Situational Awareness

What is Situational Awareness?

Essentially it means being aware of what’s happening around you. Situational Awareness is a fundamental building block of Human Factors, just like Decision Making and Error Management.

Roughly two thirds of human error are due to loss of Situational Awareness (SA), with one study identifying 88% of crew-related accidents because of it [2]
Similarly, a NASA report found that 75% of all aviation accidents are because of failures in monitoring, managing or operating systems [3]
Situational Awareness can apply in all walks of life and activities.
Pilots are well-aware of Situational Awareness, and this has contributed to a continuing decline in commercial aviation deaths over the last five years [4,5]
There is a growing acceptance of this term in sectors where safety is critical.
These include the world of medicine where, according to the World Health Organisation, adverse events cause an estimated three million deaths globally [6,7]
Situational Awareness becomes acutely important for teams with high workloads, when experts in their field perform challenging or complex activities - including carrying out a medical procedure or anticipating the markets on a bank’s trading floor.

Benefits of Situational Awareness training for your sector

Think of a bank’s trading team or an airline’s operations crew.
There’s compelling evidence that if team members discuss “what if’s” and alternative scenarios before undertaking a task, they execute it far more effectively than those who haven’t [8,9]
Teams with high Situational Awareness are less likely to become overloaded, fixated on tasks, and more resilient to error.
They’ll be more able to respond to quickly changing circumstances
And be in a better position to display other Human Factor skills, such as Decision Making, Communication and Workload Management
With highly diversified teams of professionals a common fixture of contemporary working life, successfully applying Situational Awareness can make all the difference between different subject matter experts collaborating harmoniously – or not.

Real-world example of successful Situational Awareness
Aviation
Qantas A380, Flight QF32

Background

On 4 November 2010, flight QF32 took off from Changi Airport, Singapore, bound for Sydney, Australia
On board were 469 passengers and crew in an aircraft with four million parts
Four minutes after take-off, an uncontained engine failure in the inner left engine caused it to explode without warning, followed by a second explosion
This caused huge systems damage and a flood of cockpit warnings

Using Situational Awareness

The crew kept Situational Awareness by pacing decision making, delegating tasks and avoiding tunnel vision
Sharing mental models and resisting fixation allowed the crew to safely continue operating the aircraft, despite data overload
Instead of trying to correct the many complicated failures, the crew focused on the remaining systems and services that were working
They were able to safely return the aircraft, landing back at Changi Airport with no passenger injuries. [10,11]

Applying Situational Awareness in your teams

On our Sapien Human Factors Consulting courses we’ll show you how to:

Make plans before the task starts, while the workload is low
Build an initial shared mental model of the plan
Share Situational Awareness to build team rapport
Maintain awareness of the key components of Situational Awareness
Recognise how to recover Situational Awareness for error avoidance
Enable colleagues to ask clarifying questions
Empower colleagues to challenge leaders’ gaps in their own Situational Awareness
Boost more effective information-sharing during the task
Manage peoples’ natural response to de-escalate emotion after Situational Awareness drops
Rebuild Situational Awareness in a structured way for a successful outcome.

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