THE FUNCTION OF HARMONY AND TRUST IN COLLABORATIVE CHANCE DISCOVERY

Collaborative Chance Discovery aims at determining a rare event as a chance for future decision making from a set of potential chances that have been identified by computational methods. Typically based on these potential chances, the members of a workgroup will imagine scenarios that describe situations and event sequences during which a chance could be used. This paper describes a study of how scenarios may emerge from group interactions. Verbal protocols of two software design groups, who conducted the same design task, were analyzed. The experimental group additionally had to use social diagrams to externalize their changing views about the other group members. It was predicted that the externalization causes an increase of references to harmony and trust and that this increased awareness leads to improved scenarios. The protocol analysis confirmed this hypothesis and revealed details of the process of scenario emergence. The new insights gave rise to the proposal of a new model of scenario emergence based on externalizing social context, harmony and trust.