subtitle: “A cognitive systems approach to coordination”
Goal: Understand what being a good follower is.
Followship: “The adaptive choreography of experienced responders working together for a common goal of purpose”
ideal: incident commander
- ops lead
- responders
- planners
- comms lead
Actual: incident commander
- irate VP
- 3k people on slack
Attention ($ prestige, fault) goes to the incident commander
but it can be a force-multipler by focusing on those 3k people on slack.
As you begin to dig into an incident, cognitive demands increase (more to track and think about).
This means your coordination decreases.
But coordinative demand increases too.
Coordination paradox: “in complex adaptive systems, everyone’s model is going to be partial and incomplete (Woods, 2017)”
Therefore, we need multiple, diverse perspectives to handle non-routine or exceptional events (Grayson, 2018; Watts-perotti & woods, 2001)
There is additional cognitive load working with others (Klein et al, 2005; Maguire, 2019) so investment and strategies are need to keep CoC (Cost of Coordination) low.
Strategies for coping w/ increased demands:
- delay
- delegate (increases CoC)
- drop
- diminish effort to deal with it
Incident managers can be a bottleneck.
Slowdowns in incidement management may increase:
- “freelancing” e.g.working solo on preminition
- side-channeling: working in a smaller group
- this is fine, provided understanding makes it back to the larger group
Cognition:
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mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought experience and the senses
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acquisition, processing, storage, and retrieval of info by the brain (lawlor 2002)
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all forms of knowing and awareness such as perceiving, conceiving, remembering, reasoning, judging, imagining and problem solving (APA)