Team mental models in action: a practice-based perspective

Abstract

The concept of team mental models (TMMs) has much to offer the study of design teams. However, I argue that care needs to be taken in how the concept is applied because existing studies of TMMs tend to draw upon problematic assumptions from conventional cognitive psychology. These encourage a focus on cognition as a mainly individual, passive, and disembodied affair involving the rule-bound internal manipulation of symbols that is ill-suited to understanding the thoroughly social, dynamic, and emergent character of knowing in design teams. After outlining the main weaknesses of the cognitive tradition, I suggest a practice-based approach as a more secure position from which to study the role of TMMs in action. This reframing of the TMM concept has important implications not only for the existing cognitive-orientated literature on team dynamics but also for practice-based approaches which, to their detriment, have tended to avoid any reference to the role of cognitive frameworks in interpreting and guiding social action.

Keywords:

• Team cognition
• Team dynamics
• Practice
• Situated knowledge

Acknowledgement

I would like to acknowledge the UK Economic and Social Research Council for supporting the research with which the development of these ideas has been associated (grant reference: RES-000-23-1116).