International C2 Journal, Volume 2 Number 1, 2008. Special Issue: Awareness. Tightly Coupling Cognition: Understanding How Communication and Awareness Drive Coordination in Teams

摘要

The International C2 Journal was created in 2006 at the urging of an international group of command and control professionals including individuals from academia, industry, government, and the military. This issue discusses this topic: Modern and future visions of command and control (C2) pose new theoretical and practical issues. These adaptive, rapidly reconfigurable, and distributed organizational structures rely on developing and maintaining shared awareness between interdependent components (i.e., individuals or teams working towards shared goals). The science of teams has been an effective theoretical driver for understanding and promoting effectiveness in traditional C2. Much of this work can be leveraged in modern C2 as well; however, there are gaps in the science of teams that must be filled in order to provide science-based guidance for modern C2. This article presents a review of the science of teams and discusses how it applies to modern C2. We discuss recent theorizing on cognition and teams in order to illustrate the multifaceted ways in which cognition manifests itself during complex dynamic interaction to support coordinated teamwork. Framing this within the general rubric of team cognition we discuss how awareness propagates through teams via communication processes manifested both implicitly and explicitly. Additionally, we discuss how team cognition supports a number of macrocognitive functions necessary for effective collaborative problem solving.