Cooperative strategies of individuals within a distributed organization can contribute to increased efficiency of operations and safety. We examine these processes in the context of a particular work domain: railroad operations. Analyses revealed a variety of informal cooperative strategies that railroad workers have developed that span across multiple railroad crafts including roadway workers, train crews, and railroad dispatchers. These informal, proactive communications foster shared situation awareness across the distributed organization, facilitate work, and contribute to the overall efficiency, safety, and resilience to error of railroad operations. We discuss design implications for leveraging new digital technologies and location-finding systems to more effectively support these informal strategies, enhance shared situation awareness, and promote high reliability performance.Complex socio-technical systems depend on the work of multiple individuals distributed in time and space. Examples include military command and control, space shuttle operations, air traffic control, and railroad operations. Performance depends on coordinated work among individuals that may not be collocated, have responsibility for different subsets of goals, different access to data, and different situation perspectives. There has been growing interest in understanding the cognitive and collaborative factors that enable such teams to work effectively Smith et al. 2000;Salas and Fiore 2004). In this paper we examine distributed team processes in the context of railroad operations. We focus particularly on the role of informal strategies for maintaining shared situation awareness among roadway workers, train crews, and railroad dispatchers and enhancing overall efficiency and safety of operations.Organization Studies 27(7): 967-987

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A Cognitive Task Analysis was conducted to examine how experienced train dispatchers manage track use. The results reveal the cognitive complexities faced by dispatchers and the cognitive and collaborative strategies developed in response to those demands, including strategies to support anticipation and planning, and proactive strategies to exploit windows of opportunity to satisfy the multiple demands on track use. In many cases these strategies depend on communication and cooperation among individuals distributed across time and space (i.e., multiple dispatchers, engineers, maintenance of way personnel). The ability to “listen in” on communications directed at others that have a bearing on achievement of your own goals and to recognize when information in your possession is of relevance to others, are important contributors to safe and efficient track use. The results reinforce findings from other domains (e.g., space shuttle mission control, air traffic control) regarding the role of a shared communication channel in supporting anticipation and contingency planning. Implication for the introduction of advanced “data-link” communication technologies, as well as for dispatcher training are discussed.

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