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This chapter examines how human understanding and interaction shape collective sense-making in military contexts, drawing on three conference papers. Anchored in John Boyd’s notion that effective command relies on units operating independently within a shared intent, we explore how teams maintain unity by continuously re-orienting. This requires shared mental representations rooted not only in doctrine but also in knowledge traditionally more associated with the humanities and social sciences.

The first paper, “Team Up for Success: Harnessing Participatory Sense-Making with the Harmonization Emergence Model”, examines “languaging” as a modality of participatory sense-making. It argues that team composition, context, and organizational interfaces shape the emergence of shared meaning and determine whether collective insights can be effectively channelled. The second, “A Set-Based Approach: Searching for the Problem–Solution Eclipse”, proposes five principles to strengthen contextual understanding. It highlights the importance of fostering knowledge communities capable of developing situational awareness through continuous learning and agency, extending beyond the assumptions of traditional operational frameworks. In the last, “Understanding Linguistic Diversity, a C2 Enabler”, the foreign-language effect among Swedish officers using English as an L2 in operational planning is explored. It demonstrates how L2 use influences individual agency and team dynamics, often in unrecognized ways.

The paper introduces a prototype decision support system for rapid exploratory wargaming of ground combat together with a conceptual framework for human-machine teaming. An AlphaZero agent provides continuous, GPS-device-like advice on how blue/red should proceed from the current situation to meet/prevent the long-term mission objective for blue. A controlled experiment with 100+ senior officers provides concrete evidence that the utility of wargaming in a digital environment improves with an AlphaZero agent in the team of players.

The Harmonization Emergence Model emphasizes that the emergence of a ‘real’ team with truly interdependent members, hinges on their ability to co-create 'Stimmigkeit' or Congruent Shared Meaning, which is an effective shared cognitive representation of the external environment. This increases the likelihood that a team's engagement in languaging would yield the intended effects. In this paper, we explore the effect of using a foreign language (L2) on team members’ ability to engage in participatory sense making (PSM) to reach congruent shared meaning. The study is based on the self-assessments of 31 participants during a multinational exercise as part of the Joint Advanced Command and Staff Programme (JACS-P) at the Swedish Defence University (SEDU). It explores participants own reflections on their ability to mediate information and to engage participatory discourses when sense-making. It concludes that the participants’ ability to develop a nuanced shared meaning or model of the external environment is constrained when using an L2.  We suggest that in multilingual contexts a 'Constructive-Decoherence Approach' could be used. This would allow team members to use of their first (L1) language in the sense-making process, enabling a deeper and more nuanced analysis of the situation, while simultaneously facilitating the integration necessary in multinational or multicultural organizational efforts. 

This paper draws attention to some of the unintended consequences of current planning directives, which not only obscure the true essence of complex endeavours, but may also inhibit the intellectual capabilities of planning teams because of their prescriptive and voluminous nature. In the Set-based Approach (SbA), we introduce five principles aimed at optimizing planning time and reducing the likelihood of making premature assumptions. SbA extends beyond the scope of military operational planning, offering a flexible planning philosophy that enables teams to deal more adeptly with uncertainty. The SbA concept has undergone informal testing during two pilot programs at the Swedish Defence University.

This paper introduces the Harmonization Emergence Model (HEM), a model that integrates two key dimensions of harmony: Einheit(coalescing unity) and Stimmigkeit (congruent shared meaning). The HEM, in conjunction with John Boyd's OODA-loop, provides avaluable tool for comprehending how harmonization can emerge within complex endeavors that span organizational, linguistic,and cultural boundaries. By employing these models, our aim is to broaden the understanding of the imperative to shift the focusof Command and Control (C2), beyond mere direction and control towards a function for catalyzing and modulating collaborationamong organizations and actors within a specific context. Our objective with the HEM, is to better understand the 'power to theedge' concept and how C2 could facilitate assemblages (teams of teams) in actively engaging with and influencing the environment.This is guided by the pursuit of Congruence, which represents the metastable shared meaning we seek through Participatory SenseMaking.

A multilevel theory of agility for C2 is absent. This paper uses an organizing paradigm to reinterpret the existing body ofresearch in order to explore the multilevel self-organizing dynamics that underpin the emergence of organizationalagility. Following social theory’s practice-turn, we outline in section 2 the essence of the organizing paradigm and mapsome of its implications. We reflect on the routines, creativity and complexity inherent in human organizing, and howorganizing practices manifest new collective C2 capabilities for unanticipated, unexpected and unfamiliar circumstances.Then we consider the role and limits of individual agency and rationality within the process of organizing, placing theemphasis on a collective process of structuring that imposes change and order in structure. In section 3 we present anillustration of some organizing principles and practices that may feature within a multi-level theory of agility. We explorehow collective sensemaking is intertwined with collective organizing, and briefly reflect on a conceptual model of agilityin the organizing paradigm. In the concluding section 4 we discuss the usefulness of an organizing paradigm for C2 agilityresearch and invite collaboration in researching cross-level organizing processes and practices.