Fundamental Surprises Zvi Lanir Decision Research 1201 Oak ...

Real stories are unfinished ones; and reports on historical events inevitably have loose
ends. This story of the Yom Kippur fundamental surprise is incomplete not only because
we can never reach the bottom of any human issue, but also because Israel’s learning
process after its fundamental surprise is still incomplete.
As this book is being written there is still no clear evidence that Israel has successfully
accomplished fundamental learning. Each of the three waves of surprise revelations was
understood differently, as it occurred. The Yom Kippur surprise was understood mainly
as a military surprise, the peace initiative surprise as a political one, and the Lebanese
surprise as a moral one. This, these interpretations ranged from the particular to the
general, from the concrete to the abstract, and from external to internal. In this sense, the
current stage may represent the peak of the “social crisis.” By now, more then ten years
after the Yom Kippur War and the beginning of the learning process, there are indications
that the “social” and “epistemological” crises are leading to self-awareness and
fundamental learning.
However, social awareness of the social crisis and intellectual awareness of the
epistemological crisis are by themselves insufficient for successful completion of the
process. That process also requires leadership. The transformation from fundamental
awareness to fundamental understanding and from there to formulation of a new policy is
a transformation that requires leadership with vision and historical perspective, as well as
the operational ability to translate abstract understanding into political terminology. Such
leadership must combine vision with the ability to exceed the tangible parameters of
resources and paradigms. This kind of leadership is still lacking in the Israel of the mid-
80’s.
As Israel strives to extract specific lessons from this experience, in this final chapter, I
will attempt to extract some general theoretical lessons. Its first section suggests some
general hypotheses on the function of fundamental surprises and the process of social
change. The second offers conclusions and recommendations.
A. The Tangled Hierarchy: Paradoxical Relationships between the Situational and the
Fundamental
Development of this case study relied on four paired concepts: