An Exploratory Study into Remote and Co-Located Command Planning
Abstract
What is this report about?
This report is about an experimental study into distributed teams that ran in the latter part of 2006. It is a collaboration between the Human Factors Integration Defence Technology Centre (HFI DTC) and the Ministry of Defence Directorate of Command, Control and Information Infrastructure (DEC CCII). The practical question that this report aims to address is: “How does the military commander keep involved in the planning process when they are remote from it?”
Background and reasoning behind the work
The research question resides within a wider background and context of teamwork research. The overarching point is that it is difficult to generalise as to whether team working is universally better than working individually; good team working is not an automatic occurrence. The conditions for successful team working rely on a number of factors, principle among which are the constraining or enhancing features of the operational environment, the organisation within which the team is situated and the processes of adaptation and regulation internal to the team. This led to a study that aims to mimic (conceptually and practically) some of the critical environmental/organisational/team based properties encountered in military command planning settings.
What was undertaken in the research?
A total of 108 participants took part in the study which enabled 36 teams of three individuals to be composed. The experimental command planning task was based on the game of Chess and required the commander to develop a strategy for winning the game. Teams undertook the Chess game face to face (in which all three team members were colocated) followed by a distributed planning condition (in which the commander was remote from their staff) followed again by another face to face condition. The teams were further divided, in the distributed planning condition, into four groups. Each of the four groups used different types of technology to facilitate distributed command planning, ranging from video conferencing at one end of the scale to merely voice communications at the other. The study, therefore, allows us to examine not just the effect of distributed command planning but also the differential effects of the sort of technology that can be used to support it.
What was discovered?
One of the problems with teamwork research is that simply measuring the team’s performance often hides the considerably different processes of adaptation required in order to maintain it under different conditions. This seems to have been the case here. Performance time, success and overall workload remained relatively stable, but stability in these areas came at the expense of considerable team adaptation and change in others. A moderate change in the quantity of communications was observed (the provision of a ‘virtual whiteboard’ in some of the distributed planning conditions tended to reduce the number of communication exchanges required) and the content of those communications also changed (there were more requests to repeat and/or confirm information in the distributed planning conditions). The number of Chess moves made, subjectively experienced time pressure and Situational Awareness (SA) increased considerably in the distributed planning condition compared to face-to-face planning. In summary, distributed command planning does not appear to impact on team performance, at least in this context, but does require teams to adapt. The video conferencing and virtual whiteboard facilities provide the widest scope for adaptation (which the teams used) compared to the video conferencing facility on its own, in which processes internal to the team were closest to the non-distributed, co-located condition.
Main conclusions and recommendations
The question that this report set out to answer was whether the military commander can be kept involved in the planning process when they are remote from it. The answer, at face value, is yes. In this experimental context identical performance time and task success was achieved regardless of whether the commander was distributed from their team or co-located with them. The choice of technological facilitation is a little more difficult to answer. On the one hand, the richest form of distributed planning technology witnessed the greatest extent of behavioural adaptation in order to maintain task performance at a stable level. On the other hand, just the provision of video conferencing achieves the same level of task performance for a far lesser amount of behavioural adaptation. Whether ‘less is more’ (or vice versa) is an issue for further research into the limits of adaptability that teams are capable of given the environmental/organisational/team based constraints they are working within.
Military relevance of the work
Effective teams and team working do not occur automatically. Dealing with the question of how to keep a geographically remote commander in touch with the rest of the planning team (and process) is a live issue which we have attempted to address within a wider collaboration between the HFI DTC and the DEC CCII. This report represents part of the evidence based approach to answering the practical questions surrounding distributed command planning and its role in current and future military practice.
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