Fundamental Surprises Zvi Lanir Decision Research 1201 Oak ...

does not affect your freedom, but your law affects my freedom”). If the value of freedom
was still at the core of American “Selfhood”, the law was doomed to fail, and bring about
chaos in the relationship between citizens and the authorities. Eventually, the law was
abandoned. To those American leaders who believed in its necessity, both the failure of
their law and the failure of their gloomy pictures of what would happen to America
without the law should have caused some self-examination. However it did not. One
explanation is that people are good at finding reasons why a chosen course of action will
eventually have positive results, even though the situation is still becoming worse.
No learning after fundamental surprise can also occur when societies or
organizations have the resources needed to suppress disorder and thus to return the
system to its old order, without learning any fundamental lesson. That may be the oil
crisis surprise, which were not only a situational shortage but also part of a fundamental
crisis regarding the respective roles of the developing countries and the western industrial
countries. Viewing this as a situational crisis saved the West from even considering
fundamental lessons. Nations can, as Albert Wohlstetter described it, “optimize on the
wrong curve.” 7
C. Conclusions and recommendations
Over the last 30 years, research has focused on how we gather and process
information in order to make decision despite the limitations of individuals and
organizations. However, very little is known about decisions that people and
organizations derive from processes that are not dominated by information, those
relying on personal and social experience, wisdom, ethics and aesthetics. 8 Nor is
much known about human and social creativity or about how novelty is diffused
in societies and organizations. The role of leadership, the function of intellectuals,
of slacks and buffers, of institutions’ capacity for novelty and evolution has begun
to gain attention in organizational theory in the last few decades only. In the study
of intelligence and surprises, these topics have attracted little attention at all.
Students of surprise phenomena ask themselves why people,
organizations, and nations are trapped by surprises even when they have
information that, in hindsight, seems sufficient for the prevention of the surprise.