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Sensemaking in military planning: a methodological study of command teams

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Abstract

Sensemaking, understanding how to deal with the situation at hand, has a central role in military command. This paper presents a method for measuring sensemaking performance in command teams during military planning. The method was tested in two experiments with Army captains serving as participants. The task was to produce parts of a brigade order within 6 h. The participants worked in teams of 5–7 individuals, 16 teams in the first experiment and 8 teams in the second experiment, with one team member acting as brigade commander. The independent variables were amount of information and type of communication, respectively. The characteristics of each team’s sensemaking process were assessed from video recordings of their planning sessions. The quality of their plans was judged by military experts. Although plan quality was unaffected by the experimental manipulations, the quality of the sensemaking process was related to the quality of the plans.

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Notes

  1. The results from this experiment are reported in (Jensen 2006).

  2. The task was to every 15 min write a short note reporting what the team was presently working on. This was done for purposes external to the present study.

  3. These newly developed guidelines have replaced the planning guidelines earlier used by the Swedish Army (Försvarsmakten 1995) at the battalion level (Markstridsskolan 2006). The PUT guidelines are taught to the Swedish Army officers studying at the Swedish National Defence College, and they are presently under consideration for implementation at the brigade level as well (Thunholm, personal communication 2007-05-24).

  4. When reporting the results from Experiment 1 in Jensen (2006) seven sensemaking criteria were used. The criterion identifying criteria for success was omitted in Experiment 2, partly because it was difficult to assess independently from judging the different phases of the sensemaking process, and partly because it did not fit neatly with the theory. In this paper, the results from Experiment 1 are reanalyzed with this criterion omitted.

  5. In Jensen (2006), the criterion deciding on a course of action (COA) was called team sense, but it was similarly rated. Team sense is, in essence, the shared view of the selected COA. The name was changed in order to make all the criteria, except for commander performance, relate to separate phases of the sensemaking process.

  6. War gaming may consist of anything from a stepwise discussion play on the map, letting own units and enemy units taking turns making moves, which is the method referred to here, to full-scale computer simulations (see e.g. Perla 1990).

  7. In one of the initially planned 16 battalion command teams which ended up consisting of one single individual, who was then included with his sister battalion team. Therefore, one brigade command team had only one battalion consisting of course mates to communicate with (to command over).

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Swedish Armed Forces Research and Development Program. I thank Dr. Peter Thunholm for letting me use data from his experiments for the analyses reported in this paper, and LtCol Peter Ahlström and LtCol Jonas Lind for assessing the teams’ plans. I also thank Joacim Rydmark, Hans Sandström, and Dr. Jan Kuylenstierna for administrating the video recordings, and Hans Sandström, in particular, for rating eight of the teams in Experiment 1. I am immensely grateful to Isabell Andersson who, on short notice, agreed to rate the teams in Experiment 2, and I am indebted to Dr. Berndt Brehmer for his valuable, patient and helpful feedback on several versions of this paper. Finally, I wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers who provided valuable suggestions for improvement.

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  1. Department of War Studies, Swedish National Defence College, P.O. Box 27805, 115 93, Stockholm, Sweden

    Eva Jensen

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Correspondence to Eva Jensen.

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Jensen, E. Sensemaking in military planning: a methodological study of command teams. Cogn Tech Work 11, 103–118 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-007-0084-x

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