The ability to detect a change, to accurately assess the magnitude of the change, and to react to that change in a commensurate fashion, is of critical importance in many decision domains. Thus, it is important to understand the factors that systematically affect people’s reactions to change....

There are many cases where top management either missed or almost missed detecting or interpreting a major change in the environment that might have led them to a major setback. We propose a model of sensing in hierarchical organizations that describes a sequence of sensing and detecting changes...