Overview
Comprehensive frameworks for Teams should include various functionalities and structures in order to capture the broad range of affordances available for modern Remote Teams, including, but not limited to, synchronous & asynchronous communications, memes, geospatial maps, hardware/software use, and contact escalation. We suggest that Systems Engineering provides guidelines to define the functions of Ontologies, Narratives, Formal documents, and Tools (ONFT) within the context of the life cycle of any System of Interest. Following this ONFT assessment it is possible to break out to sub-systems levels and mechanistic analysis. In this paper we explore how a new generation of ONFT for Remote Teams could be based on Active Inference, a process theory related to the Free Energy Principle. Effective ONFT based upon Active Inference could lead to the realization of lightweight and powerful epistemic tools to guide everyday decision-making in an embodied, enactive fashion. Such a technology for Remote Teams would lead to fundamental changes in various aspects of Team function, for example the efficiency of a Team’s production of artifacts or self-reported “phenomenology of the working day”.
Overview source: Curated paper metadata.
Methods and contributions
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Findings and contributions
- The authors propose three classes of functional small teams by how members reduce uncertainty about each other: ontological, intimate-trust, and narrative alignment.
- They argue Remote Teams are especially tractable for formal analysis because most team state transitions are observable.
- Under their definition, non-communicating entities outside the same informational niche are not part of the same team even if aligned in values or behavior.
- They suggest required ontological fields for team communication (Date, Time, Sender, Role, Alpha) with optional Seals, Symbols, Context and Signposts.
- They frame Active Inference as a 'two stroke engine' (Act -> Infer -> Act) for Remote Teams, realized through the team's communicative structure.
Methods
- Synthesis of FEP/Active Inference narrative work with Systems Engineering — The authors combine the FEP-ActInf-Narrative literature with Systems Engineering to begin formalizing Remote Team formation and lifecycle management.
- OMG Essence Alphas (States and Checklists) applied to Remote Teams — The Essence framework's seven Alphas, and their SE extension to System Definition and System Realization, are summarized in tables and applied to teams.
- Markov Blanket definition of a team as a shared informational niche — A team is defined as the set of human and non-human agents sharing a specific informational niche, bounded by a Markov Blanket.
- ONFT (Ontologies, Narratives, Formal documents, Tools) application framework — The ONFT framework organizes proposed applications of Active Inference to Remote Team communication design.
- Reflexive case: the authors' own all-online team writing this paper — The authors describe how their Remote Team, formed via a Discord channel and moved to Keybase, used Division of Labor, ONFT and Alphas to produce the paper.
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- 2020_BehaviorEngineering.pdf PDF · 3.63 MiB · extracted-text source
Citation
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