A "Thin-Slicing" Approach to Understanding Cognitive Challenges in Complex Command and Control
February 2007
Jill L. Drury, The MITRE Corporation
Erika Darling, The MITRE Corporation
ABSTRACT
Before modernizing any information-intensive system, it is important to understand how
people are performing their jobs using that system. This understanding is built not
simply by observing what people are doing, but by digging into how people think about
their jobs, what coordination they need to do, and the dependencies among subtasks that
together dictate a workflow. Building a thorough understanding of complex tasks takes
weeks or months rather than days, but we needed to get as much of an understanding as
possible in three days of a real-time command and control center for military unmanned
vehicles. To help structure our short-duration investigation, we used a technique called
Applied Cognitive Task Analysis (Militello and Hutton, 1998). We believe that ours is
the first use of ACTA to study a military command and control center in such a timecompressed
fashion. We describe our application of ACTA and the types of
recommendations we were able to generate from our analysis, and provide reflections on
the study process. Another contribution of this paper is based on the fact that we were
able to gain access to a facility that is not usually open to researchers; hence the ACTA
results may be of interest to those who would benefit from knowing about the major
cognitive challenges facing members of the Predator Unmanned Aircraft System
community.
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