Commander's Intent and Distributed Collaborating Teams

Abstract

The concept of Effects-Based Operations (EBO) in distributed environments exemplify the challenges being faced by teams of today's war fighters in interpreting and understanding Commander's Intent (CI) in the face of often competing requirements and emerging operational events. Theory suggests that delivery of Commander's Intent with an authoritative expression goal statement will facilitate encoding of explicit memory which will in turn impact the development of shared mental models. When the team's shared mental model is improved and aligned, we expect greater self-synchronization and performance. We conduct an experiment to study team behavior in a gaming environment with two different CI statements. We find significant improvement in team process measures when teams are presented with a CI statement containing an authoritative expression.