Testing of Edge Organizations : Laboratory Experimentation using the ELICIT Multiplayer Intelligence

The Edge represents a fresh approach to organizational design. It appears to be particularly appropriate in the context of modern military warfare, but also raises issues regarding comparative performance of the Edge to alternate organizational designs, including more traditional hierarchal configurations. These issues suggest that laboratory experimentation, with coherently structured controls and manipulations and an appropriate data collection strategy, can offer significant insight about the internal workings of the Edge organization with high levels of reliability and internal validity. Building upon prior command and control (C2) research, we seek to understand the comparative performance of the Edge and other organizational forms, across various mission-environmental contexts, network architectures, professional competency distributions, and other conditions likely to have contingent impacts upon the relative fit and hence performance of such forms. In this paper, we report our extension of our campaign of computational experimentation to series of laboratory experiments using the ELICIT multiplayer intelligence game. ELICIT requires a team of “intelligence analysts” to collaborate—in a network-centric, information-processing environment—via information sharing pertinent to a fictitious and stylized terrorist plot. The results of our prior computational experiments are exploited to suggest in part a candidate set of research hypotheses for testing; to identify a candidate set of dependent variables for measurement; and to establish an empirical basis for further validation and calibration of our computational models in this, intelligence-focused, C2 environment. Thus this paper also proposes and instantiates how computational and empirical investigations into organizational forms can both inform and build upon the other, revealing a novel, powerful approach to C2 research. Results should enable us to isolate some particularly powerful influences over and determinants of C2 efficacy—across organizational forms and contingency conditions—and to buttress the already solid foundation of external validation that supports our computational tools. Results should also help to illustrate the power of the ELICIT game to support compelling C2 research, and to contribute important, new knowledge in terms of both organization theory and C2 practice.