MacroCognition
Organizational and Multinational Support
 

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MacroCognition LLC

3601 Connecticut Ave NW, #110,
Washington, DC 20008

info@macrocognition.com

Organizational and Multinational Support

Organizational Support
One goal is to improve teamwork and technology transfer for organizations and to help practitioners anticipate and shape the behavior and decision making of colleagues, customers, adversaries, and competitors. We investigate common ground amongst team members, team coordination, and conditions that improve problem identification. This helps organizations and their leadership manage more effectively in a variety of contexts and shifting conditions. We solve organizational problems and balance opportunities and risks using a variety of tools, including: the Pre-Mortem Technique, Casual Landscapes, the ShadowBox Method, Voluntary Compliance methods, Cognitive Task Analysis techniques.

Multinational Support
Organizations are often disappointed by the performance of multinational teams, the transfer of technology across national borders, and the costly mistakes of anticipating the actions and decisions of those from different nations. These are problems for global organizations and collaborations where Western technical and scientific personnel, corporate leadership, and military organizations often struggle when working with colleagues and technology from non-Western nations. Military organizations often need to work effectively with citizens and adversaries from unfamiliar cultures.

It is also a local problem because organizations in the U.S. have foreign-born employees. Multinational work teams with highly skilled members can have marginalized and disengaged members. The Westerners may take on the primary responsibilities and assign the more mundane tasks to the outsiders. This tactic can reduce the effectiveness of the team and present barriers to international cooperation and trade. This dysfunction is likely to get worse as more high-end positions are staffed with specialists from other regions of the world. As these specialists move up the corporate hierarchy, the problem of dysfunctional teamwork moves with them. As international technology trade increases, these complications are likely to grow.

Multinational understanding is also critical when organizations need to deliver information to customers, colleagues, or adversaries from different nations. To provide the intended meaning requires an accurate understanding of how the intended recipient will perceive a message. Cultural mismatches are prevented when the framer of the message can ‘see’ as the intended recipient does.

Selected Organizational Publications:
Klein, G. (2006). The strengths and limitations of teams for detecting problems. Cognition, Technology & Work, 8, 227-236.

Klein, G., Feltovich, P. J., Bradshaw, J. M., & Woods, D. D. (2005). Common ground and coordination in joint activity. In W. B. Rouse & K. R. Boff (Eds.), Organizational Simulation. New York: John Wiley & Sons Inc.

Klein, G. (2000). Cognitive task analysis of teams. In J. N. C. Schraagen, S. F. Chipman, V. J. Shalin (Eds.), Cognitive task analysis, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Selected Multinational Publications:
Klein, H.A. (2009) Computational modeling in complex multinational domains. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 23(1), 84-88.

Klein, H. A., Lin, M.-H., Radford, M., Masuda, T., Choi, I., Lien, Y. et al. (2009). Cultural differences in cognition: Rosetta Phase I. Psychological Reports, 105. 659-674.

Klein, H. A., & Kuperman, G. (2008). Through an Arab Cultural Lens. Military Review, 88(2), 100-105.

Lin, M.-H., & Klein, H. A. (2008). Athletes, murderers, and a Chinese farmer: Cultural perspectives on sensemaking. In J.M.C. Schraagen, L. Militello, T. Ormerod, & R. Lipshitz (Eds.), Macrocognition and naturalistic decision making (pp.159-181). Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited.

Klein, H. A., & Steele-Johnson, D. (2007). Multinational collaboration: From the laboratory to the field. In R. R. Hoffman (Ed.), Expertise out of context (pp.473-506). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Klein, H. A., & McHugh, A. P. (2005). National differences in teamwork. In W.R. Rouse & K. B. Boff (Eds.), Organizational simulation (pp.229-251). New York, NY: Wiley.

Klein, H. A. (2004). Cognition in natural settings: The Cultural Lens Model. In M. Kaplan (Ed.), Cultural ergonomics: Advances in human performance and cognitive engineering (pp. 249-280). Oxford, UK: Elsevier.

Klein, H. A. (2004). Cultural differences in cognition: Barriers in multinational collaborations. In H. Montgomery, R. Lipshitz, & B. Brehmer (Eds.), How do professionals make decisions? (pp. 243-253). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Klein, H. A., Pongonis, A., & Klein, G. (2000). Cultural barriers to multinational C2 decision making. Proceedings of the 200 Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium (CD-ROM), Monterey, CA.

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