When the Penny Drops: Reframing Under Stress and Ambiguity
Abstract
This report results from a contract tasking University of Haifa. This research studied the phenomenon of "penny dropping," i.e., replacing one conceptual frame that informs understanding and guides action by another by investigating how officers and soldiers in the Second Lebanon War reframe from an initial erroneous conception of their situation to a more accurate one under stress and ambiguity. Official and journalistic post-war inquiries indicate that the failure of the Israel Defense Force (IDF) in the second Lebanon War, in despite of considerable superiority in size and technology, can be largely attributed to its Chief of General Staff, Lt. General Halutz's failure to reframe on time: Contrary to his conception that the IDF was involved in an 'operation' that could be won with an airbased strategy, the IDF was actually engaged in a war that required large scale ground operations (for which it was ill prepared (Lipshitz, 2008 a). In contrast, incidental reports indicate that on the ground officers and soldiers realized, sometimes quite quickly, that 'this was not what we have planned or were led to expect.' The research reported here used a Naturalistic Decision Making methodology to understand how these individuals managed to reframe successfully in conditions marked by high stress and ambiguity. A model integrating three areas, sensemaking, reframing, and decision making was developed in a grounded methodology in the first phase of the study, and validated and elaborated to include insight in the second phase of the study. The model distinguishes between three different processes of framing and reframing (instant, gradual, and epiphany) and specifies eight different barriers to reframing and their potential solutions.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2012
- Accession Number
- ADA563524
Entities
People
- Raanan Lipshitz
Organizations
- University of Haifa