Commander´s Intent and Distributed Collaborating Teams

The concept of Effects-Based Operations (EBO) in distributed environments exemplify the challenges being faced by teams of today´s war fighters in interpreting and understanding Commander´s Intent (CI) in the face of often competing requirements and emerging operational events. Theory suggests that delivery of Commander´s Intent with an authoritative expression goal statement will facilitate encoding of explicit memory which will in turn impact the development of shared mental models. When the team´s shared mental model is improved and aligned, we expect greater self-synchronization and performance. We conduct an experiment to study team behavior in a gaming environment with two different CI statements. We find significant improvement in team process measures when teams are presented with a CI statement containing an authoritative expression.