Uncertainty Management for Teams

One of the largest challenges facing our nation's current and future military systems is how to best make use of the remarkable proliferation of information technologies to support human decision processes. There is a sense of extraordinary potential for advancing our collaborative decision capabilities in particular, given the unparalleled reach and richness of information today. In order to tap the full potential, we need to improve our understanding of how collaborative groups jointly construct and communicate meaning that the individual members derive from the information at their disposal. Existing work on the problem has primarily focused on the information flow of content. Yet, in addition to content, team members also experience and transmit varying degrees of uncertainty with respect to the content. And the ways in which teams manage this flow of uncertainty can have a large impact on how they collaboratively observe, orient, and decide. In the Phase I effort, we will employ CTA methods to develop a model of uncertainty management for teams (UMT). The UMT Model will guide display designs for use with an existing collaborative tool. Concept maps may be especially suited to achieving collaborative understanding and uncertainty reduction.