Cognitive Collapse: Recognizing and Addressing the Hidden Threat in Collaborative Technologies

The growing application of collaborative technologies to C4ISR greatly increases communication and coordination, but poses a hidden threat. When the same set of people interact frequently with one another, they grow to think more and more along the same lines, a phenomenon the authors call "Collective Cognitive Convergence" (C3). The higher the collaborative bandwidth, the faster this convergence, and the greater the danger that the group will collapse prematurely to a single perspective, becoming blind to strategic alternatives.