Sensemaking in military planning: a methodological study of command teams

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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