Structural Complexity and Effective Informing

A task that is unfamiliar and non-routine is sometimes characterized as having high structural complexity. Through increasing the task performer’s knowledge, informing processes can have a significant impact on structural complexity—as well as being impacted by it. The present paper examines the structural complexity construct, which can be further broken down into state complexity, operator complexity, and goal complexity, with the objective of better understanding how the qualitative nature of structural complexity impacts the informing process. The analysis finds that the gap between conceptual expertise and practical expertise is particularly difficult to overcome. Informing techniques favored by the conceptual expert, which emphasize top-down informing using symbolic concepts, tend to be very much at odds with those favored by the practicing expert, who likely favors a bottom-up approach based upon examples. Techniques for overcoming these barriers are discussed, such as the use of vertical slicing and stories.