Causeworks Collaboration: Simultaneous Causal Model Construction and Analysis

Military planners use “Operational Design” (OD) methods to develop an understanding of systems and relationships in complex operational environments. Here, we present Causeworks, a visual analytics application for OD teams to collaboratively build causal models of environments and use analytics to understand and find solutions to affect them. Collaborative causal modelling can help teams craft better plans, but there are unique challenges in developing synchronous collaboration tools for building and using causal models. Collaboration systems typically organize information around varying degrees of synchronization between data “values” and user “views.” Our contribution is in extending this collaboration framework to include analytics as layers that are by nature derived from the data values but utilized and displayed temporarily as private views. We describe how Causeworks overlays analytics inputs and outputs over a shared causal model to flexibly support multiple modeling tasks simultaneously in a collaborative environment with minimal state management burden on users.