Poster Information
| Title | Alternate Work Reality - Training High Speed Decision Making in Complex Organisations |
| Presenter(s) | Jelke van der Pal and Johan van der Beek |
| Session | Conference Reception, Game Exhibition, and Poster Session |
| Time | Thursday, October 18, 7:00p-10:00p |
| Location | East Lansing Technology Innovation Center |
| Format | Poster Presentation |
| Description | Certain team tasks require almost superhuman capabilities. They deal with live threatening situations that are, at least in part, unexpected and require several organisations to work together under very high stress levels, uncertainties, and media exposure. Examples of such situations are natural disasters, riots, hostage aircrafts, industrial fires, evacuations, and bomb alerts.
This poster presents an Alternate Work Reality game framework to improve non-technical team skills of information holders and decision makers in the wider emergency response organization. Demonstrations using mobile devices can be provided. Alternate Work Reality games provides high-level decision making challenges in a variety of domains and may range from well-defined procedures to ill-defined no-win situations. The challenge is designed with minimum information to process and tasks to do. Basic technical tasks do not need to be performed. The task structure is rather abstract. Information to deal with may be as rich, delicate, or misleading as required to ensure the team's core decision is realistic. The Alternate Work Reality game allows the player to take decisions in situations that rarely occur in real life. Other decisions may be tried out while not having human lives at risk. In this cooperative game concept, the rules are simple. When a virtual emergency occurs, an invited professional decides whether he or she wants to play. The game requires real time communication with other professionals from other organisations, with whom information needs to be exchanged and decisions need to be made that may alter the course of the game. Because the game plays in real time and communication and decision making do not require full attention at all times, the game allows the player to continue performing normal work activities as well. The professional may be in a meeting or writing a report. Such 'technical' tasks are distractions to the play to deal with and form a task load substitute for the many technical tasks you would normally have to perform during the decision process in its full work context. The professional may need to inform his or her colleagues about being engaged in an alternate work reality exercise. Experiencing a core decision making process and its results under certain (distracting) work conditions is essential for building and improving (inter)team competencies such as communication, information management, decision making and shared mental models. Certain challenges, or less experienced players, may require support from an instructor during the game, which should become less in subsequent games (scaffolding principle), while other challenges or players may require a 'discovery learning principle'. After a game or a series of games played on one day, the instructor will organize a video conference to reflect on the team's actions. This is very important to ensure you have learned from your actions and the other players' actions. A discussion may be enlightening to understand each other's perspectives and needs. Further insight into the needs of the team members can be provided by cross training (role switching). |