There’s a famous paper by Gary Klein, Paul Feltovich, and David Woods, called Common Ground and Coordination in Joint Activity. Written in 2004,

Designing like a joint cognitive system

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2021-06-28 07:30:04

There’s a famous paper by Gary Klein, Paul Feltovich, and David Woods, called Common Ground and Coordination in Joint Activity. Written in 2004, this paper discusses the challenges a group of people face when trying to achieve a common goal. The authors introduce the concept of common ground, which must be established and maintained by all of the participants in order for them to reach the goal together.

I’ve blogged previously about the concept of common ground, and the associated idea of the basic compact. (You can also watch John Allspaw discuss the paper at Papers We Love). Common ground is typically discussed in the context of high-tempo activities. The most popular example in our field is an ad hoc team of engineers responding to an incident.

The book Designing Engineers was originally published in 1994, ten years before the Common Ground paper, and so Louis Bucciarelli never uses the phrase. And yet, the book calls forward to the ideas of common ground, and applies them to the lower-tempo work of engineering design. Engineering design, Bucciarelli claims, is a social process. While some design work is solitary, much of it takes place in social interactions, from formal meetings to informal hallway conversations.