Coordination Breakdowns: How flexible is collaborative work?

ion, differentiation, definition, summarisation: These provide points where shared understanding is explicitly checked and discussed. Abstraction is used to ignore detail in order to establish the overall concepts. Summarisation is used by the hearer, both to check that something has been understood correctly, and as an indication of closure on a topic. Report writing: This forces a group to set out their understanding explicitly. Note that producing a report doesn’t necessarily involve resolving any conflicts, as a report is not necessarily univocal. However, whether the report reflects a shared understanding or describes a conflict, the act of setting it out ensures that the situation is explored. At the very least, report writing ensures that the participants are aware of one another’s expectations of a situation. Debate, negotiation, argumentation: These force a group to compare, explain and support their expectations. They provide protocols through which each person can set out their position. They encourage the externalisation of conflicting models by replacing the social stigma normally attached to disagreement with a ritual in which disagreement is expected. Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS): These support some parts of the argumentation process by allowing quantitative analysis of positions. GDSS are normally based on decision theory, and hence require the group to attach utilities to various criteria for evaluating options (Kraemer & Pinsonneault, 1990). Although the imposed rationality can often cause problems, the setting out of options and utilities can be a useful group exploration exercise. Problem Structuring Methods: E.g. Strategic Options Development and Analysis (SODA); Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) (Rosenhead, 1989). These techniques are designed to elicit conceptual models of a complex organisation, in order to make decisions about potential changes. They are characterised by the separate elicitation of different individuals’ understandings of the situation. The descriptions thus elicited are then compared systematically. This process facilitates an explicit comparison of individual mental models. SODA, in particular, uses an explicit theory of mental models, based on cognitive mapping and personal construct theory. Note that the chief advantage of these techniques is the increased understanding of one another’s views, and hence the process is essentially a learning process. The main outcome is increased understanding, and the gathered representations are of secondary importance. Design Rationale: This is a technique for representing the reasoning involved in design as an argumentation structure. A number of notations have been developed, based on typed hypertext networks. Typically a notation provides nodes such as ‘question’, ‘issue’, ‘position’, and links such as ‘supports’, ‘answers’, ‘objects to’ (Shum, 1991). Such notations allow a design team to develop an external map of their shared understanding, either during a design process or as a post hoc rationalisation. They are intended to be used by the group together, and hence do not elicit individual models. In particular the elements of the argumentation structure are recorded anonymously. The use of such tools in a design meeting helps to structure the exploration, and for a group to develop explicitly a shared understanding.