Mission Experience : How to Model and Capture it to Enable Vicarious Learning

Abstract: Organizations for humanitarian assistance, disaster response and military activities are characterized by their special role in society to resolve time-constrained and potentially life-threatening situations. The tactical missions that these organizations conduct regularly are significantly dynamic in character, and sometimes impossible to fully comprehend and predict. In these situations, when control becomes opportunistic, the organizations are forced to rely on the collective experience of their personnel to respond effectively to the unfolding threats. Generating such experience through traditional means of training, exercising and apprenticeship, is expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to manage.This thesis explores how and why mission experience should be utilized in emergency management and military organizations to improve performance. A multimedia approach for capturing mission experience has further been tested in two case studies to determine how the commanders’ experiences can be externalized to enable vicarious learning. These studies propose a set of technical, methodological, and ethical issues that need to be considered when externalizing mission experience, based on two aforementioned case studies complemented by a literature review. The presented outcomes are (1) a model aligning abilities that tactical organizations need when responding to dynamic situations of different familiarity, (2) a review of the usefulness of several different data sources for externalization of commanders’ experiences from tactical operations, and (3) a review of methodological, technical, and ethical issues to consider when externalizing tactical military and emergency management operations. The results presented in this thesis indicate that multimedia approaches for capturing mission histories can indeed complement training and exercising as a method for generating valuable experience from tactical missions.