Hypothesis Testing of Edge Organizations: Laboratory Experimentation using the ELICIT Multiplayer Intelligence Game

Abstract

The Edge is a relative newcomer to organizational design--one that appears especially appropriate for contemporary military operations, but also raises issues regarding comparative performance of the Edge to alternate organizational designs, including more traditional hierarchical configurations. These issues suggest that laboratory experimentation, with coherently structured controls and manipulations and an appropriate data collection strategy, can offer substantive insights about the internal workings of the Edge organization with high levels of reliability and internal validity. Building upon prior command and control (C2) research, we report the preliminary results of our extension of our campaign of computational experimentation to series of laboratory experiments using the ELICIT multilayer intelligence game. Our experiments confirm rhe results of earlier and companion computational experimentation -- chiefly, that Edge organizations outperform Hierarchy organizations in certain task and environmental contexts, and in terms of certain performance measures. Our experiments also serve to inform future computational experimentation through noting: 1) Edge and Hierarchy organizations learn at the same rate, but with higher volatility within Edge coonfigurations; 2) transforming from Hierarchy to Edge configurations results in either similar or improved performance on subsequent tasks; and 3) transforming from Edge to Hierarchy organizations results in degraded performance initially, with subsequent recovery to previous levels.