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Organization Studies
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Extending Naturalistic Decision Making to Complex Organizations: A Dynamic Model of Situated Cognition

Lawrence G. Shattuck

Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, USA

Nita Lewis Miller

Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, USA

Naturalistic decision making (NDM) has become established as a methodological and theoretical perspective. It describes how practitioners actually make decisions in complex domains. However, NDM theories tend to focus on the human agents in the system. We extend the NDM perspective to include the technological agents in complex systems and introduce the dynamic model of situated cognition. We describe the general characteristics of NDM and the field of situated cognition, and provide a detailed description of our model. We then apply the model to a recent accident in which a US Navy submarine (USS Greeneville) collided with a Japanese fishing vessel (Ehime Maru). The discussion of the accident illustrates how decisions made are often a result of the interaction between a variety of technological and human agents and how errors introduced into the complex system can propagate through it in unintended ways. We argue that the dynamic model of situated cognition can be used to describe activities in virtually any complex domain.

Key Words: situated cognition • decision making • process tracing

Organization Studies, Vol. 27, No. 7, 989-1009 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0170840606065706
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