Developing adaptive performance skills for agile C2

Adapting to the complex, dynamic circumstances of the future operating environment in the information age will depend on the ability of military personnel to anticipate, detect, make sense of, and respond to changing situations. Adaptation of military forces is fundamentally driven by the perceptual and cognitive abilities of Commanders and their staff within the context of their information collection, processing and communication technologies. What are the cognitive challenges associated with effective adaptation? What are the cognitive requirements for effective adaptation? How do we support military organisations, at all levels, in their adaptive behaviours? How do we accelerate the acquisition of expertise and skill to improve adaptive performance? This paper will present the results of a scoping study that identified training principles to address the development of adaptive performance skills, and the subsequent initial efforts to implement and evaluate the resulting training interventions in a joint operational headquarters organisation.
Based on a review of current literature, the paper will provide an operational definition of adaptation, and a model of adaptive performance that provides the target cognitive components for education, training, learning and development. Six training principles that provide supporting evidence for performance improvements will be presented. An initial study to evaluate the effectiveness of three of the training principles within the context of a UK joint operational headquarters exercise will be described. The training interventions that were developed and demonstrated with a sample of the HQ will be described and the initial results of the training evaluations will be presented.