Early Experiences with Experimentation on Dynamic Organizational Structure

Proceedings of the 1996 Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium: Command and Control in the Information AgeThe initial experiment in the Adaptive Architectures for Command and Control (A2C2) project was designed to integrate the project's efforts, and serve as a baseline for future research. This paper describes preliminary lessons-learned in the following areas: (1) experimental design, and the difficulties of running repeated conditions with 6+ person teams in a controlled setting; (2) challenges of scenario abstraction and design, work- load, coordination requirements, and enforcement of task and organizational structure as an independent variable; (3) task and organizational structure, including levels of abstraction and task dynamics; (4) good and bad points of the DDD-111 for future work, in which organizational and/or task structure may change during the course of an experiment; (5) experimental conduct, includ- ing assignment of subjects, training and planning, and the common opeational picture; and (6) data collection instru- ments and implementation-from those automated in the DDD-111, to the use of real-time observers and subject questionnaires.This research is funded by a grant from the Office of Naval Research, Cognitive and Neural Sciences Divisio