Situation Awareness

A Laypersons Guide to Situation Awareness with lots of shortcuts and simplifications. For the complete exposure to the idea, please check out the publications by Mica Endsley. If you want to get an excellent summary of the topic please look and Krishan’s work published on sub-stack. A lot of people will have heard of the OODA loop by John Boyd. Situation awareness is similar, but goes deeper in understanding and analysis. Situation awareness also contains some pixie dust that helps us with our limited mental capacity. (It will also help computers to autonomously drive our cars. Situation awareness teaches us to reduce data to information and knowledge, which allows us to act. But this is a really long story. Simple to understand though. It is like watching fast sports: the more experience you have, the easier, you can decode the patterns and the strategies will become visible. The same thing.)

Let me give you a small example. Assume you have a drivers license and you are driving a car. You have your car to care about, and the traffic around you. Both consume your attention. If you are in your favorite or better usual environment, you will be able to assess the situations outside your car, i.e. the traffic, and will be able to recognize standard situations. You recognize the situation, understand what is going on, classify and assess the next situation. Probably there are ten or so sub scenarios that are in a given street scene. Easy going. Then there is something unusual happening. You will realize, because there is a sub-scene that does not fit to the standards you have in your training. You will concentrate on this part of the road scene and will analyze it. Your attention is shifted and will safely drive your car. Actually, you will not recognize this focus shift of your attention. In case you are listening to a podcast, you might recognize that you are missing information. You will simple focus to the road scene and will no longer listen to the podcast. Imagine what happens during a phone call in a car while driving. If you stay with your focus on the phone call, you might end up in trouble. It is safer to experiment with a podcast. Music will simply be faded out of your attention and you will not notice.

Anyway, while driving and solving the problem with the unusual scene, you will monitor the rest of the street scenes and check if they are developing according to your plan. You will be showing the same behavior in sports, when flying an aircraft or a sports glider, are climbing a mountain, whatever. The more you are used to the situation you are in, the more relaxed you will be. The challenge at some point is that you should stay alert. Too much routine can also be dangerous. That is mainly where the difficult part kicks in. I am not interested in this right now. The work of Mica Endsley is discussing situation awareness and how it is influenced by boredom, external inputs, distractions, information overload, etc. The entire topic has interesting connections to interface design, user experience, and system design. The topic is worth studying on its own right – and for me interesting to read.

All this is just about situation awareness. Flow in sports is a different, equally interesting topic. “Flow in sports” or “flow in work”: The right balance between challenge and skill and capability. Not in focus here, but the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is however certainly worth visiting. Maybe I will write about this later somewhere.

Back to driving a car: I am mainly living in Central Europe. I do not drive cars in Indian cities for example. I would be really stressed doing that, simply because I do not have the local mental models to negotiate the situations in the road. The driver driving the taxi or uber that I am using in India is perfectly at ease with the traffic. He or she has the matching patterns at hand. Works all over the world. It is a culture thing. Some areas are easier for the individual to adapt to others more difficult. (Culture is the common agreement on behavior in specific situations. Reactions are not needed to be negotiated or agreed. Everybody knows and understands what is going on. You feel “at home”.) Here there could be a chapter or an article about culture and cultural differences. You will fine one.

More abstract: If you are in unusual environment, a different country with different habits, a different continent or maybe only really unusual weather conditions, you will not so easily match street scenes to the optical impression – remember, we are still driving a car. There is a lot more mental capacity allocated the scene decoding, you do not have the needed pre-trained patterns at hand. Probably you will still be doing fine, but you will invest a lot more energy. Why is this the case? You are trained to the “wrong” patterns. You will not recognize the patterns in the traffic, so you have to dig deeper to understand what is going on. Instead of working with pre-processed meta-data, your brain needs to process more raw data. You need to handle more inputs at the same time. In consequence, you will be exhausted. Occasionally, you will miss some element of the environment, which might cause an accident. That is all. People often claim: “This is chaotic traffic.” No, it is not. People used to driving in this environment are relaxed. It is YOU, lacking the experience in this specific situation. You do not understand the underlying patters. This is why it feels chaotic. You are overloaded by all the inputs and do not have the training to process the data to metadata. That is all. And you are a danger to all others feeling at ease. Please remember that part.

Public Domain, File:Endsley-SA-model.jpg – Wikipedia

This exactly is the essence of situation awareness. Dissecting perception, understanding and reactions. We are now prepared to dive one level down to more details.

The first level of situation awareness is perception. What is there? What do I see, hear, smell, feel, taste? No interpretation at this point. This is the challenge. Do not interpret anything. Observe. The second level is Comprehension. All these inputs will point me to a certain situation. Have I seen that before? If yes, I categorize. I can predict what is going to happen next. Experience helps here. It makes situation comprehension easier. Here at this level, a lot of data reduction is happening. Experience and training is very supportive at this point. The more experience I have, the more patterns I have to match to what I perceive. At this point we understand why experienced people sometimes are not viewing new and creative solution, unless they know how to free mental capacity to search for novel solutions. Novel solutions are harder for us, because we cannot use our autopilot.

Interesting point here. Going on autopilot is a blessing and a curse. I frees mental capacity, but every misjudgement might get us into trouble. As always, there is no right and no wrong. Simple always be selfcritical and aks if the entire picture makes some sense or if something appears to be strange. At this point you might remember some SF movies, where the hero verifies the situation. Another point is that there is no such thing as an objective observation of the environment. It is always biased. It does not matter how much you are trying.

The next level is the projection into the future. Based on my perception of the here and now and my training I can predict future based on my model of reality. Based on this prediction I can take a decision and react accordingly. My reaction is going to change the environment and I can observe the result. Depending on my knowledge of the system and my understanding of the situation and the system, my predictions may be better or not so good. I need to continue observing. I need to close the feedback loop. In case my predictions are good, my confidence in the situation assessment will raise. If my predictions are not so good, the frequency in the feedback loop needs to be increased, I have to raise my level of attention to this part of the situation and I keep observing, understanding and reaction. Just faster. This will consume more energy. Based on my training and experience and abilities, my awareness of the situation will be different from what other people will experience in the same or similar situations. This is a data-based explanation, why two people can experience exactly the same situation as fun and as stressful. When a person has a lot of experience, a certain situation can appear to the outside a bit “chaotic”, the person inside the situation may however be in perfect control and enjoy it. A rookie in the same situation may be overwhelmed by impressions and simply struggle a lot to get by. It is all about data reduction. And training. And experience. The more training and experience, the more fun or boredom – depending on situation.

In the discussion above, I was speaking about mental models. Mental models have received a lot of “bad press” over the years. However, they are the key to understand our world. Our perception feeds into to model, i.e. a systematic understanding of how things work. It is connecting inputs to outputs based on a causal chain. It applies to technical systems the same as social systems. The mental model helps us to focus on the important parameter. We need to make sure that we are using the correct model and that the model is predicting the correct system state in near future. The feedback loop needs to be closed, otherwise, we can get far off track.

One layer down in the direction of higher granularity are schemata. Schemata are like macros in the entire situation. “If this, then that.” They allow classification and help to check if we are using the correct mental model. Schemata can be based on own experience or shared experience. They are part of the training process. Without schemata, there is no training. I like to quote Richard Feynman. Here is a good time to introduce one sentence on his last black board: “Know how to solve every problem that has been solved before.” If you know that, you probably have a good toolbox to solve the next problem. These are schemata. How to react is trained in little scripts. The nuts and bolts actions. In sports and other training these scripts are “engrams”. Little automatic actions that you perform “automatically”. Like shifting gears when you are driving a stick-shift transmission in a car. Or forehand/backhand in tennis. You are not really thinking this motion. And if you are, there is not enough mental capacity left to control your game. You will lose. For sure. O.K. that applies to all sports. Focus on the motion in technical training. The next thing is to distinguish between coach and trainer. Ask your coach how to connect the individual actions.

Back to situation awareness. Why should we consider this technique in engineering and development? In my opinion there are many situations, where the path to success is predictable. In these situations, forget all the agile methods and rituals. Write a plan and execute. One thing is to check frequently if the plan leads to success. Success means if it brings us closer to our target situation. Not if the plan generates the right documents at the right time. If not, we maybe need to reconsider the strategy. If there are situations, where we do not know what to do in the beginning, an iterative approach might be the right choice. In any case, there is never a “one size fits all” solution. As in the situation awareness sketch indicated: There are external influences that affect the situation. Training level, stressors, goals, and a few factors more, even our culture.

Situation awareness is a lot like Sun Zi brought into 21st century. Understand yourself and understand your opponent or your challenge, then you have a chance to be successful. If you do not know your challenge or worse if you do not know yourself, you are doomed.

The text above is just a very brief view into situation awareness. There are many more aspects, like the design of the development infrastructure environment to make life easier for your value creators, i.e. to allow them focus on the job to be done. Situation awareness ideas also tell you that before you adapt methods to your problem, it is better to first learn the method and to develop a proficiency before adapting it to specific situations etc. In addition, it has application in portfolio planning and portfolio management. Searching for Simon Wardley will point you in this direction.

That should now kill the question “agile or not agile” for good. Adapt the development methodology to your challenge, the knowledge and experience of your team(s), the external influences and then chose the method of least effort (some theoretical physics again) to obtain your outcome.