The C2 community understands well that agility the property of being robust, resilient, flexible and adaptable (NATO 2006) is critical in circumstances where organisations must quickly respond to rapidly developing situations with multiple elements whose connections are opaque. Situation Awareness (SA) of individuals and the organisations in which they perform their roles is, in turn, a key requirement for achieving that agility; there is little time for hierarchical handling, processing and authorised dissemination of information. Thus agents in the system must each be able to understand what is happening and make judgements as to what may happen next and enable others to do the same. For this reason, a model of SA that takes into account individual and distributed cognition is essential. This paper proposes such a model by unifying a number of existing approaches to SA. The model we arrive at is ideally suited to an organisational context of, for example, military staff who maintain a Common Operating Picture (COP) within the J2 (Intelligence) and J3 (Operations) functions in response to a rapidly unfolding crisis.
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