BA62574 CU Communication & Team Decision Making Questions Communication and Team Decision Making Part 1: Sharpening the Team Mind: Communication and Colle

BA62574 CU Communication & Team Decision Making Questions Communication and Team Decision Making

Part 1: Sharpening the Team Mind: Communication and Collective Intelligence

A. What are some of the possible biases and points of error that may arise in team communication systems? In addition to those cited in the opening of Chapter 6, what are some other examples of how team communication problems can lead to disaster?

B. Revisit communication failure examples in Exhibit 6-1. Identify the possible causes of communication or decision-making failure in each example, and, drawing on the information presented in the chapter, discuss measures that might have prevented problems from arising within each team’s communication system.

Chapter-6

*Klein, C., Diaz Granados, D., Salas, E., Le, H., Burke, C. S., Lyons, R., & Goodwin, G. F. (2009). Does team building work? Small Group Research, 40(2). 181-222.

* Gorman, J. C., Cooke, N. J., & Amazeen, P. G. (2010). Training adaptive teams. Human Factors, 52(2). 295-307. Human Factors: The Journal
of the Human Factors and
Ergonomics Society
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Training Adaptive Teams
Jamie C. Gorman, Nancy J. Cooke and Polemnia G. Amazeen
Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 2010 52: 295 originally
published online 23 July 2010
DOI: 10.1177/0018720810371689
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What is This?
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SPECIAL ISSUE
Training Adaptive Teams
Jamie C. Gorman and Nancy J. Cooke, Arizona State University–Polytechnic, Mesa,
Arizona, and Polemnia G. Amazeen, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona
Objective: We report an experiment in which three training approaches are compared
with the goal of training adaptive teams. Background: Cross-training is an established
method in which team members are trained with the goal of building shared knowledge.
Perturbation training is a new method in which team interactions are constrained to provide new coordination experiences during task acquisition. These two approaches, and a
more traditional procedural approach, are compared. Method: Assigned to three training
conditions were 26 teams. Teams flew nine simulated uninhabited air vehicle missions;
three were critical tests of the team’s ability to adapt to novel situations. Team performance, response time to novel events, and shared knowledge were measured. Results:
Perturbation-trained teams significantly outperformed teams in the other conditions in
two out of three critical test missions. Cross-training resulted in significant increases in
shared teamwork knowledge and highest mean performance in one critical test.
Procedural training led to the least adaptive teams. Conclusion: Perturbation training
allows teams to match coordination variability during training to demands for coordination variability during posttraining performance. Although cross-training has adaptive
benefits, it is suggested that process-oriented approaches, such as perturbation training,
can lead to more adaptive teams. Application: Perturbation training is amenable to simulation-based training, where perturbations provide interaction experiences that teams
can transfer to novel, real-world situations.
INTRODUCTION
In settings ranging from business and manufacturing to military and medical operations,
there are many tasks that are too cognitively
demanding to be performed by individuals
working alone. An example is a surgical task,
which requires a set of highly trained individuals,
including two surgeons, an anesthesiologist
and two nurses, each of whom brings different
cognitive capabilities to the team. But it is not
enough to bring together a set of highly trained
individuals. To function as a team, individuals
must coordinate their activities. Adaptive teams
have the ability to coordinate their activities not
only under routine conditions but also under
novel conditions for which they have not been
explicitly trained. Adaptation is the altering of
structure in accordance with changes in the
environment. Because they have the ability to
change their interactions to match the changing
demands of the environment, adaptive teams
can perform at a high level under novel task
conditions.
A number of relatively recent tragic system
failures can be at least partially attributed to
poor coordination of a team-level response to
environmental uncertainty. System failures attributable to poor team skills at Three Mile Island
and Chernobyl (Gaddy & Wachtel, 1992), social
pathogens behind the 1986 launch decision of
the space shuttle Challenger (Vaughan, 1996),
and lack of communication in the Operation
Provide Comfort friendly fire incident (Gorman,
Cooke, & Winner, 2006; Snook, 2002) each
implicate, in different ways, deficiencies in interaction and coordination that result in a failure to
adapt to changes in the task environment. These
incidents, and others like them, highlight the
need for training that addresses limitations and
Address correspondence to Jamie C. Gorman, Cognitive Engineering Research Institute, 5810 S. Sossaman Rd.,
Ste. 106, Mesa, AZ 85212; jgorman@cerici.org. HUMAN FACTORS, Vol. 52, No. 2, April 2010, pp. 295–307.
DOI: 10.1177/0018720810371689. Copyright © 2010, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
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296
April 2010 – Human Factors
deficiencies at the team level in responding to
novel patterns of events and threats.
Approaches to Training Adaptive Teams
A challenging problem for training team
cognition (i.e., training teams to decide, plan,
think, and act as an integrated unit; Cooke,
Gorman, & Winner, 2007) is how to balance
training for high performance under routine
task conditions with training to adapt to novel
task demands (Marks, Zaccaro, & Mathieu,
2000; Stachowski, Kaplan, & Waller, 2009).
These training goals can be approached with
varying theoretical motives. In this article, we
report an experiment in which three training
approaches, each with a different underlying
theoretical motive, were investigated with the
goal of training teams that perform at a high
level under novel task conditions. The training
approaches include cross-training, procedural
training, and perturbation training.
Cross-training. In cross-training, team members are trained on each other’s roles and responsibilities (e.g., Blickensderfer, Cannon-Bowers,
& Salas, 1998). Cross-training is theoretically
aligned with the idea that team cognition is the
shared knowledge of the team members and is
found widely in the team training literature (see
Salas et al., 2008, and Salas, Nichols, & Driskell,
2007, for recent meta-analyses). The goal of
cross-training is the development of shared, or
interpositional, knowledge (Cannon-Bowers,
Salas, Blickensderfer, & Bowers, 1998; Cooke
et al., 2003; Volpe, Cannon-Bowers, Salas, &
Spector, 1996). Positional clarification (receiving information on other roles), positional modeling (observing other roles), and positional
rotation (firsthand experience performing different roles) (Blickensderfer et al., 1998), which
are types of cross-training, have been effective
in the development of shared knowledge, ultimately improving coordination and team performance (e.g., Marks, Sabella, Burke, & Zacarro,
2002). Cross-training has a firm empirical
grounding and a record of success in the team
training literature, making it a good point of comparison with the other approaches in this study.
One of the potential benefits of cross-training
for shared knowledge is a high level of team
performance under stress (high workload, time
pressure). Drawing on shared knowledge, team
members anticipate each other’s needs to communicate efficiently, or coordinate implicitly,
under stress (Cannon-Bowers et al., 1998; Entin
& Serfaty, 1999; Stout, Cannon-Bowers, Salas, &
Milanovich, 1999). It is thought that shared
expectations, resulting from the development of
shared knowledge, allow team members to generate predictions for appropriate behavior under
novel conditions, enabling them to quickly adapt
to the changing demands of the task environment (Fiore, Salas, & Cannon-Bowers, 2001). A
possible drawback of a shared set of expectations, however, is the habituation of team member
interaction, which could result in dysfunctional
consequences if the situation is highly novel
(e.g., Gersick & Hackman, 1990; Gorman,
Cooke, & Winner, 2006).
Whereas cross-training is feasible for relatively small, homogeneously skilled teams, it
can become impractical as teams grow in diversity and size. For example, it would be impractical to cross-train the surgeon and nurse positions
of an emergency room team (Cooke et al., 2003;
Marks et al., 2002). Also, cross-training may
negatively impact individual-level performance
due to the demands of training for multiple team
member roles (Cannon-Bowers et al., 1998),
which is problematic as teams grow in size.
Although there are adaptive benefits of crosstraining, there are practical limitations to its
applicability.
Procedural training. Procedural training is a
form of process training in which operators in
complex systems are positively reinforced (through
feedback) to follow a standard sequence of actions
(a procedure) each time a particular stimulus is
encountered. The assumption behind procedural
training is that if the procedure is always followed, then errors resulting from human interaction will be reduced and performance will be
enhanced, particularly under conditions of stress
and high workload (e.g., Hockey, Sauer, &
Wastell, 2007; Sauer, Burkholter, Kluge,
Ritzmann, & Schuler, 2008). Procedural training is widely used in aviation, military, medical,
manufacturing, and business settings, in which
deviations from complicated procedures can be
catastrophic. The prevalence of procedural training for coordination in highly critical team tasks
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Training Adaptive Teams
297
(e.g., emergency response; Ford & Schmidt,
2000; Stachowski et al., 2009) make it a good
point of comparison for the other training methods in this study.
Procedural training is compatible with the
concept of “overlearning”: continuation of practice beyond mastery that leads to automatic
responding. Drilling a standard team interaction
pattern, for a specific class of event, over the
entirety of training can lead to an automatic
response that a team can rely on under stress.
The goal of procedural training, as operationalized in the current study, is to overlearn a team
coordination procedure. Ideally, due to overlearning, procedurally trained teams perform
under stress by automatically (reflexively)
reacting with an a priori coordinated response.
Procedural training does not impose the
practical limitations of cross-training but may
limit a team’s ability to transfer training to novel
situations. Similar to the concept of a “set effect”
(Luchins, 1942), procedural training may set teams
up to coordinate in a routine fashion under a
novel condition. We argue, therefore, that like
habituation (Gersick & Hackman, 1990), rigid
proceedure-following during task acquisition
can lead to poor performance when posttraining
conditions do not match training conditions.
Perturbation training. Perturbation training
is a form of process training introduced in this
study. Adopted from the dynamic systems literature, a perturbation is an extrinsic application
of force that briefly disrupts a dynamic process,
forcing the reacquisition of a new stable trajectory, and is typically used to probe the stability
of that process (Gorman, Amazeen, & Cooke,
in press). The concept of perturbation can be
applied to team training by disrupting standard
coordination procedures multiple times during
task acquisition, forcing teams to coordinate in
novel ways to achieve their objective. Unlike
training in which the situation or objectives are
varied (e.g., training for low- vs. high-frequency
circumstances), in perturbation training, critical
coordination links are disrupted while the team
objective remains constant. The goal of perturbation training is to counteract habituation and
procedural rigidity associated with team interactions—possible outcomes of cross-training and
procedural training, respectively—allowing teams
to acquire flexible interaction processes that
will transfer to novel task conditions.
Perturbation training is theoretically inspired
by findings in the motor- and verbal-learning
literatures that suggest that introducing difficulties for the learner, such as practice condition
variability, facilitates performance under novel
posttraining conditions (Schmidt & Bjork,
1992). Perturbation training thus shares some
features of motor schema theory (Schmidt,
1975) and desirable difficulties (Bjork, 1994)
but for coordination and for teams. According
to motor schema theory, varying the conditions
of practice during motor skill acquisition
enhances the “rules” that relate movements to
external task demands. In verbal learning, desirable difficulties are unpredictable and variable
conditions of practice that cause difficulty for
the learner but ultimately enhance the transfer
of concepts to new contexts. Whereas those
approaches employ equally probable but randomly varying training conditions to introduce
practice condition variability, perturbation
training employs abrupt but focused disruptions
to team coordination.
Bjork (1994) argued that varying practice
conditions exercises more elaborate encoding and
retrieval processes needed in the posttraining
environment. Perturbation training extends this
idea to team process: When coordination is perturbed, all team member interactions (not just
those directly affected by the perturbation) must
readjust to accommodate the perturbation in
such a manner that the team objective is nevertheless met (Turvey, 1990). We suggest that similar to the effects of practice condition variability,
perturbations exercise the team processes needed
to adapt in the posttraining environment.
A major limitation of perturbation training is
that it has not previously been applied and its effectiveness is unknown. An experiment described by
Gorman, Cooke, Pedersen, et al. (2006) provided
some empirical grounding for perturbation
training. Teams were initially trained and performed a repetitive command-and-control task
during a 3-hr experimental session. Participants
returned for a second session after a retention
interval, after which they were either intact
(kept the same team members) or mixed (same
role on the team but different team members).
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April 2010 – Human Factors
As expected, intact teams outperformed mixed
teams under routine conditions, but the effect
was short-lived. Mixed teams, however, performed better on tests of situation awareness,
had higher process ratings (Gorman, Cooke,
Pedersen, et al., 2006), and had more flexible
coordination dynamics (Gorman et al., in press).
Those benefits were not attributable to increased
shared knowledge or procedural rigidity but to
increased variation in interaction experience.
In some sense, mixing up the team members
perturbed rigid coordination patterns, ultimately
leading to a more flexible and adaptive team.
Perturbation training, as operationalized in the
current study, does not involve mixing team
members but was designed have the same effect.
By disrupting standard coordination procedures
during task acquisition, perturbation training
increases interaction experience in intact
command-and-control teams.
The Current Study
We compared the three different training
approaches in an uninhabited air vehicle (UAV)
simulator with the goal of producing teams that
perform at a high level under novel task conditions and that respond rapidly to novel events. In
the UAV task, three team members (navigator,
photographer, and pilot) coordinate to take pictures of stationary ground targets. Three training
protocols were developed for cross-training,
perturbation training, and procedural training of
UAV teams. The following hypotheses are
based on prior results and existing literature.
Hypothesis 1: By focusing on introducing varied interaction experiences during task acquisition, perturbation training will result in performance scores and
response times to novel events that are as good as or
better than cross-training and superior to procedural
training.
Hypothesis 2: Because of its focus on training team
members to know each other’s roles and responsibilities, cross-training will result in higher levels of
shared knowledge compared with both procedural
and perturbation training.
Hypothesis 3: By training teams to rigidly follow a
procedure, procedural training will result in the
least adaptive teams (i.e., poor performance and
slow response to novel events) compared with both
perturbation and cross-training.
METHOD
Participants
We recruited 32 three-person teams (96 participants) for participation from Mesa, Arizona,
and surrounding areas. The team members had
no prior experience working together. Participants
ranged in age from 18 to 54 (M = 28), and
71 were male. The experiment occurred during
two 3- to 4-hr sessions. Because of scheduling
conflicts for Session 2, a total of 26 teams
(78 participants) completed both experimental
sessions. Participants were paid $10 per hour,
and each member of the highest-performing
team received a $100 bonus.
Materials and Apparatus
The experiment was conducted in a UAV
synthetic task environment (UAV-STE) for
teams (Cooke & Shope, 2005). Each of the
three team members was seated at a workstation
in front of three computer monitors with a keyboard and a mouse. To interact, team members
wore aviation-quality headsets and communicated by holding down push-to-talk buttons.
The workstations were located in the same room,
configured in a U shape with team members
backs to each other. With the team members
donning headsets, the UAV-STE did not afford
face-to-face interaction.
The team’s task was to take reconnaissance
photographs of stationary ground targets during
a series of nine 40-min missions divided across
two experimental sessions. There were 11 to
12 targets per mission except for one highworkload mission that had 20 targets. The three
team member roles—navigator, photographer,
and pilot—were each associated with different,
yet interdependent tasks, information resources,
and needs.
Measures
Team performance. Performance was measured for each UAV-STE mission as the weighted
composite of several team-level mission parameters, including number of missed targets, time to
process targets, and time spent with unaddressed
warnings and alarms. Cooke, Gorman, Pedersen,
et al. (2007) report the parameter weights, which
were established in previous experiments to
maximize score sensitivity. Teams started each
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Training Adaptive Teams
299
mission with a performance score of 1,000, and
points were subtracted on the basis of final values
of the mission parameters. This team performance score has been validated against other
measures of team process and performance
(Cooke, Gorman, Duran, & Taylor, 2007; Cooke,
Gorman, Pedersen, et al., 2007).
Response time to novel events. Novel events
were introduced within UAV missions by introducing roadblocks. Roadblocks are novel
changes in the task environment that have to be
jointly recognized by two or more team members
who take action to overcome them (e.g., a new
target is introduced, equipment fails, an enemy
threat appears; Cooke, Gorman, & Rowe, 2009;
Gorman, Cooke, & Winner, 2006). Time to overcome roadblocks, defined as the time from the
initiation of the roadblock to the time that action
is taken that overcomes the roadblock, was the
measure of response time to novel events.
Interpositional taskwork knowledge. This
measure assessed a team’s average knowledge
of the taskwork associated with the other two
roles. To measure taskwork knowledge, relatedness ratings (1 = completely unrelated to 5 =
completely related) wer…
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