Why We Get Our Wires Crossed, by Angela Spivey -- Endeavors, Fall 1999

In the boardroom or on the battlefield, Diane Sonnenwald is learning why people disconnect.

Why We Get Our Wires Crossed
by Angela Spivey

Diane Sonnenwald felt like she'd been dropped into the middle of
a war movie. Riding shotgun in an army jeep, she found herself speeding through the darkness of a blackout zone, where all vehicles travel without lights to prevent sighting by the enemy. Despite their high speed, her driver was leaning halfway out of the jeep—the only way he could see around the dirty windshield.

Far away from her home at the School of Information and Library Science, Sonnenwald had just finished observing a war game at the Army's national training center at Fort Irwin, the Mojave Desert. "The troops were in a hurry to get back in after two weeks in the field," she says. "One stream of heavy traffic was going out, and another was going in. There were more tanks and large vehicles than I'd ever seen, rambling twelve abreast across this desert. Up until that point, I hadn't realized the magnitude of the exercise. Good thing I didn't see that on the way out."

Though not all her projects are this perilous, Sonnenwald, assistant professor, often eavesdrops on people in what sometimes seems a foreign land—the workplace. Sonnenwald has spent much of her time trying to untangle the communication traffic jams that are bound to happen when people work together in groups.

Back in 1993, when she was observing software designers for her dissertation research, Sonnenwald discovered something that she called "contested collaboration"—when a member of a group appears to be collaborating but is actually acting in his or her own interest.

Later, when Sonnenwald first agreed to consult for the army, she mentioned contested collaboration to someone there. "My army colleague said, 'Well you won't find that in the military. It's just not in our culture—we're one for all, all for one.'"

The army person was in for a surprise. "In one of the first exercises I ever observed," Sonnenwald says, "there was a clear case of contested collaboration." Several units were practicing battle-front fighting, and one saw on its computer simulation what looked like the enemy. After the soldiers called for backup, they realized that what they had seen wasn't the enemy after all. But they decided to let their request stand, to prevent delays in case their next sighting wasn't a false alarm. "They said, 'Let the backup come
anyway. Maybe it'll save us,'" Sonnenwald explains.

But that meant that other units who were actually facing the enemy couldn't get the backup they needed. "So, in a sense, the first unit was sabotaging their comrades," Sonnenwald says. In an after-battle review, "the people who were in those other units, looking for fire support, pointed out that the first unit's actions had endangered others," Sonnenwald says. "They were not pleased."

Contested collaboration can happen in any group, Sonnenwald says, and it comes in varying degrees. In many cases, team members aren't consciously intending to sabotage the group's efforts. "It's just that they're so focused on their specific area of responsibility, or what they need to get done, that it can be hard for them to see other points of view."

Even when intentions are good, signals get fuzzy when people try to work together across long distances. Tools such as email, videoconferencing, and online-meeting software can help, but they can introduce their own problems. Students in a class Sonnenwald teaches on collaboration saw that firsthand when working with members of a similar class at the University of Oulu in Finland. Members of the two classes wrote papers together and participated in small group discussions.

The class went well, Sonnenwald says. Most students reported a high degree of academic and personal growth in the course, and some of the papers were eventually published at academic conferences. The students found that videoconferencing was helpful at their first meeting, to see that there truly were faces behind the emails. But after that, they preferred to skip the video, using only audio and online-meeting software. This confirms other studies that show that seeing one another isn't crucial to collaborating, Sonnenwald says.

The online-meeting software and audio did have drawbacks—only one person could speak or write at the same time. Students also found that they were less likely to follow through on commitments that were made through email.

It may be impossible to completely make up for all the lost human presence, Sonnenwald says. But she and her graduate students have been experimenting with some solutions while working on a project with the departments of computer science, physics and astronomy, and chemistry. During online meetings, for example, it would be helpful if all members of a group could have a visible pointer on screen, rather than having to share one. Or during a videoconference, speakers could use a remote control to make the camera follow their movements or zoom in on something they're writing.

Whether she's working with computer scientists or soldiers, Sonnenwald must translate their jargon while also tuning in to the human side of their communication. So she's constantly switching eyes—one minute she sees things like a techie, the next, like a person. It's a good fit for Sonnenwald, though she didn't figure out how to combine her affinity for technology with her interest in people until halfway through graduate school.

While doing her master's work in computer science, Sonnenwald kept asking one of her professors, "How is this program going to work for the end user? He would say, 'You mean the final workstation, the computer?' And I said, 'no, the user, the person.' Finally he said to me, 'Diane, those are interesting questions you have, but you won't find anyone asking them here.'"

Her professor suggested she do an independent study with a colleague in information and library science. Soon Sonnenwald knew she had found her field.

"I always tell my students, I love work—I could sit and watch it all day," Sonnenwald jokes. "I think I like watching people at work because they're creating new things, solving problems. And that's something I love to do myself."

Projects discussed here were funded by the Army Research Lab, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Chancellor's Task Force on Instructional Technology, Carolina's University Center for International Studies, and a UNC Junior Faculty Research Award.