Awareness and Safe Behaviour

Walking underground in the passages of a platinum mine with the shift supervisor, I noticed that he was not 100% focused on our discussion, compared to when we were interviewing above ground.

Doing a site visit with a manager of a Bulk moving company, walking at a safe distance from big machines taking slag (at temperatures of about 600C) from a smelter, I also noticed this split in attention.

Watching a flight instructor during a training flight I had the same sense that he was paying attention to more than one thing.

Afterwards, when in the safe zone of their offices, these three people explained that while they were working it is second nature for them to “extend” their awareness to include the environment through which they are moving. They do this “extended awareness” automatically. And it made me aware that in the context of work involving space, high quality awareness of the situation is critical to success. A lack of awareness may lead to inappropriate behaviour or a fatal delayed reaction.

From modelling projects to describe successful managers whose co-workers have exceptionally high safe behaviour scores (e.g. zero LTI’s over three or more years), situational awareness presented itself as a critical success factor. This type of situational awareness has four attributes: context, speed, baseline (intent) and library of appropriate actions.

Context:

Context or situation, includes events taking place, as well as static information co-defining the situation. For example: when walking with the underground shift supervisor his awareness was using 4 of the 5 main senses. He was actively monitoring the environment through which we moved by smell, taste, hear and sight.

The flight instructor used feeling (of flying right), sight and hearing: an awareness of how the aircraft was positioned in terms of the direction of flight, etc.

The site manager was using hearing and sight to observe and track the movement of the big vehicles as well as potentially unsafe behaviours of operators and people moving through the space of operation.

The first attribute of situational awareness is therefore context specificity. The awareness is customized to the situation and determines the kind of awareness that is appropriate.

Speed:

Because situational awareness is habitual and mostly unconscious, information gets processed at a very high neurological speed. All three the above people gave examples of rapid behavioural reaction to a situation, and that they only realised afterwards during debriefing the event, what they observed that lead them to their response. At the time the trigger information was outside of their awareness.

During a modelling exercise of rally drivers, the same pattern was observed: unconscious recognition of a need for correction and immediate, rapid reaction. For example: recognising over-steering when taking a turn that will result in too wide an arc, driving at 120-140km/h.

This second attribute refer to the speed of response to the event. The speed of response correlates with level of expertise or experience: the more competent the person is, the higher the level of unconscious competence and speed displayed.

Baseline (Intent):

This appears to correlate with the knowing of what is right. The awareness displayed by peak performers are not “just” being aware, it is somewhat judgmental in that there is a comparison between what is and what should be. The “should be” for the people modelled has a distinct “social power” intention. David McClelland, writing about the three social motives, defined social power, as different from personal power, in the following way: “Socialized Power: In contrast, others experience a need for power that is “socialized” in that it focuses on exercising influence for the benefit of others through groups or other organized processes.” (“A Brief note on the Social Motives”. HBR, November 1980). A similar definition is used by Jeffrey Pfeffer in his well-researched book on “Power: Why Some People Have It—And Others Don’t” (Harper Collins, 2010).

Third attribute: the standard(s) against which the peak performer make their judgment is clear, and for the “larger good”, in service of what is right.

Library of Appropriate Behaviours:

Related to the baseline, or standard(s) of judgment, the successful person knows what is right, and has the range of behaviours from experience or expertise to behave appropriately when making corrections and getting to the designated outcome. The range of options to use in making corrections, or sustain a direction, is sourced from what we call “experience” or “expertise”. Learners or novices will not only be slow, but do not yet have the ability to think of as many options and ways to make corrections as the experts do. It is therefore a fact that a flight instructor will not only have many hours of flying time, but also have the experience to deal with a multitude of events that effects flying. And who would you rather be trained by: a clever instructor or an experienced one?

Doing Situational Awareness:

The internal sequence of events, called a cognitive strategy, can be described as starting from the intention to “be safe” (highest value, as in “working safe is good business”); paying attention to when safe happens or not (baseline awareness of what is right); giving attention to correctness or deviations from standard; an immediate and rapid response to the event when corrections are needed.

Conclusion:

From numerous modelling projects of managers with excellent safety records, it is clear that situational awareness is critical to a continual assessing of dynamic and static information in an event. The factor of high quality situational awareness is critical for the success of managers with excellent safety records.