Getting started
The following video illustrates the essential concept of common ground (low bandwidth version available here). It features a sample extracted from a real working situation. This film dates from the early nineties and shows a dispatch center located in the suburbs of Paris. The center has asked a team of ergonomists (cognitive systems engineers) to analyze their working situation and propose improvements in order to better fulfill their mission. Two kinds of improvements are initially expected: the introduction of computers in addition to the usual communication media, and a redesign of the workspace. The sequence shown is representative of an average load time (neither underloaded, nor overloaded).
Analyzing the situation
The video shows two transversal communications: an outgoing call to a maternity hospital taken care of by the dispatcher on the left, and an incoming radio call by a fireman taken care of mostly by the hospital physician. Other communications with the outside happen during the full treatment of the previous two.
What is very noticeable in this situation is the amount of communications happening among the team members, even for relatively simple cases like the ones presented in the video. This leads to a rather “noisy” environment, what is initially one of the main reasons why the ergonomists intervention was proposed.
Communications within the team play a fundamental role in the situation, and they take several forms: some are verbal and directed towards a particular person or multi-directed (to the whole team); some are non-verbal, like a head movement (for approval) or a posture (indicating that the person is listening for example). These non-verbal communications are also either single-directed or multi-directed.
Through the communications, the team members share information about the cases, what allows them to have a collective management of the calls. While the radio call is mostly taken care of by the hospital physician (that is responsible for the decision taken), the participation of the dispatchers who recognize the case they had already been confronted to allows him to take a rather quick decision based on the elements brought by the dispatchers, without having to go into all the usual details with the fireman. While the dispatchers have other calls to deal with, they take advantage of availability phases (waiting for somebody to answer for example) to listen to and participate in collective communications. The non-verbal communications play an important role in indicating to the members of the team each other’s availability. On the video, we can see the dispatchers alternating “open” postures in which they are available for the team and listening to what is happening around them, and “closed” postures in which they focus on their individual calls.
Conclusions
One of the first results of the intervention was therefore that environment was actually not “noisy”. It consists in information exchange that allows team members to have a faster and better representation of the cases they deal with (contextualization), on which they can base their diagnoses and decisions. It represents the establishing and maintaining of a common ground among the team members. It is an essential element of a highly collaborative working situation.
These mechanisms are favored by the fact that the team works in an open space, what makes everybody visible and audible (observable) to each other. In the process of redesigning such an environment in such a working situation, it is a central point that cannot be neglected since it is a base for the collective work. Although the center initially wanted to find a way to separate people in order to reduce the ambient noise and help people in their work, this didn’t seem like a solution anymore (including to the center) after a comprehensive analyze of their activity.
Further investigations
The video was made available with the courtesy of Dr. Tahar Hakim Benchekroun (Cnam, Paris, France). Detailed analyses and a theoretical framework for the working situation can be found in:
Benchekroun, T.H. (2000) Les espaces de coopération proxémique. In T.H. Benchekroun & A. Weill-Fassina (Eds.) Le Travail collectif : perspective actuelles en ergonomie, (pp. 35-53), Toulouse : Octarès.
The concept of common ground was analyzed through:
Klein, G., Feltovich, P. J., Bradshaw, J.M., & Woods, D.D.(2004). Common ground and coordination in joint activity. In W.R. Rouse & K.B. Boff (Eds.), Organizational Simulation. New York: Wiley.
Exploring the concept of Common Ground