What is Situational Awareness, and Why Does it Matter?

What is Situational Awareness and Why Does it Matter?

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Let’s start with why it matters. Situational awareness is the foundation for good decision making. It stands to reason, the better you understand the details of a situation, the better your decision making will be. However, there is an odd contradiction here. You do not need strong situational awareness to make good decisions. In fact, you can have terrible situational awareness – zero, zip, nada – no idea what’s going on, and still make a GREAT decision.

We call that LUCK.

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There’s nothing wrong with having a little luck on your side. But when it comes to making high-consequence decisions, it might be helpful if officers could figure out a way to program out some of the luck and replace it with a skillset. The skillset involves understanding how to develop and maintain situational awareness and how to use it to improve decision making outcomes.

Many officers understand, perhaps intuitive, that having situational awareness is important. But most have received no formal training on how to develop it, how to maintain it, how to realize it is being impacted, or how to regain it once it has eroded.

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The best place to begin the journey toward understanding situational awareness is with a definition. There are many definitions out there. Mine is a hybrid of several with the greatest credit going to the work of Dr. Mica Endsley, one of the early pioneers in the field and, without question, one of the most published researchers on the topic.

Situational awareness is the ability to perceive and understand what is happening in the environment around you, in relation to how time is passing, and then using your understanding of the situation to accurately predict future events in time to prevent bad outcomes.

To help simplify this wordy definition we would like to focus on the three primary components of situational awareness:

o Perception

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o Understanding

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o Prediction

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Truth be told, the cognitive neuroscience behind how individuals perceive, understand and predict can be a very complicated and messy process to explain. It is neither our goal nor our ambition to provide comprehensive explanations of these complexities.

Rather, we would like to keep our explanations simple enough that every officer, supervisor and commander can understand it and immediately apply the lessons in the field.

To help accomplish our goal toward simplicity, we like to use analogies. Developing situational awareness is like building a house. To build a house, you start with a foundation. On the foundation, you build walls. On the walls, you put on a roof. Foundation, walls and roof. This is how we are going to build situational awareness.

Perception – The foundation

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The foundation for situational awareness – the start of it all – is perception. Perception is a process by which an officer uses their five senses to gather information about what is happening in the world around them.

Seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling. Some might argue that perception is the simplest part of the situational awareness development process. All an officer has to do is be conscious, alert, oriented and looking around (i.e., paying attention). And while it may appear to be a simple task, paying attention is not always as easy as it seems.

As you’ll come to understand, every component part of situational awareness has the potential to be flawed for various reasons.

How does one perceive the world around them? Officers have five senses. They are always on and always gathering information – Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling. The five senses gather information from the environment and send that information into the officer’s brain. To briefly explain how this happens, we will use two senses as examples: Seeing and hearing.

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To see anything there must be light. In the absence of all light (i.e., in total darkness) an officer will have no vision. There must be light to stimulate the nerves inside the officer’s eyes.

The nerves inside their eyes take the rays of light entering through the retina and turn the rays of light into electrical impulses and send those electrical messages into the brain. The brain is a very dark place. Not one bit of light an officer sees actually gets inside their brain. The only thing that gets inside their brain is electrical messages, like Morse Code traveling through a telegraph line.

To hear something there must be sound waves to stimulate nerves in the officer’s ears. The nerves in their ears turn the sound waves into electrical impulses and send those electrical messages into their brain. The brain is a very quiet place. Not one sound an officer hears actually gets inside their brain. The only thing that gets into their brain from their ears is electrical messages, like Morse Code traveling through a telegraph line.

The same is true for all of their sensory inputs. To stay true to our desire to keep the process simple to understand, don’t think of it as electrical impulses traveling through telegraph lines.

Rather, think of the inputs as jigsaw puzzle pieces. Each of the officer’s senses is gathering information – pieces to a jigsaw puzzle – and sending those puzzle pieces into their brain to a destination where the puzzle will get assembled.

Understanding – The walls

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The assembly of the jigsaw puzzle is the second part of the situational awareness development continuum – the walls of the house – and that is what we call understanding. Understanding means being able to make sense out of what is seen, heard, felt, tasted or smelled.

Some might call this comprehension.

Let's assume for a moment before us we have a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle we want to assemble. Let’s further assume we are not allowed to see the cover of the box. (The cover of the box displays the solution to the problem and rarely will we ever get to see the solution to a problem on the front-end of high-risk decision making.)

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The first thing we might do is dump all the puzzle pieces out onto a flat surface, spread all the pieces out and turn them all face up.

Spreading the pieces out and turning them face up allows us to see an expanse of information.

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Each puzzle piece represents data that can help us assemble a picture of understanding. However, unless we have some kind of mad skills there is no way we can scan our eyes across a thousand random pieces of unconnected information and assemble the puzzle in our head. Rather, we’ll need to develop a strategy for making sense of all this information.

In the jigsaw assembly process, as with the situational awareness formation process, we have to start somewhere. And it will be to our advantage, in both efficiency and effectiveness, to make our starting point strategic, versus random.

The most strategic way to start the assembly process for the jigsaw puzzle is to locate the four corners. There is a sound reason to start with the four corners. The four corners represent facts. As we scan the thousand pieces on the table it is nearly impossible to say, with any certainty, the exact location where a piece will end up, except for the corners.

We know, with certainty, the corners will go in one of four very certain places. So, we seek out the four corners and set them in front of us. The corner pieces represent a small number of facts and that is enough to start the process of assembly.

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The same strategy holds true for how to assess complex problems in the work environment. Oftentimes there are dozens, if not hundreds, of pieces of information coming at an officer rapidly. If they try to make sense of it all at once it would quickly overwhelm them.

Trying to process too much information all at once can cause an officer’s brain to fatigue quickly and make it harder to make decisions.

In fact, it might cause their critical thinking abilities to shut down completely. This is sometimes called analysis paralysis.

So, let’s not do that. Instead, let’s focus on a small number of the most important, factual, pieces of information. In the case of the jigsaw puzzle, that’s the four corners.

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Armed with four corners (i.e., a small amount of factual data) we then seek out additional data (puzzle pieces) that fits together with the cornerstone facts. The next most logical puzzle pieces to focus on are the edges because they also contain factual information.

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We know, with certainty, the edge pieces outline the puzzle and help to frame – literally – the problem. Then, we start to fill in the information from the edges toward the center of the puzzle. And this is how we assemble our understanding of a situation.

However, sometimes, once we have used up all the available information at our disposal (i.e., all our puzzle pieces are used) there may still be a hole in the puzzle. Some of the important pieces of the puzzle are missing and we must go on a quest to locate them. Missing information in the puzzle causes confusion and, as you can imagine, confusion can cause some serious situational awareness complications.

When the missing pieces of information are located, and snapped into place, we transition from confusion to understanding. This is sometimes called having a “moment of clarity.” Clarity relieves confusion and improves situational awareness.

As we try to understand the meaning of our mental puzzle it can be helpful to ask ourselves some questions. The strategy of asking ourselves questions will be used throughout this book.

When it is suggested that an officer ask themselves questions, this is not meant to be a figurative exercise. Rather, it is meant to be a literal and purposeful action. Using the internal voice (called self-speak) to have a dialogue with oneself can help improve all aspects of situational awareness.

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For example, ask yourself: “What does this mean?” While an officer may see and hear clues and cues about what is happening around them, it is not always obvious or intuitive what those clues and cues mean.

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Oftentimes in fact, an officer is only seeing or hearing the surface clues and cues. There is often a deeper meaning to this surface information.

For example, while carrying on a conversation with someone, there is often a deeper meaning to what they are saying than what is being shared by their words. Sometimes the deeper meaning is implied, sometimes it is assumed and sometimes it is purposely veiled.

Regardless, the receiver of the message will be well-served to be mentally inquisitive about the deeper meaning of the message and to seek additional information and clarification when doubts arise.

The same can be said for the visual information an officer captures.

Sometimes everything an officer needs to know is revealed right before their very eyes. But many times, it’s not, at least not initially. It may be fully revealed later (i.e., after-the-fact).

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But in high-risk, high-consequence environments after-the-fact may mean after the mishap and that is what we are trying to avoid.

Officers want situational awareness to help them see the bad things coming in time to prevent bad outcomes.

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This requires an ability to look into the future and anticipate events that have not yet happened. Being inquisitive with internal questioning can help officers see and hear information that has not yet been revealed outright.

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Prediction – The roof

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The most challenging part of the situational awareness development process could, arguably, be a worker’s ability to accurately predict future outcomes. In dynamically changing environments where decisions are often time-compressed, it can be difficult to accurately anticipate outcomes. In fact, this is the component of the situational awareness development process most often overlooked and given inadequate consideration.

The process of predication is improved when a worker begins their assessment and decision making process with the desired outcome in mind. Before beginning their activities, workers should ask themselves:

?What does success look like?

What would failure look like?

What would be the outcome of a good decision?

What would be the outcome of a poor decision?

Prior to taking action, a worker should mentally envision the outcome of their decision. Then, they should develop an action plan for how to achieve the successful outcome they envision.

?What decisions need to be made? What actions need to be taken? What is the target objective?

What benchmarks to be accomplished along the way indicate the worker is on the right track?

What could go wrong along the way?

What are the clues and cues – both weak and strong – that would indicate the plan is working or going awry?

The answers to these questions can help a worker develop an appropriate course of action.