Vviewpoints

DOI: 10.1145/1666420.1666434

the profession of it
orchestrating Coordination
in pluralistic networks

LonG thE banE of organiza- tions and teams, coordina- tion breakdowns can be ex- pensive, wasteful, mission killing, and sometimes life threatening. They manifest as miscommunication, misunderstandings, ill-timed actions, wasted motion and resources, and performance-killing bad moods. A plethora of coordination technologies seeks to overcome these problems and enable virtual teams, but coordination breakdowns have become more common and more severe in virtual teams. Exquisite coordination, which separates high performance teams from the rest, is an ever more elusive goal.

The core of the challenge is that the team members are drawn from pluralistic networks—people from different countries, cultures, backgrounds, worldviews, and practices. This diversity of value sets makes coordination all the more difficult.

Recent disasters have made the pluralism issue publicly visible. Despite all the good they did, the groups gathered for humanitarian assistance encountered systemic inabilities of government and non-government organizations to coordinate well, leading to delayed responses, wasted resources, and additional lost lives. Examples appeared during the 9/11 attack in New York City, the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, and the 2005 Hurricane Katrina in the U.S. 2

Disaster relief teams have an addi-

World of Warcraft screen depicting avatars.

 

tional problem: they are often under overwhelming stress. The tendency of teams to move toward dysfunction under stress regularly deepens disasters, loses wars, and sinks companies. Pluralistic worldviews exacerbate the stress because they add obstacles to coordination when there is no time to deal with them.

Interestingly, it appears that com-
puting people have a great deal to con-
tribute to the solution of this problem.
They know how to design and build
computational tools that facilitate
conversational protocols, and collect,
analyze, and present complex data in
a form that facilitates decision-mak-
ing. Prototypes of these tools appear
in MMOGs (massively multiplayer on-
line games). The challenge for com-
puting people is to help understand
the coordination skills for pluralistic
networks and then design tools to en-
able diverse communities to quickly
form effective teams. We will discuss
the latest in a series of experiments we
conducted with the World of Warcraft
( WOW) game that leads us to be opti-
mistic about this possibility.

the Changing Context Most of us have enjoyed a tradition of working in organizations with clear chains of command in fairly homog-