Evolution of military sense making from knowledge management point of view

This paper defines a road map that military sense making may be develop or revert. Sense making is based on OODA model for command and control. The dynamics of situation is modeled with Cynefin framework of four domains: Known, Knowable, Complex and Chaotic. The behaviour of sense making is explained in each situation and some references on military culture is included to give example.

Introduction

Military Knowledge Management has changed as societies are evolving and now we are questioning the rules of knowledge management of industrial era as opposed to information era. In this paper, a military combat operations process called OODA-loop defined by John Boyd  (1987) is studied in framework of knowing organisation defined by Chun Wei Choo  (1998).

This paper belongs to a series of papers that are describing the evolution of military competence and processes supported by evolving enablers in information management. There are three capabilities in military command and control process called OODA-loop from point of knowledge management:

1. Sense making, consisting of observation (sensing) and orientation (making sense), is interpreting the equivocal data by enacting interpretations.
2. Decision making, which is searching and selecting alternatives according to projected outcomes and preferences.
3. Knowledge creating, which is creating new knowledge and improving the whole OODA-loop through knowledge conversion and sharing of information.

This process is described in figure 1.

Figure 1: Orientation for military knowledge management from sense making, decision making and knowledge creating approach


This paper defines the major evolutionary path of each level of Knowledge Management and describes some short cuts or downshifts that some military organisations have faced when reaching for more revolutionary goals. Paper provides tools to do strategic diagnosis by describing possible paths on both separate and integrated road map where interrelations and challenges may be easier identified. This is to support strategic diagnosis within Information and Communications Technology that are supporting the Knowledge Management.

Orientation to road maps of Military Knowledge Management

There is a possibility to create a description of general evolution of Knowledge Management in Military Command and Control. A generic evolution is depicted with three roads of Decision making, Sense making and Learning figure 2.

Figure 2: Roads of military knowledge management within OODA-loop

This paper is describing the sub-road map for military sensing and sense making in more detail. 
 

Description of evolutionary paths in Military Sense making 

This paper is concentrating on how observing and orientation of Boyd’s OODA  loop is executed when military is facing four different situations in Cynefin  framework: 1. Known, 2. Knowable, 3. Complex and 4. Chaos. The fifth area of disorder in Cynefin framework is not studied to keep model simpler. There is a difference in sense making in these four situations, but sometimes military is constrained with very basic standard operational procedures not flexible enough to meet specific requirements. Four possible states of sense making are described in figure 3.

Sensing needs to overcome the fog  of battlefield and egocentricity of human sensors. Sense making needs to address the attempts of deception  by adversary, biases of sense making teams and individual mental models.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, 

you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. 

If you know yourself but not the enemy, 

for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. 

If you know neither the enemy nor yourself,

you will succumb in every battle”. 

Sun Tzu 

Sense – Categorize – Respond in known environment

In known environment cause and effect relations are repeatable, thus easily perceived and predicable. Here military is copying the best practices of other forces and defining them in their Standard Operational Procedures, SOP.

Both individual, team and organization are observing an event. Event is being categorized with previously defined model. Each category has a predetermined type of respond, which is being followed without orientation or decision making. This is the very effective method of improving reaction in sudden and stressful situations when amygdala takes lead and reasoning subsides as john Boyd defined when improving air dog-fight.

Often intelligence process is standardized in level of detecting features of enemy’s movement and organization. Observations are placed simply within enemy standard order of battle and fitted in to their known tactics. Understanding is predetermined in basic intelligence training when standard enemy is being explained. It is assumed that adversary is playing by the book.

”A frog living in a well will never understand the sea!” Taoist proverb

It is not often that adversary is behaving by the book. Even more harmful is when surveillance and reconnaissance systems are pre-programmed with these standard patterns and fail to detect anything divertive.

One might argue that at least one’s own organization and tactics is well known and predictable. This might be the case with fixed organizations and linear tactics. Problem arises when blue organizations are more per task than book and blue tactics needs at least to seem to adversary being complex if not chaotic.

Structured sense making requires also structured information. Especially in information dimension, the bulk of information is unstructured and more big data analysing needs to be done to make sense out of behaviour.

Sense – Analyse – Decide – Act in knowable environment

In this environment cause and effect are separated over time and space. It needs some scenario planning and systems thinking to create a possible model to describe the knowable environment. This is the environment where most flexible military organizations reside – task force organization, swarming tactics, combined arms battle technics.

After detection the incoming data needs to be analysed to reveal all effective cause-effect relationships. Sense making is evolving the scenarios as new data is appearing and trying to create bigger picture from smaller components and their inter-relationships with systems thinking. 

The analysis needs several experts working together and the challenges of collective sense making will appear: cognitive diversity creates clashes of individual mental models, but in another hand cognitive heterogeneity helps against homogeneity biases like myopia and egocentricity.  It requires trust relationships, social networks, the timing and frequency of intercommunication, the extent of information sharing and access to information. The teaming process may at best create a "shared, organized understanding and mental representation of the key elements of the team's relevant environment" 

"Any fool can learn from his mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others." Otto von Bismarck

It requires a learning organization to transfer the needed tacit knowledge to explicit in order gain value of it through entire organization. The learning aspect is analysed in special paper.

Current trends of Big Data and Business Intelligence are good example of organization trying to utilize all information it possesses. By fusing and correlating data differently, organization may create new knowledge and if succeeding in sharing it, may gain a competitive advantage.

Probe - Sense – Analyse – Decide – Act in complex environment

In complex environment cause and effect are only coherent in retrospect and similar events seldom repeat. Emergent patterns can be perceived but not predicted. 

It requires a probe to make possible patterns more visible for our observation. Understanding these emergent, new patterns needs multiple perspectives to be involved in sense making. It needs to create narratives as base for understanding as they are simple and easy to communicate between team.

“Understand the operating environment and your organization while constantly adapting for purpose”. From Gen McChrystal’s CrossLead Way

This sense making with pattern management and narratives requires flexibility from the ISTAR systems. Fixed pattern recognition is always deceivable thus the programmability of one’s sensors is essential.

Act - Sense – Analyse – Decide in chaotic environment

No cause and effect relationships perceivable in chaotic environment. System is turbulent and there is no time to wait patterns to emerge. One might assume that there is a potential pattern but it is not visible or reconstruction able.

It requires a quick and decisive intervention to reduce the turbulence and ability to sense immediately the reaction to the intervention. This deliberate action might create something that is either known or knowable and with effective observing and analysing it might make sense.

“Es gibt keine verzweifelten Lagen, es gibt nur verzweifelte Menschen.” 

Unofficially translated: there are no desperate situations, only people. 

Heinz Guderian

The quick and decisive action followed by close observation, analyses and main action was the strength of German staff officers in second world war against allied commanders with a good example of Guderian’s combined arms XIX Panzer corps advance towards the Channel of England in 1940 . 

Figure 3: Road map for military sensing and sense making from OODA approach

Leaps, downshifts and revolutionary paths on sense making map of possible roads

As sense making is affected by both organizational, team and individual models, there is more often possibility to downshift one’s capability to sense making rather than improving it.

A heterogenic team at very beginning has challenges in trusting to each other, communicating with people from different background and understanding their differing mental models. Before the team is aligned, it’s sense making capability is quite modest.

Especially in crises situation and under extreme stress sense making capability may collapse and very routines will sustain. 

Sometimes the feeling of having information superiority may cause a downshift, when complex situation is addresses as knowable and collecting more data is believed to provide the clarity eventually. This might have been the case in late ISAF operation, where the amount of collected data reached 40 exabyte (10^18) in a month. 

The military situation is more complex than Cynefin framework. Within the same area of operation, there might exist all four models of dynamics: 

• Own force and their action might be known or knowable
• Regular parts of adversary force might fall into knowable category
• Irregular or militant parts of adversary might fall into complex
• Society where operation is executed may seem chaotic.

It requires all four means of sensing and sense making processing parallel information from each part of area of interest and more complex orientation and sense making process than any of above defined.

Requirements for near real time recognised operational picture to give targeting information for target acquisition process may constrain the time and method using for fusion and recognition. Thus targeting may suffer from the capability of basic event categorising only and both friendly fire and collateral damage may occur.

Conclusion

The classical OODA loop and military sense making are more complex than first impression may reveal. Since sense making is always a social event, there is a major impact by the relationships between people. Both individual and team mental models take time to be aligned and it takes even longer to educate whole organization to follow same sense. If, in the other hand, organization is too homogenic, there is a danger to have too narrow, blind or not decisive enough sense making capability.

Sense making combined with decision making and organizational learning composes the very core of military command, control and communication culture. It should be studied when planning a major change in C4ISTAR systems.