Improving Team Readiness through the Convergence of Team Mental Models

Cognitive readiness of individuals and teams is of increasing concern in network-centric warfare where teams play an increasingly vital role in networked military operations. Therefore, it is essential to expand the construct of cognitive readiness from individuals to team cognitive readiness through novel representations such as Team Mental Models (TMMs). In addition, there is interest in including tacit knowledge in the cognitive readiness construct to be incorporated in a TMM. This proposal asserts that tacit knowledge is largely the product of implicit learning and is the knowledge structure that is generated by this learning process. Using this theoretical approach, we propose to incorporate tacit knowledge into the appropriate dimensions of the cognitive readiness construct and assess and track it using a TMM conceptual design and innovative technologies available to the JXT Team. We propose to develop technologies to elicit tacit knowledge from team communication data, represent in our TMM conceptual design, develop techniques based on similarity indices to bring the TMM into alignment with team beliefs, and provide effective visualization techniques to foster intuitive understanding of the TMM. We call this tacit knowledge and cognitive readiness research program and prototype development ACRUT (Assessing Cognitive Readiness Using TMMs).