Why Shared Understanding Matters -- Engineering a Collaboration Process for Shared Understanding to Improve Collaboration Effectiveness in Heterogeneous Teams

Solving complex problems often requires experience and perspectives of various, often heterogeneous experts. Shared understanding of the task is an important determinant for the performance of collaborative groups [1, 2]. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the systematic development of processes that lead to a shared understanding within heterogeneous groups. To address this challenge, we provide a systematic, reusable process to support groups to converge towards a shared understanding of a task to be then able to collaborate more effectively and efficiently. To achieve the proposed goal, we develop a collaboration process grounded in theory based design guidelines, including activities for individual (1) and collaborative construction of meaning (2) as well as constructive conflict resolution (3). We ground our work in group cognition research and apply a collaboration engineering approach [3]. We test the process design in a computer-aided requirements elicitation workshop with experts from different professional backgrounds. We identify strengths and limitations of the process design to enable the development of think Lets (reusable design patterns for collaboration engineering) for shared understanding in future research.