Fundamental Surprises Zvi Lanir Decision Research 1201 Oak ...

“One of the things a scientific community acquires with a paradigm is a criterion
for choosing problems that can be assumed to have solutions, while the paradigm is taken
for granted. To a great extent, these are the only problems that this community will admit
as scientific or encourage its members to undertake …”16 “A paradigm is an efficient
instrument for solving the problems or puzzles that its paradigms defone.” 17 Leaders do
not have the luxury of choosing problems that they think they know how to solve.
In the nonscientific reality, fundamental and situational relearning does not
overlap in their time dimensions. The development of fundamental understanding is an
extended process, whereas the need to derive functional political and military lessons
after a surprise is immediate. In such cases, situational thinking and incremental
situational decisions may accumulate, substituting for fundamental thinking.
All these factors cause the process of fundamental learning in the social domain to
be longer, less direct, more vague, and more frustrating than fundamental learning in the
scientific realm.
E. The Process of fundamental surprise
To sum up this theoretical chapter, I propose conceiving the phenomenon of
fundamental surprise as a social-cognitive process. This is only one phase within this
process. In this phase, outside intervention plays a major role. In all other phases, it is
the “self” that is the cause and subject of the process.
In the second phase, the fundamental surprise spills over the boundaries of the
specific surprise event that triggered the process, to include issues that have little to do
directly with that event. Rather, social and epistemological crises evolve. These crises
can lead into the third phase—the fundamental learning phase.
In the fourth phase, the process of morphogenesis occurs. The new perspective of
self-understanding is translated into practical political-social terms. Social goals are
redefined, the structure of organization is changed, and the system’s sensitivity toward its
environment is recalibrated. A new requisite variety system evolves.
In the fifth phase, the system seeks greater efficiency and a holistic concept of the self
and the environment shifts into the requisite variety mode of dealing with the
environment. The system’s thinking shifts to a problem-solving logic, and the search for
self-awareness is extinguished.