The Types of Social Team Organization [1]
The differences in the cognitive accomplishments of any two groups
might depend entirely on differences in the social organization of distributed
cognition and not at all on differences in the cognitive properties of individuals
in the two groups .
Parallel Activities
Perhaps the most obvious property is that the activities of the members
of the team take place in parallel . Two
functional systems may be assembled into a larger functional system in the
coordination of the activities of the two crew members who work together on a
single problem.
Top down bottom up
In a "bottom-up "
information process input values are propagated upto a higher level of
abstraction. For ex. the representation of the relationship of the ship to the
world is transformed into symbolic form and moved across a set of media until
it arrives at the chart.
The Types of Human Interfaces
The creation of human and organizational interfaces to tasks is ubiquitous.
Daemons
A commonly created sort of interface to a task is what in computer
science is called a daemon. A daemon is an agent that monitors a world waiting
for certain specified conditions . When the trigger
conditions exist , the daemon takes a specified action.
Buffers
Information buffers enable the operators , whose job is to make
the observations as nearly simultaneously as is possible to operate asynchronously . There may be a
great deal of variation in the pace of the work done by the members of a
navigation team. The buffering activity introduces slack into the system so
that the temporal constraints of an operator do not interfere with the temporal
constraints of an other operator. Each pair of operators permits communication to take place when the
sender and the receiver are not overloaded.
Buffering contributes to " loose coupling " of the
system. The buffering prevents the uncontrolled propagation of effects from
one part of the system to another . Buffering provides protection against
destructive interference between processes running in parallel .
Communication and Memory
The work that is done by individual memory in the solo condition
is replaced in the group condition by interpersonal communication .
If we think of individual memory as communication with the self
over time, then the replacement of intrapersonal communication by interpersonal
communication is an expected consequence of the move from individual to team
performance of a task.
Sequential Control of
Action
Sequential control in an orchestra is achieved by having every
musician know the plan of the entire piece and also know the place of every
instance of his own part within the piece.
A procedure is sequentially unconstrained if the execution of
any enabled operation will never
disable any other enabled but as yet unexecuted operation . In this scheme, there
is no communication between the active agents other than their effects on a
shared environment . Each agent simply mills about taking actions only when he encounters situations on which he
can act.
A procedure is sequentially constrained if the execution of any enabled
operation will disable any other enabled but as yet unexecuted operation .
Where there are sequential constraints , it is
necessary to have some control over the sequence of actions . The performance of a sequentially constrained
procedure may require planning or backtracking .
Navigation Team as a
Production Team
Sequentially unconstrained procedures are easily distributed or can
be solved by very loosely interconnected systems. Tasks that have sequential
constraints require some coordination among the
actions to be taken. There are many ways to achieve this coordination .
Specifying the overall pattern of behavior in a script , a score, or an overall
plan is an obvious solution to the sequencing problem
In fact, it is possible for the team to organize its behavior in
an appropriate sequence without there being a global script or plan anywhere in
the system. Each crew member only needs to know what to do when certain
conditions are produced in the environment.
[1] Outlined from Edwin Hutchins, Cognition_in_the_Wild
