ABSTRACT
In modern society, teams are routinely called on to perform complex and critical tasks. Examples of such teams are cockpit crews, fire-fighting teams, military command and control teams, and trauma surgical teams. All of these teams make decisions in environments characterized by time pressure, heavy workload, and potentially conflicting and ambiguous information, and where the consequences for error are high. In these kinds of environments multiple experts come together as a "collective" to pool multiple sources of information in support of task accomplishment. Unfortunately, in the last decade we have witnessed a number of accidents and mishaps where innocent lives have been lost through the propagation of human error in decision making, coordination, and communication. One wonders why. Why does a highly trained set of individuals not always operate effectively as a coordinated team? Clearly, the answer to this question requires a fuller understanding of the processes and mechanisms that transform a team of experts into an expert team.
