ABSTRACT
This paper is based on a multi-year, multi-experiment research effort conducted as part of the Navy TADMUS (Tactical Decision Making Under Stress) program aimed at understanding complex team processes and developing teamtraining procedures. The problem domain for these studies is tactical decision making in naval Combat Information Centers (CIC). In the CIC, complex decision making processes rely significantly on effective co-ordination by the entire CIC team. A series of experiments was conducted, simulating a five-member command team in a Aegis platform CIC, to investigate how teams can successfully adapt their decision making and co-ordination strategies to a changing tactical environment. Other questions were how team training procedures and structural configurations, based on shared awareness of the situation, can best contribute to the team's ability to maintain superior performance under a wide range of stressful operational conditions (Serfaty, Entin, & Deckert, 1993; Entin, Serfaty, Entin, & Deckert, 1993; Entin, Serfaty & Deckert, 1994). At the inception of this research no formal models existed to describe how teams adapt their decision making and co-ordination strategies to changes in situational demand.
