Situational Awareness - Cause or Consequence
I having been facilitating some sessions dealing in navigation incident and once the participants are asked to identify the barriers which could have prevented the incidents, the BUZZ word which comes across almost immediately is Situational Awareness (SA)or rather lack of it. We have been surrounded by so many jargon and SA is something which is used very excessively and too loosely, a simile can be drawn to usage of Human Error in the past.
As a industry we should be looking at SA not as a cause but as consequence or byproduct of many other barrier failures. To loose SA, there were other barriers in that particular SWISS cheese model which failed first. Whenever the participants state - Lack of SA, i ask them how do they propose to improve it and there is never a concrete answer. The answer always lies in carrying existing procedures correctly every time ( of course whether the procedure is good is a completely different battle) and then we could have improvement in SA.
I also read about how mindfulness can enhance SA, but that is a long road one has to travel on. For now i am trying to break SA into actionable barriers and facilitating. Hopefully i can add more to my repertoire and be clearer to the participants
When
Marine Assurance
4 年Space and Time play an important role for SA. To be HERE & NOW. If we can identify the factors which made the mind drift away from "here and now" will help in finding the cause. And then creating a standard patter between a bridge team to act as a checkpoint could also help. To break the drift from "here & now".
Head of Quality, Training and Vetting / Maritime consultant
4 年Its probably the most used and abused term in most incident reports.The easiest RCA one can come down to without having to dig deeper..
Applies everywhere I guess
Open to New Opportunities within Dubai I Technical Manager I Ship Management Expert I UAE Golden Visa Holder
4 年Can’t agree more!! Believe it may be the result of natural bias which exists in our subconscious. Having said that, too many incident reports reglecting lack of SA as a root-cause may point fingers somewhere else too??????