Ruediger Oehlmann

THE FUNCTION OF HARMONY AND TRUST IN COLLABORATIVE CHANCE DISCOVERY

Collaborative Chance Discovery aims at determining a rare event as a chance for future decision making from a set of potential chances that have been identified by computational methods. Typically based on these potential chances, the members of a workgroup will imagine scenarios that describe situations and event sequences during which a chance could be used. This paper describes a study of how scenarios may emerge from group interactions. Verbal protocols of two software design groups, who conducted the same design task, were analyzed. The experimental group additionally had to use social diagrams to externalize their changing views about the other group members. It was predicted that the externalization causes an increase of references to harmony and trust and that this increased awareness leads to improved scenarios. The protocol analysis confirmed this hypothesis and revealed details of the process of scenario emergence. The new insights gave rise to the proposal of a new model of scenario emergence based on externalizing social context, harmony and trust.

Metacognitive and computational aspects of chance discovery

Chance discovery is concerned with events or situations that affect human decision making; such events or situations are viewed as opportunities or risks. Perspectives are mental representations that describe partial knowledge of a task domain (cognitive perspective) as well as knowledge about other participants (social perspectives). Based on verbal protocols and a computational model of these protocols, it is argued that perspective taking is a suitable strategy to achieve chance discovery. Therefore the cognitive mechanisms underlying this strategy have been investigated and the results implicate metacognition as necessary requirement to achieve chance discovery.

Externalizing Social Views in Collaborative Chance Discovery Facilitates Scenario Emergence

Collaborative Chance Discovery aims at identifying rare events or chances for future decision making by imagining scenarios or stories that relate the decision process to the given data set. The intra-group interaction may even lead to the emergence of new scenarios. The relation between the social intra-group context and this emergence is not well understood. Therefore the study described in this paper investigated how externalizing a collaborator’s view of his or her social relations within the work group will affect the emergence of new scenarios. Verbal protocols of five group meetings of two software design teams were obtained. The team in the experimental condition used a social diagrammatic description language for externalizing their social views, whereas the control group did not. The protocols indicated two fundamentally different strategies: The control group negotiated an exchange of scenario concepts with very low granularity in a tit-fortat fashion. In contrast, the experimental group used a strategy of relaxation and tightening of value constraints to merge scenarios from different group members. This strategy was based on trust that developed with the increasing externalization of the social intra -group context. The result is considered as important for the design of expert groups in Chance Discovery as well as for the training of such groups to increase their efficiency.

Discovering Color Semantics as a Chance for Developing Cross-Cultural Design Frameworks

Chance Discovery aims at determining a rare event as a chance in the sense of an opportunity or risk for future decision making. Such opportunities or risks are of particular importance for a Web designer who designs for a cross-cultural audience. An on-going research program aims at developing a new method of deriving opportunities and risks for design frameworks from the semantic and context analysis of the culturally constrained use of color. As part of this program, this paper describes an experiment where two groups of Korean and English subjects were presented with colors that are preferred in these cultures. For each color the subjects had to write brief text about their feelings and associations. Then results confirmed the prediction that Korean subjects form more associations related to emotions and nature, while English subjects form more associations with artificial concept categories, such as man-made objects. These differences will inform the next step of the research program that is concerned with the discovery of chances from context analysis.

A diagrammatic approach to discovering chances in team relationships

Typically interpersonal relationships in teams are investigated with questionnaires, interviews or observational studies, methods which lack either depth or are very costly. This affects the chances for improving such relationships that can be discovered. The first part of the paper describes a system that takes a diagrammatic approach to acquiring data on interpersonal relationships in teams. It will be argued that this approach is suitable to acquire data with less cost than conventional methods. The second part describes the analysis of relationships in a security team that utilizes the approach. The results of the analysis clearly identify strength and weaknesses of the intra-team relationships, and indicate that the approach is useful in organizational settings but also as research tool for investigating intra-group relationships in social psychology.

A study of the crossroad game for improving the teamwork of students

The Crossroad game is a social game that is used for learning to deal effectively with difficult situations such as conflicts in teamwork. This paper investigates the characteristics of questions to be used when the Crossroad game is applied to teamwork scenarios. The questions were collected by using questionnaires and dividing them into three groups, high-agreement, low-agreement, and middle-agreement groups using the chi-square method. Results are obtained from students in Japan and the UK, and it is shown that the attitude toward a dilemma within teamwork depended on the background of the students.

Harmony Strategies for Human-Centered Chance Discovery

Taking the stance that a harmonious situation facilitates improved scenario creation of an expert team involved in chance discovery, a study has been conducted with the objective to identify strategies of increasing interpersonal harmony. A cultural practice that emphasises harmony is the Japanese tea ceremony. Therefore four tea ceremonies with the characteristics of novice/high formality, novice, lower formality, expert/high formality, and expert/lower formality have been recorded and interpretative phenomenological analyses have been conducted. The number of participants ranged from three to ten with an age range from 20 to 60. The results indicate strategies related to time, space and intersubjective positioning. In particular, they showed that intersubjective positioning, i.e., how the participants positioned themselves in their interrelationships to others, in terms of trust, support, competition and conflict, constrains the choice of harmony strategies. Based on the indentified strategies proposals for the management of chance discovery teams are made.

Free Association Versus Recognition: Sensitivity for Chance Discovery in Cross-Cultural Color Design

Chance Discovery focuses on opportunities and risks for future decision making. This makes it suitable for cross-cultural color design. An on-going research program aims at developing a new method of deriving opportunities and risks for design frameworks from the semantic and context analysis of the culturally constrained use of color. As part of this program, this paper compares two experiments involving two groups of Korean and English participants. In the first qualitative experiment participants were presented with preferred English and Korean colors and were asked to describe the meaning of the colors in a free association format. In the second quantitative experiment two different groups of English and Korean participants were presented with the same colors combined with selected explanations from the first experiment. The participants had then to identify their preference on a Likert scale from 1 to 7. Although the differences between colors (p < 0.001) and between meanings (p < 0.001) were significant, the differences between Korean and English participants were not significant (p < 0.077). The difference in the experimental results suggests that both methods have different sensitivities for the discovery of new cross-cultural chances. Implications for e-commerce Web design will be discussed.

Discovering chances for organizational training strategies from intra-group relations

Chance discovery has been described as a process of identifying opportunities or risks for future decision making that are referred to as chances. We argue that in the area of organizational training such chances are widely ignored, because either standard off-the-shelf training strategies or ad-hoc strategies are used. In contrast, this paper describes a case-study that uses a two-stage approach, which is tailored to the specific training situation. The case study involves the development of a training scheme to improve customer relationship management (CRM). In the first stage a study is conducted that analyzes relevant groups of the organization based on diagrammatic self-descriptions and descriptions of intra-group relations. In the second stage, chances are identified from the diagrams.

A Computational Model of Reasoning as Socially-Constructed Process

Social-constructionists argue that people understand the world by constructing their view of the world in the sense that any observation can only become meaningful in social interchanges. This aspect of reasoning has been investigated in psychological and AI studies by focussing on the reasoning strategy of perspective taking. Perspectives are viewed as mental representations that describe partial knowledge of a task domain, including causal links between knowledge components, (domain perspective) and as representations about other participants (social perspectives) including knowledge about how these participants might see the world.