Good Sensemaking is More Important than Information for the Quality of Plans

Good sensemaking is assumed to be central to military command. So is high quality information. This paper presents an experimental study investigating the effect of amount of information on the quality of the produced plans. It was also tested if plan quality could be predicted from the quality of the sensemaking process. Army captains served as participants. The task was to produce a part of a brigade order within six hours. The participants worked in 16 teams of 5-7 individuals, with one team member acting as brigade commander. Eight of the teams received full information about the location of all enemy units (as would be the case in a fully developed network enabled defense), while the remaining eight teams received the amount of enemy information that might normally be expected. 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. The quality of the sensemaking process predicted the quality of the plans well, but plan quality was unaffected by the amount of enemy information. Apparently, good sensemaking is more important to military command than high quality information.