In the chaos of an incident, nothing counts more than situational awareness, the shared, real-time understanding needed to protect people and property. Yet, gaining and maintaining this critical insight is far from easy.
Since situational awareness is an incident response team’s most valuable asset, we’ll examine why it’s so difficult to achieve.
What is situational awareness?
Used across high-stakes fields, from military strategy to utility operations, situational awareness is a critical evaluative metric. In incident management, specifically, situational awareness is defined by a three-staged cognitive process which supports decision-making:
1. Perception
Actively observing the immediate status of critical attributes and elements of the situation. For example:
- Where is the breach?
- What systems are down?
2. Comprehension
Understanding the significance of the perceived elements in the context of the incident. For example:
- The communication outage means we can't notify external teams, which changes our resource strategy.
3. Projection
Predicting the likely near-term evolution of the situation to enable proactive decision-making. For example:
- If the power stays down for two more hours, we project a critical failure of auxiliary cooling.
Core challenges to situational awareness in incident management
Incident management relies more heavily on rapid, accurate situational awareness than almost any other discipline. After all, incident management protocols are built on the assumption that accurate information flows regularly.
But as incident responders well know, the high-stress environment of a critical event makes achieving and maintaining situational awareness exceptionally difficult.
But why, exactly? To answer that question and get teams thinking about how they can improve situational awareness with enhanced strategies and tools, we lay out the key challenges to forming and maintaining situational awareness during a critical incident. They include:
Cognitive load versus speed
During a critical event, the pressure to act fast is intense. But the very demand for speed often triggers errors of perception, judgment, and/or action. For their part, incident responders, feeling this urgency, often skip vital steps or make snap decisions based on incomplete data.
Information siloes
The nature of a critical event, especially incidents involving communications failures, isolates the people with the most critical, first-hand information. The individuals closest to (or right at) the epicenter are often physically unable to share what they perceive.
Lack of a common operating picture
Accurate information culled from the site of an incident enables response personnel to develop a singular, clear common operating picture (COP). But if incident response teams lack the tools, including emergency management software, needed to consolidate observations, analyze contents, and determine next steps — or the COP that’s created is not accessible to all responding parties — this can lead to a disorganized or splintered incident management effort.
Missing the big picture
Responders are often focused on their specific task, such as fixing one server or securing one entry point. This focus, albeit necessary, can lead to tunnel vision, which often causes teams to miss related, yet critically important, data simply because it falls outside of their immediate purview.
Confirmation bias
Experience is invaluable in incident management, but it can just as easily create confirmation bias. When facing ambiguity, incident responders might unconsciously filter new information to match their preconceived notions or the patterns of a previous incident. This bias prevents them from accurately perceiving the novelty or unique severity of the current situation.
Overwhelm and distraction
The immediate aftermath of an incident can unleash a chaotic volume of addressable items, tasks, and noise. For team members, the sheer volume of multitasking and distraction can overwhelm cognitive capacity, preventing them from conscientiously completing their appointed, often simple, tasks.
Overcoming these challenges takes time, effort, and most importantly planning. Tools help, too.
For instance, to develop situational awareness, incident response teams will have to maintain clear incident reporting records, so that the information they gather remains aligned with the observations that yielded them.
Fortunately, critical event management (CEM) software can help, with functionality purpose-built to help teams maintain situational awareness via field personnel updates, GIS feeds, data import, email, and social media.
What other capabilities to consider in CEM software, though? Check out our Buyer’s Guide to Critical Event Management Software.
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