Introduction
Droves of organizations deal with operational “fires” on a daily basis. In fact, “fighting fires” or “fire drills” in the workplace have become cultural and societal norms that people almost seem proud to boast about. The reality is, constant “fires” should not be looked upon as a badge of courage, it should be seen as a red flag. Operational fires take a heavy demand on resources and are an indication of poor decisions and inadequate processes. Unpredictable “black swan” events may occur from time to time, but what if we told you there was a way to reduce and nearly eliminate these highly stressful and devastating “fires” that are hindering your organization’s growth? The solution: create a culture of situation awareness. Applying this concept will help people make smart decisions and quickly get the results they need.
Origin of Situation Awareness (SA)
Situation awareness is a term that originated in military aviation and has since been adopted by business and emergency services. Mica Endsley, a US Navy fighter pilot, and researcher, first developed situation awareness as a way to make better decisions. Although the term Situation Awareness is somewhat “new”, the concept itself can be found throughout history in various military theories dating back to the 4th century BC. The concept involves understanding your environment, being aware of what's happening around you in real time, anticipating future outcomes based on past experience, and making an informed decision about how to respond.
Situation Awareness (SA) Explained
Situation Awareness is defined as “conscious knowledge of the immediate environment and the events that are occurring in it. Situation awareness involves the perception of the elements in the environment, comprehension of what they mean and how they relate to one another, and projection of their future states…”
Situation awareness (SA) is a cognitive process that enables an individual to perceive, interpret and respond to information in order to make sense of their surroundings. SA is critical for decision-making and team performance because it allows individuals to interpret, communicate, and coordinate actions. Essentially, SA involves seeing the big picture while focusing on the details as well.
Endsley’s model for Situation Awareness has three levels of increasing complexity: perception, comprehension, and projection.
Level 1: Perception is the most basic level. It's our understanding of what's going on right now, at this very moment. Perception is our awareness of the basic elements in our environment (such as people, places, things, and events). In essence, perception is how we perceive the world around us.
Perception is a cognitive process that allows us to take in our environment. It's a form of mental processing. It’s what allows us to see, hear and feel. What we perceive as reality is actually just a representation of that world, which can be altered by our senses or even our expectations.
You can only perceive what's happening around you or in your mind if you're paying attention to it; if your brain is distracted by something else, then it doesn't matter how much information there is — when there are too many things competing for our attention at once, we simply can't handle the workload.
Level 2: Comprehension means that we understand how all the different elements fit together and affect each other. In the perception phase, we have a picture of a situation, but it’s not clear from one perspective how all these pieces fit together.
In combination with perception, comprehension helps us define the current status in operationally relevant terms.
Level 3: Projection in the context of situation awareness, is the ability to predict what will happen next based on what we currently know. It’s a critical part of situation awareness because it allows us to see the future—and knowing what will happen next can help us make better decisions and quickly see results.
Projection differs from prediction in that projection does not require any information about outcomes or probabilities, only knowledge about how things work now. You could say that projection is seeing how things work now and projecting them into an imagined future scenario.
Having more information does not directly equate to having a better understanding.
Another misconception is that having more information leads to a better understanding of the situation. This is not so. Situation awareness requires the ability to interpret and make sense of what you already know, and this process depends on how well your mental model fits with what's happening in the world around you. Your mental model needs to be updated if there are changes in your environment that would change your interpretation of what has happened or might happen next (as compared to what you thought was going on).
Essentially, being situationally aware means you can predict what will happen next based on what you currently know. To do this effectively and efficiently, we need to understand the difference between raw data and situational assessment.
Raw data is simply information about what is going on around us. It doesn’t have meaning until we take the time to interpret and process it into something useful for our decision-making process.
Situational assessment- In brief, situation awareness is viewed as "a state of knowledge," and situational assessment as "the processes" used to achieve that knowledge. Situational assessment is a critical step in developing situational awareness.
Note that SA is not only produced by the processes of situational assessment, it also drives those same processes in a recurrent fashion. For example, one's current awareness can determine what one pays attention to next and how one interprets the information perceived.
Shared Situational Awareness (SSA)
Shared situational awareness (SSA) is working or collaborating with others to achieve mutual goals through effective communication. SSA involves sharing information and intentions between trusted team members to advance common objectives.
To have SSA, a team must share information and understand each other's intentions to advance common objectives.
If you're working alone on a project, you need to be able to communicate with others effectively in order to meet the goals of your project (even if they aren't working directly with you). This means knowing how other people think about things like time management or priorities—and also knowing how they feel about different situations so that you can prioritize accordingly.
In order to develop good SA skills, we need to practice identifying key pieces of information within our environment more quickly than others do without getting overloaded by irrelevant details (friction).
How to Apply Situation Awareness
Team SA depends on a high level of SA from each individual team member according to their job, while also ensuring SA between the other team members. There are four factors to consider if you want to apply situational awareness to the decision-making process in your organization. We recommend the company's chief operating officer facilitate the implementation of SA at your firm. If you do not have a COO, it may be best to enlist a Fractional COO to get the results you need as quickly as possible without interfering with others' accountabilities.
Outline the requirements. Team members need to know what information they should and should not share.
Designate the devices. Team members should know how to share information with each other whether it be verbally or through technology.
Implement mechanisms. Resources and training need to be provided so team members are equipped with a standardized operating system so they are all using the same models, and terminology, and share the same goals.
Create Processes. The team must be able to share information and conduct situational assessments as things evolve to ensure the state of the environment is kept current as feedback is received. From there, teams can begin making informed decisions to prioritize tasks and even establish contingency planning.
Once your team is applying situation awareness to their decision-making process, you will begin to wipe out mistakes, inefficiencies, and stagnation. The time saved due to this reduction in rework will allow the team to focus on process improvement and achieving the company’s long-term goals.
The impact of applying SA will be felt immediately as teams will now have an in-depth understanding of the “current state” giving them a more clear idea of the desired “end state”. This makes for some excellent problem-framing, which leads to superior strategy and laser-focused plans.
Conclusion
SA is about knowing your current state—what resources are available both within yourself and externally; understanding where you are going by making sense of the whole picture (upstream/downstream); evaluating all the possible options available now or in the near future; making a decision based on this analysis; determining if further action is required at this point in time. Situational awareness is a vital skill for anyone who wants to be successful. With greater awareness, we can better understand our environment and make better decisions, reduce operational fires, and quickly solve issues once and for all.
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