Adaptive Architectures for Command and Control: Toward An Empirical Evaluation of Organizational Congruence and Adaptation

How do teams cope with a misalignment between their organizational structures and mission requirements? Through a series of empirical and modeling efforts, our long-term goal is to understand the nature of organizational congruence, and to predict and measure the effects of a lack of congruence on the behaviors of organizations as they strive to adapt. In this paper, we present a series of lessons learned based on a pilot experiment in which we explored the performance of two organizations (functional and divisional) performing a single mission, which in this case, was not designed to favor a particular organization. The lessons learned here suggest a variety of empirical strategies to further our investigations, including measures of performance, rigorous attention to team and mission definitions, and precise planning of training structure. Our findings suggest that each of these factors has the potential to profoundly influence the results, reflecting the multiple factors that shape team performance.