• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Safety Risk .net

Humanising Safety and Embracing Real Risk

  • Home
    • About
      • Privacy Policy
      • Contact
  • FREE RESOURCES
    • FREE SAFETY eBOOKS
    • FREE DOWNLOADS
    • TOP 50
    • FREE RISK ASSESSMENT FORMS
    • Find a Safety Consultant
    • Free Safety Program Documents
    • Psychology Of Safety
    • Safety Ideas That Work
    • HEALTH and SAFETY MANUALS
    • FREE SAFE WORK METHOD STATEMENT RESOURCES
    • Whats New In Safety
    • FUN SAFETY STUFF
    • Health and Safety Training
    • SAFETY COURSES
    • Safety Training Needs Analysis and Matrix
    • Top 20 Safety Books
    • This Toaster Is Hot
    • Free Covid-19 Toolbox Talks
    • Download Page – Please Be Patient With Larger Files…….
    • SAFETY IMAGES, Photos, Unsafe Pictures and Funny Fails
    • How to Calculate TRIFR, LTIFR and Other Health and Safety Indicators
    • Download Safety Moments from Human Resources Secretariat
  • PSYCHOLOGY OF SAFETY & RISK
    • Safety Psychology Terminology
    • Some Basics on Social Psychology & Risk
    • Understanding The Social Psychology of Risk – Prof Karl E. Weick
    • The Psychology of Leadership in Risk
    • Conducting a Psychology and Culture Safety Walk
    • The Psychology of Conversion – 20 Tips to get Started
    • Understanding The Social Psychology of Risk And Safety
    • Psychology and safety
    • The Psychology of Safety
    • Hot Toaster
    • TALKING RISK VIDEOS
    • WHAT IS SAFETY
    • THE HOT TOASTER
    • THE ZERO HARM DEBATE
    • SEMIOTICS
    • LEADERSHIP
  • Covid-19
    • COVID-19 (Coronavirus, Omicron) Health and Safety Slogans and Quotes for the Workplace
    • Covid-19 Returning to Work Inductions, Transitioning, Safety Start Up and Re Entry Plans
    • Covid-19 Work from Home Safety Checklists and Risk Assessments
    • The Hierarchy of Control and Covid-19
    • Why Safety Loves Covid-19
    • Covid-19, Cricket and Lessons in Safety
    • The Covid-19 Lesson
    • Safety has this Covid-19 thing sorted
    • The Heart of Wisdom at Covid Time
    • How’s the Hot Desking Going Covid?
    • The Semiotics of COVID-19 and the Social Amplification of Risk
    • Working From Home Health and Safety Tips – Covid-19
    • Covid-19 and the Hierarchy of Control
  • Dr Rob Long Posts
    • Learning Styles Matter
    • There is no HIERARCHY of Controls
    • Scaffolding, Readiness and ZPD in Learning
    • What Can Safety Learn From Playschool?
    • Presentation Tips for Safety People
    • Dialogue Do’s and Don’ts
    • It’s Only a Symbol
    • Ten Cautions About Safety Checklists
    • Zero is Unethical
    • First Report on Zero Survey
    • There is No Objectivity, Deal With it!
  • Quotes & Slogans
    • Researchers Reveal the Top 10 Most Effective Safety Slogans Of All Time
    • When Slogans Don’t Work
    • 77 OF THE MOST CLASSIC, FAMOUS and INFAMOUS SAFETY QUOTES
    • 500 BEST and WORST WORKPLACE HEALTH and SAFETY SLOGANS 2021
    • 167 CATCHY and FUNNY SAFETY SLOGANS FOR THE WORKPLACE
    • COVID-19 (Coronavirus, Omicron) Health and Safety Slogans and Quotes for the Workplace
    • Safety Acronyms
    • You know Where You Can Stick Your Safety Slogans
    • Sayings, Slogans, Aphorisms and the Discourse of Simple
    • Spanish Safety Slogans – Consignas de seguridad
    • Safety Slogans List
    • Road Safety Slogans
    • How to write your own safety slogans
    • Why Are Safety Slogans Important
    • Safety Slogans Don’t Save Lives
    • 40 Free Safety Slogans For the Workplace
    • Safety Slogans for Work
You are here: Home / Safety Leadership / Organisational Situational Awareness

Organisational Situational Awareness

February 16, 2015 by Goran Prvulovic 9 Comments

Organisational Situational Awareness

By Goran Prvulovic, MOccHlth&Saf

The concept of situational awareness (SA) is not a new one. It is often talked about in management circles and is extensively covered in OHS literature, especially in relation to an individual’s ability to understand the work environment elements in a particular time frame, evaluate a range of factors and use the acquired knowledge to predict their status in the future. It is a deep, conscious awareness in ‘now’, the present moment.

Situational awareness can simply be seen as a past, present and future state with associated internal questions such as:

  • Where was I and what happened before?
  • Where am I and what is happening around me, and
  • Where am I going and what can credibly happen?

There are a range of factors associated with situational awareness such as attention, ability to recognise and retrieve patterns, workload, mental models and working memory. In fact, situational awareness is mostly about human ability to adequately focus, resist a tunnel vision and a capacity to self-reflect. When situational awareness works, we are aware that we are being aware. This is where individuals need to be to achieve safe execution of work and a local workplace balance between production and protection.

Can the same principle be applied to an organisation as a whole? Does an organisation need to be situationally aware? It makes sense that it does, especially in relation to management of business risks in all functions, and at all levels.

Organisations need to be constantly situationally aware in relation to their operational activities as this is where hazards and risks have largest potential to cause losses, specifically those with unforeseen and severe consequences. Organisational situational awareness relates to a collective mindful state of a large group of individuals involved in decision making processes and high level organisational activities.  Some of those activities are management of change, management of contractors, human and reliability issues, resourcing, competency and training of people as well as implementation of integrated management systems.

Organisations really need to focus on signals their reporting, communicational and warning systems produce as ignoring or not noticing them has proven in many cases worldwide to have disastrous consequences. To be able to hear and understand those sometimes faint signals, organisation needs to be situationally aware. This means that senior organisational decision makers need to routinely apply attention and focus to operations, understand current state and predict potential credible consequences.

This is not an easy task. Organisational focus on risks is often pointed towards the high likelihood – low consequence events as opposed to low likelihood – high consequence ones, mostly as a product of what is familiar, tangible and attention grabbing.  When catastrophic events occur, investigations commonly find deep underlying organisational causes which have been in existence for a long time, hidden, not known or not recognised as significant and acted on in a timely manner.  Logically, one view can be that in many cases organisations on the receiving end were not situationally aware to appropriate extent.

To increase overall organisational situational awareness, organisations need to revisit 3 critical states (past, present and future) and critically examine the following components:

  • Spatial awareness – Is our awareness of operating space, operating conditions, human performance issues, work requirements and management performance at the level where it needs to be? Do we need to make ourselves more familiar with operations and its components, to improve quality of our decisions?
  • System awareness – Are we adequately aware of the critical systems of work, their efficiency, practicality and level of their implementation? Are we auditing for quality of integrated systems?
  • Task awareness – What is our level of knowledge about the practical field work execution? Do we have a good understanding of the problems which exist on the sharp end?

How skilful, knowledgeable and efficient are our front line leaders and what can we do to assist or upskill them.

  • Pattern recognition – Are we ‘tuned in’ to signals and messages from all of our warning systems and are those systems optimised and used appropriately? Are we constantly on the lookout for unexpected, seeking to identify where the next incident will come from? Have we ‘tuned out’ to some consistent warnings and are treating them as ‘white noise’?
  • Attention – Is the ratio of leaders per team members appropriate? Do we have enough people on the ground to do the task safely and efficiently? Are demands of the job exceeding people’s and supervisors capacity? Are we paying attention to the right things?
  • Mental models – Have we provided and implemented appropriate tools for making people aware of the critical systems, work methods and requirements. Do we have a good understanding of human factors and reliability and are our systems and tools adequately structures to help people store and retrieve the right information for the task at hand?

There are a number of useful approaches in becoming a situationally aware organisation. Field leadership goes a long way in observing the actual operational processes, providing focus and attention to those processes, auditing critical reporting systems and systems of work, establishing efficiency of the front line leaders, interacting with employees, listening actively and aggressively,  building relationships and becoming aware and cognisant of the issues on the sharp.

From the leadership perspective, paying systematic attention and understanding those factors is what makes one a situationally aware leader. Grouped together, situationally aware leaders can apply this awareness in practice through various risk assessment tools which will guide them towards the right decision. Ultimately, for an organisation to be a situationally aware one, its leaders need to be constantly asking critical questions outlined in this article and be in touch with operational realities. This is the process which can never stop as we are only situationally cognisant when we are being aware of it.

References

University of West Florida, Military Psychology: Situational Awareness (2011) Retrieved 20/01/2015 from uwf.edu/skass/documents/Milpsy_situationawareness_000.ppt

 

  • Bio
  • Latest Posts
  • More about Goran
Goran Prvulovic

Goran Prvulovic

Director & Principal Consultant at RiskWise Solutions
Goran Prvulovic

Latest posts by Goran Prvulovic (see all)

  • Safety Manager – an Ultimate Scapegoat - September 5, 2016
  • HSE Performance – Back to Basics - May 28, 2015
  • Impacts of Cognitive Dissonance in the Workplace - April 25, 2015
  • Organisational Risk Profiling by Consequences – a Failed Approach - March 30, 2015
  • Are Our Front Line Leaders Ready? - March 8, 2015
Goran Prvulovic
Goran is a HSE Professional from Western Australia with multi industry experience, currently operating in the power generation industry as a Regional HSE Manager. His career in the Western Australian mining industry began in 1989 where Goran performed a multitude of operational and leadership roles, culminating in a full time engagement as a safety professional in 2005. Goran’s specialties include Safety Culture, Leadership and Operational Discipline interventions and catastrophic risk profiling and management. Goran holds a Master’s Degree in OHS from Edith Cowen University in Western Australia. He also holds a number of vocational educational accreditations and is currently undertaking further studies in the area of Management and Leadership. Goran has held a number of senior HSE management positions in Western Australian Mining where he has managed multidisciplinary teams as well as lead and assisted in development and implementation of HSE management systems. He also developed a number programs aimed at leadership development, improvement of safety culture and operational discipline in several organisations. He is currently developing his consultancy business focused on safety leadership and upskilling of front line leadership in OHS. He enjoys development and execution of training as well as occasional writing. He lives with his wife and children in Perth, Western Australia and enjoys bushwalking.

Please share our posts

  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)

Related

Filed Under: Safety Leadership Tagged With: situational awareness

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Search and Discover More on this Site

Visit Count – Started Jan 2015

  • 23,900,706 Visitors

Never miss a post - Subscribe via Email

Enter your email address and join other discerning risk and safety people who receive notifications of new posts by email

Join 7,410 other subscribers

NEW! Free Download

How we pay for the high cost of running of this site – try it for free on your site

Please take our 2 minute zero survey

Recent Comments

  • Rob Long on Is Safety A Virtue Signal?
  • John Davey on Is Safety A Virtue Signal?
  • Kenny on 15 Safety Precautions When Working With Electricity
  • Rob Long on Being Emotional and Being Safe
  • simon cassin on Being Emotional and Being Safe
  • Patrick O'Brien on ‘Measuring’ does things to people…. (and what to do about it)
  • Rob Long on How to Know if Safety ‘Works’
  • Jack Benton on How to Know if Safety ‘Works’
  • Rob Long on Understanding Humans and How They Tackle Risk
  • Brian Darlington on How to Know if Safety ‘Works’

FREE eBOOK DOWNLOADS

Featured Downloads

  • Awareness-EBook-Rev-01.pdf (2078 downloads)
  • Zero-to-HRO.docx (1961 downloads)
  • Presentation-Skills-Toolbox.pdf (1123 downloads)
  • Due-Diligence-Workshop-Nov-2018.pdf (747 downloads)
  • Injury Data Spreadsheet (20516 downloads)
  • Free Health and Safety Manual (72075 downloads)
  • hazard-database.xls (5636 downloads)
  • National Psychological safety guidance material (191 downloads)
  • Volunteer-Risk-Assessment-checklist.pdf (2065 downloads)
  • Learning-How-to-Facilitate-Learning.docx (3125 downloads)
  • The-air-that-I-breathe.docx (1035 downloads)
  • Abdukadirov_UnintendedConsequences_v11.pdf (1376 downloads)
  • Manual-Handling-Checklist.doc (6496 downloads)
  • Risk-Unplugged-Peter-Ribbe.pdf (2267 downloads)
  • WorkSafe_inspectors_guide_FINAL.pdf (1026 downloads)

Recent Posts

  • Is Safety A Virtue Signal?
  • Being Emotional and Being Safe
  • CLLR–Quarterly Newsletter–April 2022
  • Understanding Real Risk
  • Understanding Humans and How They Tackle Risk
  • How to Know if Safety ‘Works’
  • Programming for Safety, the Performance Myth
  • Complacency, Consciousness and Error in Safety
  • Demonising Error and Mistakes, What Can the Book of Job Tell Safety
  • How an Obsession with SAFETY Leads to Mental Illness & Tyranny

What is Psychological Safety at Work?

Footer

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address and join other discerning risk and safety people who receive notifications of new posts by email

Join 7,410 other subscribers

AUTHORS

  • Alan Quilley
    • Heinrich–Industrial Accident Prevention
    • The Problem With ZERO Goals and Results
  • Bernard Corden
    • After the goldrush
    • The Internationale
  • Bill Sims
    • Employee Engagement: Chocolate, Vanilla, or Strawberry?
    • Injury Hiding-How do you stop it?
  • Craig Clancy
    • Task Based vs Activity Based Safe Work Method Statements
    • Safety And Tender Submissions
  • Daniel Kirk
    • It’s easy being wise after the event.
    • A Positive Safety Story
  • Dave Whitefield
    • Safety is about…
    • Safety and Compliance
  • Dennis Millard
    • Are You Risk Intelligent?
    • Honey they get me! They get me at work!
  • Drewie
    • Downturn Doin’ Your Head In? Let’s Chat….
    • How was your break?
  • Gabrielle Carlton
    • All Care and No Care!
    • You Are Not Alone!
  • George Robotham
    • How to Give an Unforgettable Safety Presentation
    • How To Write a Safety Report
  • Goran Prvulovic
    • Safety Manager – an Ultimate Scapegoat
    • HSE Performance – Back to Basics
  • James Ellis
    • Psychological Core Stability for Wellbeing in Workers Comp
    • In search of plan B in workers’ recovery
  • James Parkinson
    • To laugh or not to laugh
    • People and Safety
  • John Toomey
    • In it for The Long Haul – Making the most of the FIFO Lifestyle
    • Who is Responsible for This?
  • Karl Cameron
    • Abby Normal Safety
    • The Right Thing
  • Ken Roberts
    • Safety Legislation Is Our Biggest Accident?
    • HSE Trip Down Memory Lane
  • Mark Perrett
    • Psychology of Persuasion: Top 5 influencing skills for getting what you want
  • Mark Taylor
    • Build a Psychologically Safe Workplace by Taking Risks and Analysing Failures
    • Enculturing Safety
  • Max Geyer
    • WHS Legislation is NOT about Safety it’s about Culture
    • Due Diligence Is Not Just Ticking Boxes!
  • Matt Thorne
    • Safety Culture–Hudson’s Model
    • Culture – Edgar Schein
  • Peter Ribbe
    • Is there “Common Sense” in safety?
    • Who wants to be a safety professional?
  • Phil LaDuke
    • Professional Conferences Are A Sleazy Con
    • Hey Idiots, You’re Worried About the Wrong Things
  • Admin
    • CLLR–Quarterly Newsletter–April 2022
    • How an Obsession with SAFETY Leads to Mental Illness & Tyranny
  • Dr Rob Long
    • Is Safety A Virtue Signal?
    • Being Emotional and Being Safe
  • Rob Sams
    • The Learning (and unlearning) that Revealed my Vocation
    • I’m just not that into safety anymore
  • Barry Spud
    • Things To Consider When Developing And Designing Your Company SWMS
    • Bad Safety Photos
  • Sheri Suckling
    • How Can I Get the Boss to Listen?
  • Simon Cassin
    • Safety values, ideas, behaviours and clothes
  • Safety Nerd
    • The Block isn’t portraying safety as it should be
    • Toolbox Talk Show–PPE
  • Wynand Serfontein
    • Why The Problem With Learning Is Unlearning
    • I DON’T KNOW
  • Zoe Koskinas
    • Why is fallibility so challenging in the workplace?

Most commented on

The Unconscious and the Soap Dispenser

Forecasting Safety

The Banned Objects Index – A New Development in Safety Culture

Dumbs for Safety

The Real Barriers to Safety

Safety as Faith Healing

Who Said We Don’t Need Systems?

Why Safety Controls Don’t Always Work

How to use signs, symbols and text effectively in communicating about risk

Safety Should NOT Be About Safety

FEATURED POSTS

Understanding The Social Psychology of Risk And Safety

Risk Intelligence, Thinking and Decision Making

The Tyranny of Absolutes

Paperwork and Usability in Tackling Risk

New Video Available – Semiotics Walk Workshop

The Mechanistic Worldview and the Dehumanisation of Risk

Face-to-Face Safety

Managing the Unexpected

Toward Zero, A Failed Goal

Trinket Safety

Mapping Social Influence Strategies

The Mythic Symbology of Safety

Culture About Much More Than Structure

Can There Be Other Valid Worldviews Than Safety?

Embracing Diversity & Critical Thinking to Help us ‘Create’?

The Measurement Mindset in Safety???

Understanding Psychological Terminology

The Safety Worldview and the Worldview of Safety, Testing Due Diligence

Target Trade-Offs and Numeric Goals

The Colour of Safety

More Posts from this Category

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address and join other discerning risk and safety people who receive notifications of new posts by email

Join 7,410 other subscribers

How we pay for the high cost of running of this site – try it for free on your site

 

How To Make Your Own Hand Sanitizer

 

 

How to Make your own Covid-19 Face Mask

 

Covid-19 Returning To Work Safety, Transitioning, Start Up And Re Entry Plans

 

How’s the Hot Desking Going Covid?

imageOne of the benefits of the Covid-19 epidemic is a total rethink about how we live and work (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-28/coronavirus-could-reshape-how-australians-work-forever/12097124 ).

Expertise by Regurgitation and Re-Badging

One of the fascinating things about the Coronavirus pandemic is watching Safety morph into epidemiology expertise. I would like a dollar for every flyer, presentation, podcast, powerpoint, checklist template, toolbox talk and poster set that had jumped into my inbox… Read the rest

The Stress of Stasis

One of the challenging things about the Coronavirus crisis is stasis. For those without work and confined to home, for those in self-isolation, it’s like life is frozen in time. ‘Stay at home’ is the mantra. The trouble is, in… Read the rest

loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.