A Conceptual Model of Organisational and Social Factors in HQ

The potential of Information Age technology to support collaboration at a distance invites military forces to create agile mission groups, which can form, adapt and re-form rapidly and sympathetically to changing circumstances. Managing such an agile capability will require agile headquarters, as part of a wider Information Age Command and Control concept. This paper explores the implications of HQ agility from the stand-point of organisational and social science, and presents the results of thinking about how organisational and social factors can be integrated into modelling. The paper draws from social and organisational science literatures, C2 experimentation, and modelling research, to map out the key factors impacting on the relationship between capability investment and HQ performance and behaviour. It outlines a revised conceptual model capable of addressing a requisite subset of variables and bringing them together into a coherent model implementation. The model requires a judicious synthesis of approaches, striking a practical balance between detailed and abstraction. The paper draws encouragement from existing model implementations, but the synthesis of a requisite model remains a challenging task. Success will allow analysis to support an integrated approach to investment in Network Enabled Capability (NEC). Failure has significant implications for acquisition justification and management.