Abstract
Communication is in this paper seen as the foundation for purposeful human–human activity in dynamic environments. Coordination is a central issue in large systems such as military organisations, enterprises, or rescue organisations, and communication is needed in order to achieve coordination in such systems. This paper suggest a holistic approach to control, where control in a large system is seen as an emergent product of human interaction, focusing on human–human communication from a technical, organisational, temporal, and social perspective.
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Notes
The use of the word ‘common ground’ is somewhat unfortunate since it suggests that two persons engaging in an activity actually shares exactly the same assumptions. Rather, as explained above, it is the set of assumptions that each person has, and it is in practice impossible to know whether these assumptions overlap or not, although it is reasonable to assume it in some cases.
A similar division between the social, organizational, and technical components of a system can be found in Friman and Derefeldt (2004), although in the form of a three-layered model aimed at showing how sociograms can be used to understand network-centric organisations.
There is a strong debate within the field of command and control research regarding if and how networked organizations would be more apt to tackle the challenges of warfare today. The authors of this paper do not suggest that networked organizations are ‘better’ than hierarchical organizations; we only use the debate as an example.
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Johansson, B., Hollnagel, E. Pre-requisites for large scale coordination. Cogn Tech Work 9, 5–13 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-006-0050-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-006-0050-z