Scenario Design for the Empirical Testing of Organizational Congruence

Over the past several years, researchers within the ONR-sponsored Adaptive Architectures for Command and Control (A2C2) research program have been investigating the concept of organizational “congruence”. These model-based theories loosely state that the better an organization is matched structurally to the overall mission (as measured using a multi-variant set of workload/congruence metrics) the better will that organization perform – and that mismatches are potential drivers for adaptation of organization structure. In order to test the congruence theories and their corollaries in a laboratory experiment, our approach was to seek two sufficiently disparate organizational structures and then design two missions (or scenarios) that would exploit the differences in these two structures. One scenario would be “tuned” to organization 1 to exhibit a high degree of congruence, but at the same time it would be “mismatched” (i.e., exhibit low congruence) with organization 2. Conversely, the second scenario would be engineered to be congruent with organization 1, but incongruent with organization 2. This paper describes the selection of the two organizations, and the model-driven design of the two scenarios. This actual scenario is but one example of how military forces need to be adaptable to accommodate changes in mission that will occur as part of the nature of warfare. In response to this need, the Adaptive Architectures for Command and Control (A2C2) research program integrates optimization, modeling, and simulation-based research efforts with psychology-based and experimental activities to address key issues in command and control. The research has followed a model-experiment-model paradigm wherein models produced by the modeling/simulation efforts support the formulation of hypotheses, the determination of key variables and parameter values, and the prediction of organizational performance and processes of adaptation. The ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ * Supported by the Office of Naval Research, Cognitive and Neural Sciences Division Report Documentation Page Form Approved