The Four Sisters of Understanding

Looking for better tools, we find four related concepts: Situation Awareness, Sensemaking, Weak Signal Detection and Attention Economy. We them them the four sisters of understanding. Togeher, they provide us with the necessary tools to navigate in complex times.

• Attention Economy is  based on the idea that human attention is a finite resource, and as information becomes increasingly abundant, attention becomes the limiting factor in consuming that information. It reminds us to design situations and processes in which we can focus on the right things and put effort into avoiding obvious errors in our perception.
• Situational awareness is the ability to perceive and comprehend the environment, including elements such as people, objects, and conditions, in order to anticipate and respond to potential threats or opportunities. In essence, it’s about understanding where you are, what’s happening around you, and what might happen next.
• Sensemaking is the cognitive process of interpreting and understanding information, often in complex or ambiguous situations. It’s a vital human skill that allows us to make meaning out of the world around us.
• Weak signal detection is an important prerequisite for situation awareness and sensemaking, and, unassuming it looks like, it takes profound consideration to build the social and technological structures to make it work.

 Sensemaking and situational awareness deal both with understanding complex environments; they are distinct concepts with different focuses and processes. Situational awareness focuses on the ability to act meaningfully, while sensemaking aims to uncover the underlying structures and relationships that govern system behavior and guide us to a deeper understanding.

Key Differences & Relationships include

• Sensemaking & Situation Awareness: Sensemaking often contributes to situation awareness. You can’t understand the situation (awareness) without making sense of the information within it. However, situation awareness is more immediate and focused on the present, while sensemaking can be more retrospective and focused on constructing a coherent narrative.
• Weak Signal Detection & Sensemaking: Weak signals are the raw material for sensemaking. Detecting these signals is the first step, but sensemaking is necessary to understand their meaning and implications.
• Weak Signal Detection & Situation Awareness: Weak signals can enhance situation awareness by providing clues about future changes in the environment. However, they can also be easily missed if individuals are overly focused on the dominant signals and current state.

First, I want to introduce each of the sisters. Then, I will continue with a dicsussions of consequences, conclusions and open questions.

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Mica Endsley received a PhD in industrial and systems engineering. She served as Chief Scientist of the U.S. Air Force and is a prominent figure in cognitive engineering.

Endsley works on operator interfaces for various systems, including those for military, aviation, air traffic control, medicine, and power grid operations. Her work is focused on designing systems to support situation awareness and dynamic decision-making.

Endsley’s work

is significant for its emphasis on the practical application of cognitive research to real-world systems. Her work translates research findings into usable design principles and guidelines for engineers and human factors professionals. She has developed the Situation Awareness Global Assessment Technique (SAGAT), a widely used method for objectively measuring SA. Her research has impacted the design of systems across many domains, including aviation, air traffic control, medicine, military operations, and power grid operations.

For Endsley, the development of SA is a layered process that starts with the perception of essential environmental elements, progresses to comprehending the current situation, and ultimately projects future states.

Cognitive mechanisms, goals, and experience influence this process. Understanding these levels and mechanisms allows one to design systems and training programs that effectively support and enhance SA in various complex and dynamic domains.

Endsley includes

• Three levels of situation awareness, which build on each other, which allows to track where awareness breaks down
• Key cognitive mechanisms that influence the performance of SA
• Challenges to SA
• The influence of technical systems and consequences for the design of these systems.

Endsley has worked on designing technical systems and the intricacies of group situation awareness, but this post does not focus on these topics.

Use cases for the model

Endsley’s model provides a framework for designing systems and interfaces that support human situational awareness.

Aside of that, it is used in

• Training and Education for various professions, including healthcare, first responders, and pilots
• Safety and Risk Management. By understanding the factors that contribute to situational awareness failures, organizations can develop strategies to prevent accidents and errors
• Teamwork and Collaboration: improvement of our understanding of how teams develop and maintain shared situational awareness.

Three Levels of SA

Endsley breaks down SA into three distinct levels. The idea is that a person goes through the three stages of recognizing the situation and can then act purposefully.

Level 1: Perception of the Elements in the Environment

This is the most basic level of SA and involves perceiving relevant environmental cues and information through our senses (sight, hearing, touch, etc.) and any available tools or displays.

The focus is on noticing and attending to important details, such as:

• Objects and their characteristics
• Events that are occurring
• People and their actions
• System status and indicators

Examples include a driver noticing a pedestrian crossing the street, a pilot observing the airspeed indicator, or a doctor monitoring a patient’s vital signs.

Level 2: Comprehension of the Current Situation

This level goes beyond simply perceiving individual elements and involves understanding their meaning and significance in the context of the current situation.

The focus moves to integrating the perceived information, recognizing patterns, and forming a mental picture of what is happening, such as

• Understanding the relationships between different elements
• Interpreting the meaning of events
• Developing a coherent mental model of the situation

Example: A driver who understands that the pedestrian is crossing against the light and may pose a hazard, a pilot who understands that a sudden drop in airspeed could indicate a problem with the engine, or a doctor who recognizes that a patient’s changing vital signs could indicate a worsening condition.

Level 3: Projection of Future Status

Based on the current understanding, this is the highest level of SA and involves anticipating how the situation might evolve in the near future.

It’s about using knowledge and experience to predict potential states and outcomes.

This includes:

• Forecasting the likely course of events
• Anticipating potential problems or opportunities
• Evaluating the consequences of different actions

Example: A driver anticipating that the pedestrian may continue crossing the street and adjusting their speed accordingly, a pilot anticipating that the engine problem may lead to a loss of altitude and preparing for an emergency landing, or a doctor anticipating that the patient’s condition may deteriorate and taking proactive steps to prevent further complications.

Cognitive Mechanisms

Endsley identifies several cognitive processes and mechanisms that contribute to SA. These include:

• Perception and Attention: Individuals can only attend to a limited amount of information at a time, requiring them to selectively focus their attention on the most relevant elements. Factors such as the importance and rate of change of information influence attention allocation.
• Working Memory: Working memory, which has limited capacity, plays a vital role in SA by temporarily storing and processing information from the environment.
• Long-Term Memory (Mental Models, Schema, and Scripts): Long-term memory structures help overcome working memory limitations.

o Mental models are internal representations of systems that allow individuals to understand their behavior, explain observed states, and make predictions about future states. For example, a pilot has a mental model of how an aircraft responds to control inputs.

o Schema are mental frameworks that organize knowledge about specific situations, allowing for rapid classification and understanding of new information. They act as shortcuts, enabling individuals to quickly comprehend and make projections based on familiar patterns.

o Scripts are sequences of expected actions or events in a particular situation. For instance, a pilot has a script for takeoff procedures that outlines the steps involved.

• Goals: Goals act as filters, directing attention to relevant information (top-down processing). They also provide context for comprehending and interpreting the perceived information.
• Expectations: Expectations, derived from past experiences and knowledge, can influence the perception and interpretation of information.

The Demons to SA

The model identifies several challenges (the demons) that can hinder an individual’s ability to achieve and maintain good SA. These challenges stem from human information processing limitations and the complexities of individuals’ environments:

Attentional Tunneling: an individual focuses too narrowly on one aspect of a situation and misses other important information.

Can lead to: A limited and inaccurate understanding of the overall situation.

Requisite Memory Trap: the difficulty in remembering all the relevant information required to maintain SA.

Can lead to: As the demands on working memory increase, retaining and processing all the information critical for SA becomes challenging.

Workload: Workload, Anxiety, Fatigue, and Other Stressors (WAFOS),

Can lead to: It can impair cognitive functions and negatively impact SA. Stressors can reduce attentional capacity and information processing capabilities.

Data Overload: An excessive amount of information,

Can lead to: Individuals may struggle to process, prioritize, and make sense of the data, which can overwhelm their information processing capacity. This can lead to difficulty in identifying the most relevant information needed to make informed decisions.

Misplaced Salience: Less important information draws attention away from more critical aspects of the situation.

Can lead to: A distorted perception of the overall situation.

Complexity Creep: Systems become more complex.

Can lead to: Forming an accurate mental model of how the system works becomes increasingly difficult.

Errant Mental Models: Having an incorrect or incomplete mental model.

Can lead to: This can significantly impair SA. An inaccurate mental model makes it difficult to assimilate and process information correctly and also to form accurate projections. Mental models are crucial for directing problem-solving and interaction with a system.

Out-of-the-Loop Syndrome: Passively monitor automated systems, leading to a loss of SA and a diminished understanding of what the system is doing.

Can lead to: The out-of-the-loop problem may not simply be complacency but a fundamental difficulty in understanding what the system is doing when passively monitoring.

Poor Feedback: Systems do not provide adequate feedback.

Can lead to: This creates challenges for SA because key information is not effectively communicated to the operator. When feedback on system operation is eliminated or changed, monitoring what’s happening effectively becomes difficult.

Time constraints: Time is an important factor in SA.

Can lead to: Understanding how much time is available until an event is often a critical component of SA.

Shared SA: This can arise because team members might not be aware of what information needs to be shared or may assume that other team members have the same information.

Can lead to: Shared information might not be passed between team members. In addition, team members might falsely assume that others will arrive at the same assessments based on the same data.

To support SA, system designs must be built to mitigate these issues.

Designing for Situation Awareness

The collection of guidings including the “demons” leads to a number of design principles and guidelines aimed include:

• Explicitly identify missing information: Systems should indicate when data is unavailable or unreliable to prevent users from making assumptions.
• Support the rapid development of global SA of systems in an alarm state: Displays should provide a clear overview of the system’s status, particularly during emergencies.
• Design systems to support the projection of future states: Displays should provide information and tools that help users anticipate future developments, such as trend graphs and predictive displays.
• Highlight deviations from expected or desired states: Systems should use visual cues like color changes or alerts to draw attention to significant changes or anomalies.

Sources

• For a first overview on YouTube.There are shorter versions available, but in this case the description above should suffice. Situation Awareness, Mica Endsley. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WaGolF2V2c.
• Endsley, Mica. 2013. Designing for Situation Awareness: An Approach to User-Centered Design. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00140139.2013.793052.
• McNeese, Michael D., Eduardo Salas, and Mica R. Endsley, eds. 2020. Foundations and Theoretical Perspectives of Distributed Team Cognition. 1st ed. First edition. | Boca Raton : CRC Press, 2020.: CRC Press. https://doi.org/10.1201/9780429459795.

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What is OODA

The OODA Loop is a strategic tool developed by military strategist and United States Air Force Colonel John Boyd. OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. It’s a decision-making process to help individuals and organizations operate effectively in competitive environments. The loop emphasizes the importance of adapting quickly to changing situations through a continuous cycle of interactions.

Typically, it is drawn like above.

• Observe or Sense (Analysis) – Gathering information and understanding the current environment and situation: In Observe mode, you focus on understanding the current situation. This section helps you dissect and comprehend an organization’s various elements and dynamics, paving the way for insightful analysis.
• Orient (Diagnosis): Analyzing and using the information to update your view of reality. While the analysis does not directly imply an assessment, the main focus of the diagnosis is developing an opinion about the findings.
• Decide (Design) – Making decisions based on observations and orientation: Finally, we delve into organizational design. This part guides you through the critical decisions involved in proposing changes and improvements to an organization’s structure and processes, utilizing the principles of VSM.
• Act (Ways of Change)- Taking action to implement the decision: Last, we choose a procedure to implement the findings. This can mean a traditional change process or an iterative approach. We discuss some of the options and the reasons why you would choose one over the other.

After taking action, the loop restarts with observation to assess the actions’ success and to react to any changes in the situation. 

The process helps to control the “blast radius,” i.e., the impact of an intervention. The loop allows interventions to be treated as experiments. It is intended to be performed rapidly and continuously, allowing quick reactions and flexibility in response to a situation’s dynamics, leading to improved strategic outcomes.

The OODA Loop is not a Loop.

What looks like a linear process in this illustration is much more complex and open. In any case, the OODA loop is not a loop, the popular understanding of the OODA loop as a simple, circular decision cycle that favors speed simply wrong.

However, the OODA process is not circular… Military forces do not in practice wait to observe until they have acted. Observation, orientation and action are continuous processes, and decisions are made occasionally in consequences of them. There is no OODA loop. The idea of getting inside the enemy decision cycle is deeply flawed.

Observation, orientation, and action are continuous processes, the idea of simply “getting inside the enemy’s decision cycle” is flawed.

It is an open system: you can enter and exit it anywhere.

OODA is not a Loop

Any “phase” can become current, depending on the situation. This dynamic nature keeps you engaged and active in the decision-making process. A simple example would be the famous hand on the hob. This certainly does not lead to you orienting yourself, designing the reaction, and then taking your hand off the hob. Instead, it is a sequence of sense -> act.

But there is no automatic cause of pain here, either. I modified the example slightly so that the Christmas tree burns. I may grab it anyway and throw it out of the patio door.

In Boyd’s view, there are many loops at different speeds simultaneously; the opponent reacts in the same way and, in turn, forces me to respond. OODA is a holistic checklist and reminds us not to run off at the first observation but to invest time,  willpower, and energy in assessing the situation. This investment is valuable and can lead to more informed decisions.

Boyd’s concept of orientation went beyond simply understanding the current situation. It involved integrating observed data with existing mental models, cultural biases, and past experiences to develop a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the unfolding situation. This deep level of orientation was essential for making effective decisions and acting swiftly in complex and dynamic environments._

The OODA Loop is a set of Views. Perhaps a better picture than a loop is a situation in which we continuously view the system in focus with different “hats,” i.e., perspectives, and are always ready to integrate contributions from every perspective.

OODA as a set of Viewpoints

A broader view

OODA is part of developing a mental model of the current situation. Creating relevant mental concepts requires constant improvement and adaptability of existing mental models.

Boyd’s view on things is much broader. The OODA Loop is part of a discussion of strategy and gaining a competitive advantage. Boyd uses and incorporates many of the scientific themes of his time (“zeitgeist”), including ideas from physics, biology, and chaos theory. His view includes a view of the shift from the Newtonian paradigm of closed, deterministic systems to a view of the world as a complex adaptive system.

The Importance of “Orientation”

Boyd’s concept of “Orientation” is crucial, he placed significant emphasis on the “Orient” viewpoint. He believed that an individual’s or organization’s ability to rapidly and accurately orient themselves to the situation was the key to gaining a decision-making advantage.

“Orientation, seen as a result, represents images, views, or impressions of the world shaped by genetic heritage, cultural traditions, previous experiences, and unfolding circumstances.”

Boyd about Survival and Adaptivity

Boyd’s concepts revolve around themes of organizational survival and its solution – adaptability.
He portrays Adaptability as a Strategic Imperative: Adaptability is identified as the key to success for organizations and armed forces.

• A system must be able to change and adapt as conditions require.
• adaptability is linked with the need to understand one’s own relative power position (shih).
  “The shih constantly shifts according to what is happening in the internal and external environment of the state. At any one time the shih is formed by intangible factors such as morale, opportunity, timing, psychology and logistics.”

More

• About John Boyd
• The best way to explore the work of John Boyd is probably: Osinga, Frans P. B. 2007. Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd (Strategy and History). Taylor and Francis
• A deep dive into practical applications of the OODA loop is: OODA Loopers on Youtube

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ohn Boyd (1927-1997) was a famous fighter pilot in the US airforce. He served in Japan and Korea. The lessons he learned and the work he did in Korea formed the foundation for much of his later work, including his theories on air-to-air tactics, energy maneuverability, aircraft design, OODA loops, strategy and maneuver warfare, and his thoughts on time and thinking itself.

John Boyd is best known for his OODA model for situation awareness. Although the popular interpretation focuses on the speed of decision making, Boyd’s original concept was more comprehensive, involving organizational learning, adaptation, and the importance of orientation.

Boyd’s Work

Boyd’s work also included:

• A Discourse on Winning and Losing (also known as The Green Book) which includes four briefings and an essay.
• Patterns of Conflict, a historical analysis of warfare and theories for victory.
• Organic Design for Command and Control, which focuses on cooperation in complex, fast-moving situations.
• The Strategic Game of ? and ?, which emphasizes the mental twists and turns for realizing aims or purposes.
• The Conceptual Spiral which uses examples from science and engineering to discuss self-correcting mechanisms.
• The Essence of Winning and Losing which offers a picture of the OODA loop.

The best way to explore the work of John Boyd is probably:
.Osinga, Frans P. B. 2007. Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd (Strategy and History). Taylor and Francis.

image: https://www.coljohnboyd.com

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“The problem is, most managers aren’t aware of the theories they’re using, and they often use the wrong theories for the situation.“

Situational awareness is about knowing what is going on around you, and what potential threats and opportunities there might be. It is a critical foundation for successful decision-making. Situational awareness means sensing changes in the business environment as well as in organizational capabilities.

Situational awareness can be considered as a three-step process: perceiving the relevant information, properly comprehend the relevant information, and predicting the future state based on the available information.

Safety Advice
Don’t do this on your own! As human beings we are always bound by our knowledge, life experiences, biases and thought distortions. Therefore, awareness is very subjective. To overcome this, we need to collaborate: invite others for sharing and discussing their perspectives and together make sense of what we see. Instead of feeling disturbed by the viewpoints and opinions of others, we need to see them as invitations to a better understanding of our situation.

Related

• Strategy Definition
• Organizational capabilities
• Participation and communication

Recommended Resources

1. Wikipedia article on sensemaking

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