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Weatherhead Doctor of Management Programs
Show moreOrganizations increasingly face competitive and security threats that require better intelligence to guide action. National policy makers face an especially pressing need for intelligence, and rely on complex, diverse information from many sources in monitoring their environment. The primary formal information system for conveying knowledge to government leaders is the system of national intelligence briefings, which collects data from a global network of analysts that is presented by a briefer to individual government leaders, in a short daily session. The quantity of information created by intelligence analysts far exceeds the capacity of a policy maker to assimilate, and the briefer has severe time restrictions for assembling and communicating the daily briefing. In this important, yet highly constrained setting, our exploratory research question is: ?How does the briefer experience communication with policy makers, and how does the briefer act to ensure that the information produced by intelligence analysts is useful to and understood by policy makers?? We conducted a qualitative study of boundary spanning dyad chains reaching from field analysts to policy makers at high levels in the United States federal government, and found: (1) a low degree of shared context between significantly different social and professional worlds; (2) a four-phase communication pattern crossing multiple boundaries, multiple times; and (3) a common 3-step embedded structure within the communication pattern in which the briefer tried to create shared meaning. Despite the extreme setting, we propose that the 3-step embedded structure our subjects enacted can be applied to improving communication for any manager across a wide range of thick boundaries in profit, non-profit and government boundary spanning contexts.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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Show moreWe examine learning outcomes in intelligence analysts ? the likelihood to shift intelligence analyst?s mental models ? within policy-making dyads of analysts and decision-makers operating in complex, high-stake contexts. We ask to what extent do properties of information present in the environment ? information overload and equivocality ? and two behavioral dispositions present in the dyad ? one possessed by the decision maker (feedback) and another by the analyst (perspective taking) ? influence analyst?s learning outcomes. In particular, we focus on the combined impact of three analyst?s behavioral responses ? filtering, dialogue and networking ? to either mitigate the negative effects of overload and equivocality, and/or improve the potential positive effects of feedback and perspective taking. We find that some behaviors such as filtering and networking significantly improve the analyst?s ability to learn by reducing the negative effects of information overload. On the other hand, dialogue amplifies the knowledge gained through perspective taking to aid in learning. But we also found evidence of confounding and suppressive effects. The use of filtering and networking has a downside of suppressing the analyst?s use of feedback but we also found that dialogue had an emergent property of increasing analyst?s use of feedback. A key finding is that as equivocality of intelligence data increases, dialogue with decision makers actually reduces analyst learning.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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