First Due: The Sinister Seven

Some describe situational awareness as “paying attention to your surroundings” or “keeping your head on a swivel,” but those phrases only describe—and not very well—the first element of situational awareness: perception. 

There are three component parts that contribute to the development of situational awareness:

• Perception: Using your five senses to capture information (clues and cues) about what is happening in your environment
• Understanding: Comprehending and combining those clues and cues into something relevant to your situation
• Prediction: The ability to take understanding of what is happening to accurately anticipate what will occur in the future

Although perception, understanding and prediction might seem simple on the surface, nothing is further from the truth. Developing and maintaining situational awareness, particularly under stress, is complex and fraught with challenging barriers.

In fact, there are more than 100 barriers that can flaw a responder’s situational awareness. That’s bad news for individuals and for teams who operate in high-risk, high-consequence, high-stress, time-compressed environments. The good news: The greatest challenges to first responders are few in number. Let’s explore seven of them here.

Sensory conflict occurs when two or more senses gather clues and cues that aren’t aligned (e.g., the ears hear one thing, but the eyes see something else). This causes confusion. The brain can use up a lot of precious cognitive resources trying to resolve confusion. Until the confusion is resolved, you are more vulnerable to making mistakes or bad decisions that can result in injuries or death.

Mind drift happens when the conscious mind wanders out of awareness and starts thinking about something else while performing a high-risk activity (e.g., driving a vehicle at highway speed while thinking about something other than driving). This reduces vigilance and awareness about looming dangers and changing conditions.

The pre-arrival lens occurs when responders develop an understanding about the problem that they will be dealing with before they arrive on scene. This potentially flawed awareness usually is based on erroneous information shared by a dispatcher over the radio, leading responders to believe that they know what the actual problem is. This can, in turn, lead to pre-arrival decision-making and action plans that don’t fit the problem, because the actual problem doesn’t match the information that was shared over the radio prior to arrival.

Under rapidly changing conditions, a responder can feel a sense of urgency to take action quickly, which is understandable. However, urgency also can increase stress and lead a responder to believe that there isn’t any time to waste and, more concerning, that there isn’t time to do the task correctly. This can cause a responder to shortcut best practices. (The situational awareness shortcut that’s taken most often when under the influence of urgency is failing to complete a 360-degree size-up.)

Overconfidence develops from responders who repeatedly circumvent best practices but are rewarded each time with a successful outcome. Success breeds confidence, but success via a shortcut with best practices isn’t based on skill. It is based on luck, which eventually will run out.

Complacency can affect responders, which can prompt them to let their guard down, and when that happens, vigilance is lessened, and the responder stops paying attention to environmental clues and cues. Complacency often rears its ugly head during routine/repetitive calls or while performing boring/redundant tasks. Experienced responders also can become complacent after working many years in high-risk environments without any consequences (i.e., no near-misses or injuries), which causes them to become desensitized to risk.

Confabulation happens when the picture of understanding on the responder’s “mind’s eye” doesn’t match what is happening in the environment. When this occurs, particularly under stress, the brain is far more likely to believe the mind’s eye over what the biological eyes see, so the responder will experience a flawed perception of reality.

Visit SAMatters.com to learn more about these and other challenging situational awareness barriers.