Chances are, however, they won’t know it unless someone points it out to them. When this occurs, both members may believe they have strong situational awareness but one is suffering from a flawed perception of reality. This can happen at an incident scene as well. Two people can be looking at the same thing, at the same time, from the same angle and each of them see something completely different. Suffice it to say, situational awareness can be a very fragile commodity and can be lost so quickly that you’ll never even know it’s happened. It works every time, even when I warn them I’m going to do it and tell them how NOT to let it happen. In fact, I demonstrate for students just how fragile situational awareness can be by doing exercises that steal away their situational awareness. Situational awareness gone awryĪnyone can lose their situational awareness, at any time, for a wide variety of reasons – a point I speak to extensively in the Mental Management of Emergencies and the Flawed Situational Awareness programs I teach. What one crew is doing can have an impact on another crew and certainly (hopefully) a positive impact on the overall incident. Third is incident situational awareness – being vigilant to the fact that few things at an incident scene are done in isolation. Second, is team situational awareness – an awareness of our team members’ knowledge, skills, abilities, etc. Three Types of AwarenessesĪs we discuss situational awareness, there are three types we need to develop.įirst, is individual situational awareness – an awareness of our own knowledge, skills, abilities, fear, phobias, stamina, etc. In fact, I would characterize this as a dangerous mindset and would like to defend why you would never want to relegate your situational awareness to anyone else. I could not disagree more with this mindset. Further, he didn’t worry about having situational awareness about the larger incident scene, that’s what he has an incident commander for. I recently read a post on social media where a firefighter said at an incident scene that he doesn’t worry about his situational awareness.
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