.

A remark concerning the categories is that the categories used is (1) not completely disjoint and (2) of different levels of abstraction giving rise to the problem that one category can partly (or in worst case wholly) contain another category (e.g does complexity of a military mission give rise to uncertainties about how different aspects should be considered?).

The respondents emphasize the relation between the importance of mission and level of risk that own forces can be subjected to when executing the mission. The level of risk, in this sense,becomes a determinant of how the mission is executed.The respondents also touches on the relation between risk, uncertainty and own losses. The level of risk is perceived higher when the uncertainty increases and/or when the chance of own losses increases (McCrimmon 2004).This focus on risk is particularly interesting when you consider that these kinds of risk judgments are not included as standard parameters in the planning manuals on which the respondents were trained.

The respondents also emphasize the role of personal communication.Before embarking on a mission they want to meet all relevant commanders in person and discuss important aspects of the mission. If there is an opportunity to meet in person theperceived difficulties regarding the mission are substantially reduced.

An observation not directly related to this study is related to the question “How do you identify opportunities, and what do you find difficult with that?” When answering this question, several of the respondents show hesitation and answers like “…you are so occupied following the plan, so you don’t think about that” or “I haven’t thought about that”. This is a bit worrying since the military doctrines state that “taking initiative” and “acting, not reacting” are key factors to success. It seems difficult to act according to these guidelines without being able to identify opportunities that arise.

The rest of the discussion will relate the results in this article to other risk/uncertainty literature such as McCrimmon, Shapira, Lipshitz&Strauss etc. with focus on dealing with risk. The discussion will end with a section that relate the results to requirements for supporting sensemaking.

Further research

More to come…

[1] Anti Surface Warfare

[2] Anti Submarine Warfare

[3] Mine Clearance Warfare

[4] Refers to the desire of being creative: “if you can find something tactically cunning…so you can break trough”, “…have enough width [in your COA]…”, “…not get caught in a stereotypical pattern”

[5] Refers to the problem of abandoning your old plan: “it’s something human about it…it’s very hard to say: aehh…lets skip it…lets start all over again”, “the difficult thing was not to realize that I had to make a decision, the most difficult part was to make the decision”