Support Requirements for Cognitive Readiness in Complex Operations

Abstract

The authors report two experiments studying the requirements for effective decision making in a complex environment. The focus lies on three components of individual cognitive readiness: situation awareness (SA), problem solving, and decision making. Participants performed a simulated society management task in which they could allocate resources to stabilize a national crisis involving multiple interrelated factors (political, economic, environmental, and social). A striking aspect of this simulation is that even though information about the causes and effects within the system is available, most individuals fail to bring the system to the targeted state because of unintended consequences of their decisions. The experiments test the impact of two cognitive support tools designed to improve anticipation of future outcomes. Results show that supporting short-term anticipation (with perfectly accurate projections) was insufficient to improve effectiveness, but supporting long-term anticipation (with approximate projections) successfully improved performance in this complex environment. We conclude with a review of requirements that training and technological support should address to augment individual cognitive readiness for operations in complex environments and propose an extension to SA theory by conceptualizing a Level 4 SA (long-term projection) that may be particularly important to overcome the “wall of complexity.”