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Situational Awareness

Situational Awareness has been used for decades in aviation as a terminology describing the importance of the conscious and unconscious environment. It has been defined by Sheryl Chappell of the NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System as being “aware of everything that is happening and is going to happen to your aircraft and the airspace you fly through, because the consequences of a lapse in awareness can be deadly”.
This methodology inherently pertains to managing and leading a business. The gauges in the cockpit of an airplane provide vast amounts of information to a pilot from the moment the airplane is powered up through taxing and maneuvering on the runway to take off to finally landing at the predetermined destination. The pilot also receives information from outside sources such as flight towers, airspace personnel and the co-pilot and crew team. In business, leaders and managers begin with a strategy and vision towards a goal, and receive information throughout the journey once the strategy has been put into place from internal departments, analysis reports and business partners and supply chain vendors and suppliers.
In both cases, should the pilot or leader not pay attention to the vital information received from their environments, wrong decisions are made, misinformation occurs, both leading to potential disaster.
The Situational Awareness model developed by Sheryl Chappell and the Situational Awareness Management Tiger Team of the Industry Human Factors/CRM Developers Group is a philosophy of three components: 1. you must be aware of the plane, the path and the people; 2. monitor and evaluate these three things now, but you need to anticipate what is going to happen in the future, and 3. consider contingencies, or the unforeseen.
Developing the ability to become fully aware of one’s situation is a learned behavior, thus must be taught and continuously practiced before it is an accomplished and innate behavior. The ability to know what is currently happening from what could potentially arise requires different skills.
For the “here and now”, it is suggested in this methodology to “be aware of what you need to and ignore everything else”. This helps many to disseminate and prioritize information as to its importance and relevancy. The knowledge of those areas that can be ignored helps to retain focus on the areas needing focused attention.

Situational Awareness identifies many “traps” with the purpose of hedging against falling for them by bringing them to the front. These include:
  • Focusing on the right information at the right time
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  • If something does not look or feel right, it probably isn’t
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  • Watch out when you are busy or bored
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  • Habits are hard to break
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  • Expectation can reduce awareness
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  • Things that take longer are less likely to get done right
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  • Reliable systems are not always reliable
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  • It is hard to detect something that is not there
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  • Automation keeps secrets
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  • Distractions come in many forms
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Growing to a level of maintaining Situational Awareness as a leader is not the ending point of creating corporate-wide Situational Awareness. Getting to this level requires teaching and instilling team awareness, managing other managers to begin to think in this way as well as instilling this thought process into the labor force. This is important in that people cannot be in two places at once, and, as much as we would like, one person cannot see or experience everything happening. Instilling this philosophy into a corporation can filter the right communication to the right person(s) in order for proactive actions to take place. Globalization and the variable decision-making process consumers make, create a volatile environment making the managers’ and leaders’ job more complex.

To read more on this methodology and study:
www.crm-devel.org/resources/paper/chappell.htm