COAction: Collaborative Option Awareness impact on collaborative decision making

Previously, we used exploratory modeling to forecast a landscape of plausible outcomes for a set of options. Outcomes were displayed as a set of box-plots that illustrate outcome-frequencies distributed across an evaluative dimension (e.g., cost, score, or utility). Such a display depicts a “decision space” because it directly supports comparing and deciding among available courses of action rather than simply providing the facts about the situation (the “situation space”). Our previous research showed that such decision spaces provide what we termed “option awareness” - an ability to determine robust options that will have good outcomes across the broadest swath of plausible futures. Moreover, such option awareness resulted in increased confidence in the chosen option. When extending this approach to collaborative decision making, issues arise when team members' decision spaces are in conflict - when merely jointly executing the most robust individual options does not yield the most robust collaborative option because each individual's decision space does not account for the synergy that may emerge from collaboration. The current paper describes issues for providing collaborative decision support. It includes a proposed categorization of different types of synergies and defines conflicted versus unconflicted cases. Further, this paper describes experiments that are now underway to determine the robustness of joint decisions, the confidence with which these decisions are made, and the nature of the coordination among teams of decision makers.