What are the three ways to “look” to maintain situational awareness?

What are the three ways to look” to maintain situational awareness?

I have a friend who stepped off the curb and was killed by a vehicle running a red light. He was 40 years old and his life was over in one second. I almost made the same mistake.

While in England, I checked for traffic and confidently began to step into the intersection, when my companion yanked me back. I’d looked left instead of right, the wrong direction in a country that drives on the left-hand side of the street. It was a near miss and my companion chided me: “That’s why we call you Yanks.”

Situational Awareness

I have spent a fair amount of time over the past several years trying to define and refine my understanding of the term “Situational Awareness.”

Most of the written material deals with very technical definitions, that for me hold little real world application. As I tried to make them fit my own experience with awareness, I realized that the academic approach was impractical.

So here’s how I defined “situational awareness.” It is: “paying attention to what is going on around you.” How’s that for practical? It’s more than that, but the basic definition is the ability to scan the environment and sense danger, challenges and opportunities, while maintaining the ability to conduct normal activities. In other words, to pay attention to your surroundings while not appearing to be paying attention.

Understanding the Baseline

Awareness is a choice. One has to choose to pay attention. But once that choice is made, the part of the brain responsible for monitoring the senses, known as the Reticular Activating System (RAS) takes over. It switches filters on and off that will fulfill your subconscious desire to pay attention. By simply telling yourself to pay attention to certain things, the RAS will scan for and acknowledge those things when it encounters them.

I have found three main obstacles to developing awareness. To understand the obstacles with awareness, lets define the most basic tenant of awareness: BASELINE. The concept of baseline states that our environment has a baseline, a homeostatic state of what things look like, sound like and feel like when nothing much is going on.

In the woods, this is reflective of the noise and activity level of the area when nothing much is happening. The normal state. For example, in the late afternoon, things are normally pretty quiet. The baseline is pretty flat. As we move into evening, the baseline changes a bit. Night feeding animals are coming out, day feeders are going in.

The increase in noise and activity is still the norm. It is louder and yet still within the realm of normal. Suddenly a predator appears. All the prey animals react. Alarm calls go out and the noise level suddenly spikes. This is referred to as a concentric ring of disturbance because it radiates out from the source.

In the city, each neighborhood has its own baseline. In one area, people move at a certain pace, talk at a certain volume, stand at a certain socially acceptable distance from one another, gesture in a certain way. This combination of noise and activity constitutes that area’s baseline. Depending on cultural or ethnic norms, it will be different in various neighborhoods.

Being able to develop awareness is dependent upon first knowing the baseline for the area you are in and recognizing any variations to the baseline. These changes in baseline are learned from observation. One must know the baseline. One must recognize disturbances to the baseline and one must recognize if those disturbances represent a specific threat or opportunity.

This requires knowledge of the environment, knowledge of terrain. It requires that one recognizes predator behavior. It requires one to see well beyond normal sight. For example, an aware person will notice things others may miss: a youth in a hoodie across the street whose movements mimic yours. Or a dumpster set in such a way that requires you to pass close to it. It can be threats or potential threats. You must constantly monitor and assess. Over time, this becomes almost a background activity, requiring little conscious thought.

The key to great situational awareness is the ability to monitor the baseline and recognize changes.

Three Obstacles in Situational Awareness

1. Not Monitoring the Baseline. If you are not monitoring the baseline, you will not recognize the presence of predators that cause a disturbance. Other events can cause concentric rings as well. Any unusual occurrence from a car accident to a street fight can create a concentric ring. One of the keys to personal security is learning to look for and recognize these disturbances. Some disturbances are dangerous, some are just entertaining.

2. Normalcy Bias. Even though we may sense a concentric ring that could be alerting us of danger, many times we will ignore the alert due to the desire for it NOT to be a danger. We want things to be OK, so we don’t accept that the stimulus we’re receiving represents a threat. We have a bias towards the status quo. Nothing has ever happened when I do this, so nothing is likely to happen.

3. The third interrupter of awareness is what we define as a Focus Lock. This is some form of distraction that is so engaging, that it focuses all of our awareness on one thing and by default, blocks all the other stimulus in our environment. This is when someone is texting and walks into a fountain. The smart phone is the single most effective focus lock ever invented. It robs us of our awareness in times and places where it’s needed most.

Three Effective Techniques to Stay Aware

1. Monitor the Baseline. At first, this will require conscious effort. But after a while, I find that I can monitor the baseline subconsciously.

2. Fight Normalcy Bias. This requires you to be paranoid for a while as you develop your ability. Look at every disturbance to the baseline as a potential threat. This will allow you to stop ignoring or discounting concentric rings and begin making assessments of the actual risk. But as you learn, people will think you are jumpy or paranoid. That is OK. It’s a skill that will save your life.

3. Avoid using the obvious focus locks in transition areas. It is ok to text while you are sitting at your desk or laying in bed. But it’s NOT ok to text as you walk from your office to the parking garage.

Any time you’re drawn to a concentric ring event, do a quick assessment of that ring, then stop looking at it (the event) and scan the rest of your environment to see what you’re missing.

Developing awareness is a skill. At first it will seem very awkward and self-conscious, but with practice, it will become seamless and subconscious. You will start to pick up on more and more subtle rings of disturbance and more complex stimuli. Eventually, people may think you are psychic as they notice how you seem to sense events before they unfold.

Editor-in-Chief’s Note: Kevin Reeve is the founder of onPoint Tactical, training professionals and select civilians in urban escape & evasion, urban survival, wilderness survival, tracking and scout skills. I’ve personally taken onPoint Tactical’s Urban Escape & Evasion class and highly recommend it as a resource!

I was involved in a film project recreating a firefighter close call event that occurred during a basement fire. While interviewing the firefighters who were on the hose line in the basement, I recognized an interesting dynamic.

The firefighter who was on the nozzle heard the least amount of radio traffic and recalled the least about the changing conditions in the basement.

As my interviews progressed through the firefighters farther back on the hose line, the descriptions of the radio traffic and interior conditions became more detailed. Ultimately, the firefighter who was the first to recognize that the fire had moved behind the crew and was threatening their exit was the firefighter farthest back on the hose line.

What are the three ways to look” to maintain situational awareness?

As a leader, your primary role is situational awareness and scene safety. (Photo/courtesy American Ambulance Association)

The differences in these firefighter’s stories and observations are a classic example of the difference between task orientation and situational orientation. Each moment that we are on scene, we are choosing to devote our attention toward specific tasks and skills, or the details around us.

Every task and skill that we devote attention towards robs us of a little bit of our situational orientation, or our awareness of the environment around us.

Task orientation

When we are primarily involved in skill orientation, most of our attention is dedicated to the task being performed. In these moments, the details of the task or skill tend to consume us.

Where is the best site to establish an IV? Am I getting a good seal on the BVM mask? Which blade should I select for this intubation attempt and where is it located?

The more complex the skill being performed, the more of our attention it will require. Securing a patient to a board may require only a small percentage of our awareness, while an oral intubation attempt may draw upon all of our focus and attention.

Situational orientation

When we are not engaged in tasks or skills, our attention naturally turns to the details of our environment. We notice the color of the curtains, the ashtray filled with cigarette butts and the closed bedroom door at the end of the hallway. This orientation is more commonly referred to as situational awareness.

This broader awareness allows us to see the big picture. Only when we are unburdened by complex skills and uninvolved in tasks can we truly devote our mental focus to situational awareness.

In our scene safety lectures, we often pay a lot of lip-service to situational awareness, but we don’t always mention how to achieve it.

Tasks need to be accomplished. Someone needs to do the work of assessing and treating the patient. So how do we get the work done and still maintain our awareness of the whole scene?

Here are three ways to improve situational awareness.

1. Practice your front-door survey

Inexperienced providers often charge forward into the scene and become involved in tasks. We do this for several reasons.

First, we are often insecure that any hesitation will be interpreted as uncertainty. When we are new EMS providers, we struggle to appear confident and in charge, so we begin patient care without hesitation.

Scene management can also be far more difficult than basic assessment and care for one patient. The larger and more complex a scene, the more enticing and comforting task orientation becomes. Practicing a front-door survey, or scene survey, is one way to overcome this challenge.

Remember the scene survey? It’s not just for the national registry skills test.

Try to actually stop for a moment as you enter a scene and let your senses take in the whole picture. Before you rush to the patient’s side, spend a few seconds and take in the sights, sounds, smells, mood and emotional tempo of the scene. Ask yourself if everything fits. Consider what resources you are likely to need.

2. Reorient yourself after a task

Sometimes, you will be the person doing the bulk of the task work. That doesn’t mean that you need to completely disregard your surroundings.

After each task that you complete, look around. Take in everything for just a few seconds before you begin your next task. Reconsider if the scene is being managed around you appropriately, or if a change in tactics is necessary.

You can also use the natural pauses in the flow or progression of the scene to shift back into scene survey mode. While strapping down the patient on the pram or waiting for someone to hand you a blood pressure cuff, shift your mental focus back to the environment and prepare for your next task.

3. Situational awareness leadership

Scene presence, leadership and delegation can be some of the toughest skills to learn, especially when we are personally good at the tasks and skills that need to be completed. Doing things yourself is comfortable; leading others on the scene is not. This is why we so often see those who are supposed to be in charge carrying backboards and holding c-spine.

A huge part of scene leadership is maintaining situational awareness and looking out for the folks on scene who are involved in tasks. Their task orientation leaves them in a high-risk mode where they could easily miss an important big-picture detail.

Is the person holding the end of the backboard too close to the passing cars? Should you find out if anyone is in that back bedroom? Is the patient’s drunk husband becoming agitated?

In training, it’s OK to talk about scene safety being everyone’s job. It is.

But mostly, it’s your job. Someone needs to stand back and maintain situational awareness. If you are the leader, that is your primary job. Put down the blood pressure cuff and lead. 

What are the three ways to look” to maintain situational awareness?

Learn more

How to make scene safety a core part of every EMS response

Attacks on EMS providers by the very people we are trying to help are becoming all too common: Review your safety practices and training

This article was originally posted Sept. 23, 2014. It has been updated.