Situational awareness

For pilots, the implications go well beyond being an academic argument since they lead to other important and very practical considerations, and was the subject of a recent and perceptive presentation by Human Factors Manager of Emirates Airlines Dr Nicklas Dahlstrom.

The point of this article is to stimulate more discussion about this important area — is situational awareness simply an unprovable ‘folk model’ where currently accepted definitions lead to what is practically a circular dead end?

Perhaps this is supported by the fact that situational awareness has been shown to be a very difficult construct to train, which would undoubtedly be the case if training was being directed at symptoms rather than deeper underlying causes.

Rather than trying to summarise both sides of this extensive academic debate in a semi-intelligible manner, I’ve tried to provide some clarity by introducing a ‘systems perspective’ in a commonsense way.

When you fly an aeroplane you are part of a dynamic system, which includes yourself and your crew, the various systems, individually and in aggregate, that make up the aircraft you are flying, the environment, both the physical ‘weather’ environment and the physical and mental operating environment, ATC and numerous of other agents and variables.

In short, as a pilot, you are part of what is termed a ‘complex adaptive system’. One of the important emergent qualities of such systems is that they are unpredictable and so resultant outputs can be totally disproportionate to the associated inputs.

Sandcastles are an example of a complex adaptive system, as you can never predict which tiny extra grain of sand, a small and simple input, will tip the system into instability and cause the whole castle to collapse — rearranging the whole system in a complex and unpredictable manner.

As a pilot, you are given an extensive list of rules and procedures to follow. But because you are operating both in and as part of a complex adaptive system, you constantly have to assess where you are in relation to the knowable variables in this system. You also have to constantly assess when or how to action the rules and procedures that are applicable to your subsystem to accomplish the task given to you.

While you can artificially separate and apply inputs to these various subsystems, it must be remembered that since you are part of a complex adaptive system, unrecognised interrelationships can lead to unintended outcomes in relation to the inputs you have made or that were made by other system components, with or without your knowledge.

Putting this another way, the starting point for any crew is its goals. Of course ‘safety is our first priority’ but in general terms your goal is to get your aircraft and its contents safely and efficiently from A to B.

Accomplishing this goal requires a constant assessment of your relationship to, and in, the complex and constantly adapting system you are part of and how this impacts upon your existing and future goals. This knowledge then guides the actions you take, given the tools you have at your disposal — SOPs, aircraft capability, time and other factors.

As an example, when ‘glass cockpit’ aircraft were first introduced folklore has it that the most commonly heard phrase on the flight deck was: “What’s it doing now?” In this instance, the unexpected mode change prompted the crew’s need to re-establish the relationship between themselves and the system they were part of.

Questions mean answers are being sought, which means decisions are required about what is relevant, that is, where should your limited attention be directed, and what it all means.

Extending this implies that situational assessment, the process by which your so-called situational awareness is established, is a continuous loop of environmental decision making. In other words ‘situational awareness’ is the ongoing and continuously updated answer to the often implicit question: “Where am I in relation to the complex and continually adapting system I am part of and what actions do I now need to take to continue to move towards my goals?”

This should also lead to the associated question: “Do these goals, or my existing goal hierarchy, remain appropriate given my assessment of the existing system state?”

Understanding and appropriately managing the risks that overlay this process is another interrelated subject and has been the subject of previous articles in this series.

Hence, the basis of situational assessment is a continuous loop of ongoing environmental decision making, while ‘situational awareness’ is the label assigned to the output of this process.

As such, to say that “A” happened because the pilot or crew lost situational awareness is meaningless. The more relevant and practical question to ask is — why did their ongoing process of environmental decision making fail?
Usually, a large part of this ongoing environmental decision making process operates in the background in the same way you constantly but relatively subconsciously monitor the footpath you are walking along.

However, if you become distracted or don’t devote enough ‘attention’ to the changing nature of the system you are operating within and trip, you don’t start using labels such as “I lost situational awareness and as a result fell over”, which is historically how aviation has tended to described a similar event.

Similarly, running through the forest at night means you have to devote more mental resources to ongoing environmental decisions,such as where to put your feet, so you don’t have the spare mental capacity to have the in-depth conversation with your partner that possibly distracted you enough to miss the tree root previously.

Redefining situation assessment as a pilot or crew’s ongoing environmental decision making within a complex adaptive system links this concept to the voluminous and rapidly changing decision-making research and importantly, to the research on decision-making training (the edited volume Making Decisions Under Stress provides an excellent initial resource for readers who want to learn more about this area).

If situational assessment is ongoing environmental decision making then in standard operational environments this process will rely on fast and cognitively frugal recognition primed processes where you won’t even recognise you are making decisions — you just ‘know’.

However, if your attention is sufficiently diverted for long enough you may become unaware of your operational position within the constantly but perhaps subtly changing complex adaptive system of which you are part. How many times have you missed picking up something on the drive home because you “tuned out”? Flying an aircraft may not be as forgiving.

Importantly, when you are faced with unusual or more complex situations, you cannot use these same naturalistic decision-making processes. Instead, you have to default to the more cognitively consuming rational choice decision-making processes, where you have to think and estimate your operational position within the system you are part of — and how this impacts on your relevant goals.

Under these situations it is very easy to exceed the scarce capacity of your very limited capacity working memory — and once this becomes overloaded, good decision making is likely to suffer in very unpredictable ways.

Note that what is an unusual or complex situation is very dependent on the individual pilot or crew’s expertise, which while related to, is not the same thing as experience. Hence, pilots with greater expertise may continue to have spare capacity in a situation that totally overloads a pilot with lesser expertise.
To reinforce this point, which has been the subject of previous articles in this series, people have a very limited working memory capacity. This is where all the processing takes place that’s required to make the environmental decisions needed to develop ‘situational awareness’.

Normally you can use recognition primed decision-making processes, which are fast and cognitively frugal. But in unusual situations you have to use slow and cognitively taxing processes to make operational decisions on how to reposition yourself within the complex system you are part of.

If you are faced with using these working memory intensive processes in time-limited situations or otherwise high workload environments, you may rapidly overload your working memory resources or run out of time to ‘figure out what is going on’.

Once you hit either of these two limits, accurate environmental and operational decision making becomes severely compromised, if not impossible. This is why in accident or incident reports highly trained, experienced crews often seem so confused.

And it’s why they have made choices that appear so poor — but only after all ambiguities have been removed, anomalies explained, salient inputs identified and where you have all the time in the world to understand their time-constrained and working-memory overloaded decisions.

Thorough and thoughtful planning, appropriate task prioritisation and knowledge of and adherence to standard operating procedures, while minimising distractions that are unrelated to the task at hand, are vital tools in keeping as much spare mental capacity available as possible.

This is essential, as you never know when the unpredictable nature of the complex adaptive system you are part of will tax your working memory to its limit. When this limit is exceeded, appropriate environmental decision making becomes unpredictable at best — with the result that reality, and the pilot or crew’s understanding of this reality are likely to be quite divergent.

Operational decisions based on this quicksand are a lottery.

(The author would like to thank Dr Nicklas Dahlstrom for his helpful comments on previous drafts of this article).