STUDY WEEK - UNDERSTANDING/MODELING TEAMS AS DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS

                                                      

Full Study Link Here.

• Understanding teams involves not just understanding isolated mental/behavioral processes in the individual but demands theories/models for how interacting with other people shape thought/behavior in real time
• Whereas a system exists independently of whether or not it is recognised as a system (when something is part of a system it behaves differently then if it wasn’t), systems thinking is a matter of perspective
• For an astronomer the galaxy is the system and the earth is an element of the system and for a climatologist the earth is the system and the atmosphere is an element
• Systems and subsystems can have fuzzy boundaries but when we use the word system, we invoke explanations/understanding precisely at the system level rather than the constituent elements of the system
• Behaviors can emerge at the system level that are not encoded at the level of isolated elements and is the distinction between compositional/compilational emergence in team cognition
• Compositional emergence means that properties at the team level (team knowledge etc) are isomorphic to properties at the ind level (sum of in game knowledge etc)
• Compilational emergence means that properties at the team level are non-isomorphic to properties at the individual level where the team properties only emerge through the process of team interaction
• An attractor is a behavior that a system settles on over time after (possibly) displaying initial transient (settling in) behavior
• A perturbation is an outside disturbance to a system that forces either a reorg of the behavioral trajectory towards an attractor or moves the system towards a new attractor
• Synchronisation is where 1 or more coupled oscillatory processes become coordinated in time across some proportion of frequency
• Fractals model either spatial or temporal processes in which similar patterns occur across multiple scales (timescales etc) of measurement, meaning it displays a temporal nesting property such that smaller copies of a pattern are nested w/in larger copies of the pattern, a property called scale-invariance
• Scale-invariant properties are fit by a power law distribution and these laws are a signature of self organisation and long memory effects
• Self organisation is a process wherein order at the global scale emerges from and constrains component behavior at the local scale and long memory effects are correlations that persist over longer timescales than those that characterised local variability within the system
• Just as there are different scales of analysis (local v global, short v long timescale etc) there are also different levels of analysis including perceptual-motor, cognitive-behavioral and neutral
• Perturbation training is a team training approach that draws on the system proposition that when a coordination pattern is perturbed, all team members (not just those directly affected by the perturbation) must readjust their interaction patterns at a local scale to maintain system stab and team effectiveness at a global scale
• Well placed perturnations (unexpectedly cutting a communication link etc) exercise the potential coordination space of a team beyond routine conditions by forcing them to develop new solutions for novel coordination problems
• The prediction for team training is that by introducing perturbations during team skill acquisition, we increase the flexibility/adaptability of the team members, thereby enhancing team performance in response to novel/unpracticed task conditions
• Perturbations can lead to superior performance under novel task conditions compared to cross training/procedural training
• Flexibility in real-time interaction processes induced by pert training, rather than shared knowledge/following scripted procedures, enhances team performance by exercising the real time dynamics that team members need to experience in order to adapt in the post training environment
• 2 measures of whether a team response to a roadblock are whether the team overcomes the roadblock and the time it takes to overcome the roadblock and the 2^nd measure is related to the dynamical concept of relaxation time which is the time it takes for a system to return to its attractor after its trajectory has been perturbed
• Team communication/cognition/coordination give rise to dynamic patterns that change in real time
• Local variability ensures global stability and vice versa
• These dynamics are substrate-independent and there is no preferred level of analysis
• Cross level effects occur between levels of analysis
• Interpersonal behavior/teamwork that is somehow encoded in the individual is inaccurate and what is encoded in the individual emerges out of a vibrant network/interpersonal/social/cultural interactions that continuously shape/reshape that which is encoded and from this perspective teams and individual in any interactive environment can be understood/modeled using a systems approach