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Shared Mental Models at the Intra- and Inter-Team Level: Applications to Counter-Terrorism and Crisis Response for Homeland Security

Critical to meeting the needs arising from an increasing emphasis on homeland security is a fuller understanding of how to maximize the interactions among a diverse group of people and organizations. The complicating issue is the need to coordinate experts and teams of experts from differing disciplines. From a practical standpoint, because of the multidisciplinary requirements for effective homeland security, it is imperative that methodologies that can foster inter-individual (i.e., within team) and inter-organizational coordination (i.e., across departments or organizations) be investigated. From a theoretical standpoint, the operational concepts that drive the investigation and development of such methodologies must be identified. We suggest that the concept of shared mental models, arising out of research in the cognitive and organizational sciences, can be utilized in a program of research that explores the methods and tools to facilitate coordination in homeland security. Shared mental models can be applied to help our understanding of coordinated behavior at both the team level and the organizational level and, in this paper, we illustrate the relevance of this construct to both counter-terrorism operations and crisis response. We first discuss the shared mental model construct and follow this with a brief description of sample applications.