Presentation at the TMP Consortium

Abstract

Problem statement: Technology managers struggle to transfer knowledge from experts to novice employees. Based on NASA’s “Report to Congressional Committees,” approximately half of NASA’s current workforce is expected to retire in a decade. Such potential loss of expertise may raise a management concern about keeping the technical capabilities of the workforce at a desired level. This necessitates a technology policy strategy that ensures an effective communication between generations. Given NASA’s increasing technological complexity and risk, it is essential to develop support tools that facilitate communication among employees with different levels of expertise. Objectives: Our objective is twofold, explore the risk perceptions and decisions of technical experts and evaluate effective strategies to communicate their perceived risk to nonexperts. Methods: To achieve these, we analyze how experts at NASA perceive risk concerning a mission design and, accordingly, make their decisions. We draw upon Fuzzy Trace Theory, a leading theory of decision making under risk, which has specific predictions about experts’ risk perception and decision making processes. According to the theory, people perceive risk information in terms of two parallel mental representations: verbatim and gist. While verbatim is the detailed form of the information, gist is the bottom line meaning of that information. The theory predicts that as expertise increases, the reliance on gist based representations also increases. Building upon the theory’s tenets, we devised a survey to measure risk perceptions and decisions under threat of Micrometeoroid and Orbital Debris (MMOD) risk. We collected data from 42 NASA employees and 234 laypeople recruited from an online crowdsourcing platform. We designed an experimental survey in which laypeople were randomly assigned to either verbatim information or both verbatim and expertise-based gist information to make mission design decisions. We tested the following hypotheses: (1) Gist and verbatim information are encoded separately; (2) experts rely more on qualitative and the least precise representation of risk (i.e., gist) when making design decisions; and 3) laypeople, when presented with experts’ gists, made similar decisions to those of experts. Results: Consistent with Fuzzy-Trace Theory’s predictions, our results showed that both gist and verbatim representations were processed in a parallel yet separate manner. As predicted, experts’ mental representations of design risks and decisions were different from those of laypeople. While the qualitative gist representations were associated with subjects’ decisions, the quantitative verbatim risk assessments were not found to be a significant predictor of choice. Finally, laypeople who were presented with the experts’ gists made decisions similar to those of experts. However, the decisions of lay people who were presented the verbatim information were statistically different to those of experts. Conclusion (Policy implications): Our results offer insights for technology policy management regarding communicating information, specifically risk information of complex technical problems. Specifically, NASA managers could incorporate policy interventions that support expertise-based gist transfer—”expertise transfer”—from experts to novices. This would facilitate the bridge the gap between generations and address the managerial concern about maintaining the technical capabilities of the workforce.