Hypothesis Testing of Edge Organizations: Empirically Calibrating an Organizational Model for Experimentation

Abstract

This paper presents our ongoing efforts to model, simulate, and eventually optimize work and knowledge flows in Edge organizations. We use the extended POW-ER 3.2 framework to model and compare two organizational forms (Edge vs. Hierarchy) to structure participants in a counter-intelligence student exercise, ELICIT -- first without, and then with, learning micro-behaviors enabled in POW-ER 3.2. Empirical, experimental data on learning and forgetting from observtions of student teams conducting repeated trials of the AROUSAL (Lansley, 1982) business simulation exercise at Stanford are used as the basis for calibrating agent learning and forgetting micro-behaviors derived from the cognitive psychology literature. We then compare empirical observations of student teams conducting the ELICIT exercise for both Edge and Hierarchy structures configurations with outputs from POW-ER 3.2 computational simulation models representing teams executing the ELICIT exercise in these two structural configurations. This initial comparison has the potential to further calibrate and validate POW-ER for potential use in analyzing and designing C2 organizations. Further output from ELICIT experiments and other empirical data on learning and forgetting will augment our initial comparison. Calibrated POW-ER 3.2 learning and forgetting micro-behaviors will improve the ability of POW-ER to model and simulate organization-level C2 knowledge flows in Edge vs. Hierarchical organizations.