Situational Awareness - it's not what you think
Let’s start with relevant quotes from the Mapping Book:
The first one is from Chapter 11 - and talks about always applicable principles. One of them is focusing on high situational awareness.
Focus on high situational awareness
There is a reasonably strong correlation between awareness and performance, so focus on this. Try to understand the landscape that you are competing in and understand any proposal in terms of this. Look before you leap.
However, there is an issue with this statement.
A meta-analysis1 of situational awareness for performance found that, on average, situational awareness has a weak correlation with performance, but there are large variations among effects.
The paper ends with a big statement:
[…] it may be appropriate to revise major theories of SA.
What’s really wrong with situational awareness?
In my opinion, outside of very narrow circumstances, the measurement is the problem.
There are for acknowledged ways of measuring situational awareness2:
Direct experimental techniques: These are the most common approaches and involve measuring situational awareness through performance on tasks or simulations.
Subjective ratings: These measures rely on self-reports or observer ratings of situational awareness.
Physiological measures: These measures use physiological signals, such as heart rate variability or electroencephalography (EEG), to infer situational awareness.
Hybrid approaches: These approaches combine multiple measures, such as subjective ratings and physiological measures, to provide a more comprehensive assessment of situational awareness.
If you look at them, they all have one thing in common - a known model of how the best (or high level of) situational awareness looks like.
This is because situational awareness originated from places where the situations are repeatable enough - and there is the best way of retrieving information about the environment regardless of who is doing it.
Imagine a pilot - when they land a plane, they must follow procedures. In case of malfunction, they need to follow a procedure to find out what stopped working. It works that way because of the enormous body of knowledge created by experimentation, research and catastrophe analysis.
Similarly, when a doctor is supposed to diagnose a patient, there is a procedure to follow that is based on the efficiency and side effects of potential interventions (or, at least, this is what you should reasonably expect).
However, this is not universally applicable.
When you think about your life, or about your organization, there is no way to know what you need to know to make the right decision. In fact, you do not even know which decision is right, nor what right means, especially given the long perspective.
Remember what Steve Jobs said about an event that would be considered negatively by many people.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.
The simple definition of Situational Awareness
Existing definitions of situational awareness emphasise the importance of knowing key components in a system and being able to anticipate their changes.
In business, some things are hidden, and their actions will bring unexpected consequences. This will be revealed after the fact.
Therefore, I find it important to focus not on knowing but on being prepared. Or, in other words, not being caught off-guard.
The thought ‘I did not expect that’ indicates that your situational awareness is not good enough.
Situational Awareness is misleading
Situational awareness as a concept seems to be useless.
Since our understanding of ‘what is going on’ is always limited, we might happen to be in the right place & time, and still get what we want.
We might put all the effort into understanding the situation only to discover that the main factors remain hidden. We observe the effects of hidden forces.
Therefore, situational awareness is much more a skill than a state. It means how quickly you can build a useful understanding of the situation, one that will allow you to act and get results that will then build your psychological momentum.
Shared Situational Awareness
A member of any organization has to build many different types of situational awareness:
‘me in the team’
‘the team in the department’
‘the department in the organization’
‘organization in the market’
‘market in the world’
A common view on situational awareness is that two or more people have a commonly understood mental model of what is happening3. This is, however, incredibly misleading and impossible to achieve, against perhaps some narrow situations.
A much better view on shared situational awareness is that people have the knowledge necessary to do their jobs4.
https://osf.io/kv7n3/download
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4753990/
https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/13/suppl_1/i65
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0018720820969071
https://www.samatters.com/shared-situational-awareness/
https://www.ukfrs.com/promos/16984#:~:text=Good%20shared%20situational%20awareness%20will,to%20their%20area%20of%20work.