By Julia Loughran, ThoughtLink

Cyber greetings to customers, friends and family of ThoughtLink and welcome to the first issue of Linked!

As a distributed team (with employees working from coast (Indialantic, FL) to coast (San Francisco, CA), we stay connected through a variety of collaboration technologies. The emphasis of our business is to help improve virtual team and organizational effectiveness using technology – so it makes sense that we employ

Julia Loughran in the London Eye

these technologies ourselves to improve our own effectiveness and learn about the best methods for using these tools. Linked! is the latest tool in our communications toolbox.

This first issue of Linked! focuses on how technologies can help bridge cultural differences whether those differences are social, organizational, geographical or technical. Many of the technologies and innovative methodologies we research and practice (gaming, collaboration tools, storytelling, simulation, etc.) help bridge these cultural gaps so that we all find ourselves more “cultured” about different “cultures.”

ThoughtLink's (1999) Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project taught me a great deal about both organizational and technical cultures. This study showed the military's greatest difficulty in Operations Other Than War (OOTW) is understanding the cultural differences of the various non-governmental and international organizations. Traditional training approaches for OOTW training (large-scale, multi-day events) were often inadequate. ThoughtLink's recommended solution was the use of a variety of low-cost collaboration tools and games to help train the military to become more aware of different cultures…and cultural differences.

Another ThoughtLink-DARPA study demonstrated the effectiveness of using collaboration tools for training about cultural differences between U.S. government agencies. For this study, called DICE , various agencies had to work together and produce a political-military plan for a specified scenario. The study showed that while learning occurred in all the groups, plans developed by the group using collaboration tools were better and more complete. The study also demonstrated that collaboration tools were beneficial in teaching participants about different government agencies' cultures. For instance: how the military embraces planning and how the State Department may delay implementing actions in hopes of furthering a diplomatic solution.

Through these studies ThoughtLink learned that there are cultural differences in the adoption and acceptance of technology. Despite the fact that the DICE study demonstrated the benefits of collaboration technology, we were unable to find anyone involved in Joint training who was willing to try this approach. We believe this reflects, in part, the fact that the military is culturally comfortable with the way it conducts exercise events now – using large-scale computer simulations.

ThoughtLink's most recent study for DoD's Training Transformation program focuses on how games and collaboration tools can augment joint training. Although several military services are beginning to acknowledge the benefits of these alternative training methods, few in the joint community are embracing them. As a result, you must address organizational cultural barriers and present demonstrated benefits before people will change how they have trained traditionally in the past. The best way to do so is through a series of small experiments – wrapped together in an experimental campaign plan – to demonstrate and communicate the benefits while starting to build a community of practice. ThoughtLink showed similar findings in its study for DHS involving the use of models, simulations and games.

Over the years, ThoughtLink has undertaken research and consulting primarily for the U.S. government. Not surprisingly, this has affected our own culture – we at ThoughtLink sometimes forget that there are organizations and groups very different from the ones we regularly support. In fact, I recently was introduced to an organization with a vastly different culture: SIETAR, the Society of Intercultural Education, Training and Research.

At SIETAR's annual conference, I gave a presentation addressing how games can be used to help shape cultural awareness . When I first reviewed SIETAR's conference agenda, I realized this would be a different cultural experience for me. Rather than the typical DoD conference the SIETAR conference agenda included morning and afternoon wellness activities like yoga and balancing your chakras. I suppose I will know we have really bridged cultural differences when the next I/ITSEC conference begins with group yoga.

I hope that Linked! will help you understand something more about ThoughtLink's culture – one that embraces learning, optimism, teamwork and fun – and that through this newsletter we will learn more about the cultures in which you live and work as well. Also, since our goal is to make the newsletter valuable to you, we welcome your feedback. In the end, we all might find ourselves less likely to suffer from culture shock in the future.

ThoughtLink, Inc. President

Two tools that ThoughtLink has delivered to the Department of Homeland Security are a multi-media online tutorial and an interactive web-based Decision Support System (DSS). Both tools were designed to educate the emergency response community on the use of technologies (Models, Simulations, and Games, MSG) for exercising in all hazards.

The online tutorial uses real world multi-media case studies to illustrate how to use technology for emergency response training and exercising.

A trial period/use of both tools is available by registering here: http://www.thoughtlink.com/tools.

By Carol Powell, ThoughtLink

Our newsletter's theme of culture is an interesting subject. I remember after the shooting at Columbine HS, when there was a lot of blame going around, that I saw a quote from a person in the music industry saying, “We wouldn't want to deprive them (teenagers) of their culture.” Wow, I remember thinking, teenagers have their own culture? I had always assumed that a “culture” was a much bigger issue . . . a context that was shaped by history, language, ethnic identity, national identity, religion, hopefully wisdom, those sorts of things. When I was a teenager in the 60s, we believed in “never trusting anybody over 30!” and we truly believed that we would right all the wrongs, but I don't recall ever thinking that I had a different culture from my parents.

But times change and now “culture” has become something that more and more of us are thinking about. Maybe it is an effect of globalization and technology. We really can get in contact with people around the globe so easily and quickly. Does all that communication make us notice our differences or our similarities? Do we come from one really big culture or are we products of the smaller subcultures that seem to be part of our lives? Is it possible to consciously create a culture?

At ThoughtLink, Inc. we are trying to consciously create a culture. As a small, distributed team we want to build the trust and common experiences that will allow us to work well together. If you define culture as the context and assume that it is shaped by history and language, among other things, how can you build a culture within an organization? One of the tools that we use is the Virtual Book Club (VBC).

I have to admit that at first it was a little bit scary. On a teleconference people don't wear nametags and it was hard to identify who was talking. (Another ThoughtLink tool that helped is the company calendar with pictures of everybody.). Plus, I kept wondering if I had anything of value to offer. The beauty of discussing a book, rather than your work, is that there is less “at stake”. It really is safe to share your thoughts and opinions. And, of course, in the process, people get to know you and you get to know them. Then, when you are discussing your work projects, you all have a much better understanding of the team's strengths and weaknesses. What a gift!

Along the way, we have steadily been building a “history”. Each of the books, maybe even the one everybody gave up on, becomes a part of us. The lessons and ideas often crop up later as we discuss how to approach work tasks. Although our backgrounds and personalities are quite different, reading together helps us constantly focus and strengthen our company vision. Even though we all speak English, the VBC has given us a commonality of language and understanding. Plus, it is great fun. I love starting the week by spending an hour hanging out with people who have come to be friends as well as colleagues.

So, are we building a culture? I suppose that it depends on how you define culture. But I would suggest that the process is the really important key. Having the company engaged in the search, pulling together, and having fun along the way is, in my opinion, a wonderful way to work.

by Rebecca Agrait, ThoughtLink

It's a sunny 66 degrees in the outdoor park of the new Lucas Studios in the Presidio area of San Francisco. ThoughtLink's Rebecca Agrait recently sat down with Meridian Eaton's Chief Creative Officer, Ted Dale, to talk about Meridian's innovative work in global training and consulting.

Ted Dale, Chief Creative Officer of Meridian Eaton, Global Effectiveness experts

To view more scenes of Lucas Park click on the links below:

		Lake view
		Park view
		Yoda fountain view

Courtesy of PanoramaNETWORK

it to mainstream psychology, is to determine how culture and society produce psychological phenomena, and how psychology drives culture and society. This dual causality has confused social scientists at least since August Comte in the early 19 th century, and I am also confused.

Cultural Psychology, as well as Cross-Cultural Psychology, emerged from Psychological Anthropology, Psychological Sociology, and Comparative Sociology**. Its many models bear witness to this legacy, ranging as they do, from almost functionalist systems views of psychology-in-culture, to fuzzy, postmodern philosophizing on how the person and the culture are "mutually interpenetrating." It would be OK if "mutually interpenetrating" meant something sexual, but that would not be postmodern.

The systems models in Cultural Psychology are interesting. For example, from anthropology, we have models of cultural development that link ecological, subsistence, social structural, and ideological/psychological variables in fascinating causal chains. Poor rainfall around big river valleys allows irrigation that enables high-output grain production, but requires strong social organization that always involves political hierarchy and oppression, the survival of which depends in part on the invention of a suitable ideology/religion.

Along the way, people must be appropriately socialized to have the requisite "psychological makeup" to function in this system. All systems produce psychological strain (distress, deviance, mental illness, rebellion), and these strains are expressed (in art, literature) and dealt with (through social control, religion) by the cultural system. Compare southern Chinese wet-rice agriculture to the American Plains Indians hunter-gatherer tribes. More

of the functions of the impersonal, universalist, "fair" systems developed in individualist societies. Neither type of society meets all of its people's needs, failing in different directions. Compare Chinese pre-industrial society to the USA . Would you rather have great friends and a strong family, or a well-functioning driver's license bureau? (I simplify, of course.)

These two examples represent the content of a large chunk of my Culture and Psychology course, and the first one expresses the metatheory on which I base my research.

Teaching a Fish About Air

the material and, most dismaying of all, occasionally just don't believe me. Americans, more than Asians, are famously culturally insular.

Student: "But people do the same thing here in America, too."

Cranky, aging professor: "Bullshit, you have no idea how different we are."

How do you teach a fish about air?

The easy answer is to show the fish documentaries about air. This is the tried and true method, and it can help.

Another way is to produce simulation games of air from a perspective that a fish can understand. I will refer to this type of simulation game as a "simulated documentary," a blend of the traditional documentary with simulation technology that allows the student to "play the culture" from a first person perspective or a God's eye view. I can imagine several flavors of this type of simulation, such as simply having the student run though cultural events, or requiring the student to solve common problems of living (e.g., handle the complications of guan-xi , networking, in working a Chinese business deal), or allowing the student to set initial parameters and play out the cultural implications of these starting conditions (e.g., if a certain type of society suffered a dramatic terrorist attack, what are the medium-term implications for social, political, attitudinal, mental health, economic, and relationship variables? What if a different sort of society were attacked?). Cultural development and decay can also be simulated and viewed using macro models with hooks to psychological variables. The simulations, like traditional documentaries, would probably focus on specific cultures, but a major interest area in Cultural Psychology, intercultural interaction and overseas adjustment can also be simulated. The latter area is of great concern to multinational corporations, NGOs, and governments as they send personnel to overseas assignments.

Such a simulation must meet these criteria:

It has to be good. The quality is coming, gradually. The Xbox 360 went on sale as I was writing this. They say the graphics are pretty good, for Microsoft. I find the popular mass-market games boring or repulsive, generally, but the graphics are excellent and will eventually converge with CG animation to produce movie-like experiences with fully simulated "real" actors. This graphics technology, on top of improving expert system logic, should enable the simulated documentary that I'm waiting for.

It has to be made. Well, of course it has to be made. My point is that the cost of producing a mass-market video game is very high, higher than the cost of producing most of the 55-minute education documentaries that we rent or steal for our classes. A simulated documentary will not be a home grown project ***. Only a commercial corporation or an organization with deep pockets can produce a competent simulated documentary. It is likely, if unfortunate, that the funding may come from military sources.

It has to be free. Maybe not free, but ridiculously cheap; or it must employ a business model that transfers the costs away from students. Students' textbook bills have now reached an unsustainable level, and no additional costs are feasible ****.

The simulated documentary picks up just one of the potential teaching functions of a cultural simulation for Cultural Psychology. Another one is more academic: demonstrating cultural processes through simulations. The complex cultural systems I described previously can be modeled in a simulation, just as they are in a variety of natural science disciplines. Sim Earth provided a great simulation of a variety of processes of interest to environmental scientists. Sid Meier's simulation game Civilization, loosely based on an earlier board game by the same name, was a good first attempt at a historical-cultural simulation. Unfortunately, the cultural modeling was narrow and insufficient from an academic perspective. Cultural processes are even more complex than, say, earth science, so the task is formidable. A valid and reliable

U2 Miami concert 11/14/05

By Rebecca Agrait, ThoughtLink

I've seen the band U2 before…but before every show I haven't seen them yet!

It's one of those bands that you have to see again any chance you get because after they sing the songs you've been humming for decades they don't leave you thinking ‘They still got it' but instead ‘That was even better than the recording'.

After fighting ridiculous Miami highway traffic for three hours (what should have been an easy one hour drive) we finally arrived at the arena to what seemed a ‘simple stage'. Once the show began it was simple no more—but exciting, elegant and ALIVE. Curtains of light bulbs descended by the band that were used to illuminate and sometimes as backdrops for the projectors. The stage was surrounded by rings that lit up to the beat of the music and changed colors furiously.

What is a U2 appearance without mention on human rights, equality and freedom? This time Bono asked the audience to take out our light up cell phones and said ‘Christmas is coming early this year'. He then asked us to text message a number for www.one.org to take action against aids and poverty. Want more?

Bono introduced the song Miss Sarajevo by telling the story of the inspiration for the song: a girl in the beauty pageant who stood up to military attack by wearing a bathing suit, while under raid, and a banner that read ‘Do you really want to kill us'. Bono really outdid himself when it came time for Luciano Pavarotti's part of the song and he did an outrageous soprano.

In this band I've definitely found what I've been looking for.

Wish you were there yet?

• Game Developer's Conference (GDC) will be held March 20-24, 2006 in San Francisco. There will be a special Serious Games Summit in association with GDC on March 20 and 21. This Summit provides a forum for game developers and industry professionals to examine the future course of serious games development in areas such as education, government, health, military, science, and corporate training.
• ABSEL is the Association for Business Simulations and Experiential Learning and their conference is March 22-24, 2006 in San Francisco.
• Start planning for Down Under Mate! – One of the best simulation conferences around is SimTecT. OK - maybe what makes it so great is that it is held in Australia! So mark your calendar and make plans to attend the 2006 SimTecT Monday 29 May – Thursday 1 June 2006, at the Melbourne Convention Centre. This year's conference theme is "Simulation - Challenges and Opportunities for a complex and networked world.” ThoughtLink's Julia Loughran will be presenting a key note at the conference.
• This year's I/ITSEC conference to be held in Orlando, FL, December 4 – 7, 2006, appears to have a much greater emphasis on gaming strategies and technologies. This might mean an exciting mindset shift to new alternative ways for training and exercising.