How Does Situational Awareness Affect Decision Making?
A phenomena I’ve encountered in almost every project is the inability, of those I’m supporting, to separate fact from fiction. Leaders and their teams making critical decisions following a robust fact free debate. The confident assertion of belief statements without any demonstrable evidence. For what ever reason these smart and capable individuals, in these contexts, had almost no situational awareness.
A moment seems to present when a team starts get a sense of a problem and its’ solution, as opposed to clearly defining the problem vs solution and with a still-out-of-focus notion they rush off to take action. This leads to all sorts of false starts and thousands of pounds down the drain in lost salary time. So, what can the nominated leader of any team do to at least minimise risk wasting precious resources?
Let’s explore this now.
Situational Awareness
The model below is based on a matrix by Albert Humphrey from the Stanford Research Institute, Stanford University who identified 4 key factors that contribute to the success or failure of any endeavour. It offers an individual, team or organisation a preliminary assessment of the internal and external factors they need to consider before setting off in pursuit of a specific, short or long term, objective. As I’ve said in a previous article, this can be anything from delivering a career defining presentation to a team winning a major sporting tournament.
Strengths: Appraisal of current internal factors that provide advantages in pursuit of the objective.
Weaknesses: Appraisal of current internal factors to be mitigated or eliminated to achieve the objective.
Opportunities: Possible external factors in the future that could be leveraged to achieve the objective.
Threats: Possible external factors in the future that could derail attainment of the objective.
We can see the model encourages the user to anticipate and create, to the best of their ability, a 360 degree snapshot of the landscape they must navigate in order to achieve their objective. Let me give you simple personal example:
In 2016 I was invited to be the opening speaker at TEDxStirling and this was my situational assessment at the time of receiving an invite:
Strengths: Subject matter; 30+ years operating in the field of human behaviour pro-actively continuing to learn.
Weaknesses: Coach and Facilitator that stimulates discussion to deliver outcomes, not a presenter or storyteller.
Opportunities: Share knowledge and wisdom through exposure to a new audience and deliver a TEDtalk.
Threats: Unaccustomed to parroting memorised lines therefore risk of coming undone on stage is high.
You can read about my 11th hour blindspots and ensuing anxiety in a previous case study that investigates how to leverage emotional states as part of your decision making process and take action, High Performance: Confidence vs Anxiety. Anyway, you can see from the outset I was aware of what to leverage and what would require considerable purposeful practice in order to pull this speaking engagement off. I had 12 weeks.
Triage
The model below is the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, its’ name stemming from a quote attributed to the 34th US President, Dwight, D. Eisenhower: "I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent."
By correlating the relationship between Urgency, defined as: The timeframe in which a decision must be made or activity completed, and Importance, defined as: The impact a decision or activity will likely have on a desired outcome. One of four courses of action present in the assessment of any decision or activity:
We can see the model demonstrates a very simple method of reducing the number of distractions in order to maintain focus on achieving an objective. Having previously completed the SWOT analysis this allows us to create a critical path analysis for the sequence required activities should most likely be undertaken, balancing Efficiency: best use of resources, and Effectiveness: Degree of mission success. To continue my example from above:
I had to assess my workload at the time and postpone, and in some cases cancel, other activities in my life to ensure I could prepare accordingly, the ask of myself for this task was very much outside my comfort zone. I work for myself, so delegation is not an option and I considered this opportunity a likely once-in-a-lifetime-experience due to the stiff competition for TED events, hence Do It.
State Management
Below is a representation of an ideal path for any decision scenario using a simplified version of Prof. Mihály Csikszentmihályi Flow model, which he originally discovered in 1975 after identifying the components of high performance. I have updated this to demonstrate the relationship between Strategy, Operations and High Performance, which can be applied to any individual, team or organisation. By looking at the relationship between Challenge, defined as: Degree of difficulty to be overcome, and Support, defined as: Available resources. Four states emerge:
These four states correlate with specific behaviours that can be measured in any individual, team or organisation.
Anxiety: Missed deadlines, avoidance of interaction, likely negatively impacting employee sickness absence.
Apathy: Absence of enthusiasm or presence of indifference, likely negatively impacting employee retention.
Comfort: Lack of activity and accountability, likely negatively impacting employee productivity.
Flow: Pro-active, self-directed, emphasis on personal responsibility, likely positively impacting all above.
Conclusion
Learning to assess a situation and prioritise decisions means we can take practical steps to measurably improve performance outcomes, even in high stress scenarios. As I’ve said in a previous case study, High Performance: Confidence vs Anxiety, the more variables and/or distractions we can identify and eliminate with a successful strategy the more likely we are to achieve the state of Flow, individually or collectively, and deliver agreed outcomes.
As these models are universal and apply to absolutely everyone, from individuals and teams to entire departments and organisations, might it be worth assessing your own situation against these models?
Determine your SWOT factors
Triage your activity and decisions
Set some next steps to up your game accordingly.
If you want to improve your self-awareness, situational awareness and decision making skills, then please do schedule a call with me by putting a 60mins in my diary at a time that suits you. We can discuss your situation and options over an eCoffee.
Best Wishes
Kenny
