Towards an Understanding of Shared Understanding in Military Coalition Contexts

Shared understanding is commonly seen as essential to the success of coalition operations, and current research efforts are attempting to develop techniques and technologies to improve shared understanding in military coalition contexts. In spite of this, our understanding of what the term ‘shared understanding’ actually means is surprisingly poor. In part, this problem is attributable to the difficulty in comprehending the true nature of understanding itself, although confusions also arise about the precise nature of the differences between shared understanding and ostensibly similar constructs, such as shared mental models and shared situation awareness. In this paper, we attempt to improve our understanding of shared understanding by exploring the nature of understanding, situation awareness and mental models. Following Wittgenstein, we suggest that understanding is best conceived of as something akin to an ability, and shared understanding is, we suggest, best conceived of as the sharing of individual forms of understanding by multiple agents. We further suggest that mental models may provide a mechanistic realization for some of the performances that manifest understanding, and that situation awareness should best be seen as a particular kind of understanding, namely a dynamic form of situational understanding. In addition to discussing the nature of understanding and shared understanding, we also discuss their potential relevance to military coalition operations. We propose that shared understanding is important to coalition operations because it contributes to improvements in coalition performance, the optimal use of limited communication assets, and an improved sense of group cohesion, group solidarity and mutual trust.