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June 20, 2021 3 Minutes
There’s a famous paper by Gary Klein, Paul Feltovich, and David Woods, called Common Ground and Coordination in Joint Activity. Written in 2004, this paper discusses the challenges a group of people face when trying to achieve a common goal. The authors introduce the concept of
common ground, which must be established and maintained by all of the participants in order for them to reach the goal together.
I’ve bloggedpreviously about the concept of common ground, and the associated idea of the
basic compact. (You can also watch John Allspaw discuss the paper at Papers We Love). Common ground is typically discussed in the context of high-tempo activities. The most popular example in our field is an ad hoc team of engineers responding to an incident.