Cognitive Work Analysis: Coping with Complexity (1st edition.)

'Complex sociotechnical systems' are systems made up of numerous interacting parts, both human and non-human, operating in dynamic, ambiguous and safety critical domains.

Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA) is a structured framework specifically developed for considering the development and analysis of these complex socio-technical systems.

Unlike many human factors approaches, CWA does not focus on how human-system interaction should proceed (normative modelling) or how human-system interaction currently works (descriptive modelling).

Instead, through a focus on constraints, it develops a model of how work can be conducted within a given work domain, without explicitly identifying specific sequences of actions (formative modelling).