Fascinating Article on Bad Decision-Making by the Israeli Defense Force

Check-out this insightful article that we posted over at our website Evidence-Based Management. As Jeff Pfeffer puts it so well:

"We have just posted an amazing article by an Israeli professor that has some fascinating material on how things went so wrong for the Israeli army in its recent struggles in Lebanon. The article highlights the importance of assumptions, mental models, and mind sets as crucial to making better and better informed decisions."

The article is by Raanan Lipshitz and here is the abstract: 

"This paper argues that the Israel Defense Force (I.D.F.) failure in the second Lebanon war can be partly attributed to commanders mindless and insufficiently critical decision making processes at the individual, group and organizational levels, or the platoon/tactical, division/operational and GHQ/strategic levels. Four cases are analyzed. The first three cases confirm the proposition during planning and opening stages of the war. The fourth case tests confirms its validity during the war's second, ground campaign phase. The paper presents an inclusive psychological conceptualization of decision making that is radically different from the calculative conceptualization that underlies mainstream decision research. The descriptive and prescriptive implications of the paper's findings and the model that it presents generalize beyond the second Lebanon War and Military Decision Making to decision making in business and the conduct of decision research."