Defining and Measuring Shared Situational Awareness

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is interested in exploring key factors that affect how teams, particularly distributed teams, develop what is called shared situational awareness in an operational environment. The DARPA Program Manager for the Wargaming the Asymmetric Environment program asked CNA to address these issues, with subcontracting support from ThoughtLink Incorporated. The focus of the project was to demonstrate how wargaming could be used as a testbed for conducting experiments to explore these key factors in shared situational awareness. The concept of "shared situational awareness" which underlies some recent ideas about the organization of military staffs, is elusive and ill-defined, and does not lend itself easily to traditional scientific evaluation. Nevertheless, this paper composes a systematic definition and develops objective approaches to studying the process by which "shared situational awareness" (SSA) arises.