Sense Making - Underpinning Concepts and Relation to Military Decision- Making

摘要

Decision makers at all echelons go through a process of goal-directed sense making when dealing with complex and dynamic problems involving, for instance, ambiguous or poor information, changing circumstances and multiple players. In this paper we argue that the key to sense making is understanding the nature of and the nexus between the knowledge that humans bring to the process and the way in which that knowledge is applied in a creative thinking framework to build meaning and to provide judgements, insights and conclusions. In this respect, there are three main concepts in this paper: *Knowledge as a cognitive process that is key to sense making; *Philosophy and epistemology as a framework in which knowledge is applied, refuted, tested and grown; *The recognition that sense making deals with complex systems underpins new ways of perceiving the world and generating conjectures that can be tested within an epistemological framework. The relationship between sense making and decision-making for military operations is illustrated with respect to two decision-making doctrines OODA and the newly proposed CECA (Critique-Explore-Compare-Adapt). The ideas in this paper resonate more with CECA than OODA, and could be further developed in an experimental environment that looks at different sense and decision-making approaches.