Enhancing Joint Task Force Cognitive Leadership Skills

Joint interdependence embraces the concept of purposeful reliance on other service and joint capabilities to maximize their complementary and reinforcing effects while minimizing service vulnerabilities. High performance teamwork is enabled by better understanding of the processes, capabilities, and cultures of the other organizations. During this Phase I project, we carried out a front-end training requirements analysis, focused on team performance problems caused by differences in knowledge and culture across Services. We also sought to understand other factors that affect Joint performance in order to identify training approaches that address inter-Service and other issues in an integrated manner. Based on interviews with 20 instructors and staff at Joint Forces Staff College (JFSC) and U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) and on review of prior research, we recommend developing a scenario-based training system that enables one or more students to carry out staff functions at a hypothetical Joint command headquarters. We propose to develop an operational version of this software and three scenarios during Phase II to support training at JFSC, JFCOM and other Combatant Commands. This system will leverage our SimVentive scenario authoring tool and our prior work developing intelligent agent and natural language understanding capabilities that enable conversations with simulated characters.