Decision making in high stress environments is
strongly intuitive – but does not have to be so. We may make poor, even
senseless decisions, while clearly seeing events around us escalating towards
inevitable disaster. Inspired by Dr. Rich Gasaway’s notions on emergency
management, I gathered some of my ideas on how currently available technologies
can be utilized to improve situational awareness.
Dr. Gasaway has
more than 30 years of experience as a fire service professional, including 22
years as a chief officer and incident commander. He is an acclaimed speaker and
instructor focusing on tactical situational awareness and how we can improve
our capabilities to form better operational pictures i.e. situational awareness
in high stress situations by training and by understanding how our brains process
information. As a seasoned fire service professional as well as a scholar in
neuroscience of decision making, Dr. Gasaway quite aptly claims; “decision
making in high stress environments is more a neuroscience topic than a
leadership topic”.
We observe our
environment mainly visually and form our perception i.e. an idea of what’s
currently going on around us based on what we see. Resulting understanding or
awareness of current situation is used to make decisions on how we should react
on what we are seeing. Pretty obvious so far. However, when we are observing
events taking place not in our immediate vicinity, challenge of forming
situational awareness is more difficult. In most of cases we then are relying
on our ears. This may typically be the case in, for example command centers. I
have personally witnessed a staged exercise where three fire departments,
police department and military co-operated in clearing a chemical train
accident. The exercise included fire and leak suppression, evacuation of
civilians within the fall-out zone, paramedic operations etc. etc. I was
surprised to see the amount of information efficiently collected, organized and
disseminated. All done with radio-based communication only. Amazing. The
incident commanders of fire departments have my highest respect.
While talking with some
fire chiefs I have realized that the mass of data they are handling and
organizing almost on daily bases is close to overwhelming, to me at least.
Given this challenge I was surprised to learn that more visual and
self-explanatory command systems are not utilized, even though enabling
technologies have been available for a very long time. Quick explanation
followed; the systems are out of your average fire department’s reach in terms
of purchase and operation costs. This can’t be right!? Especially when
currently available web and mobile technologies allow various different ways to
provide content rich and visually powerful situational data.
Google’s as well as
HERE’s map and navigation services already provide excellent content to support
situational awareness in terms of locations and how to get there. However, visualization
of a comprehensive situational picture requires combining diverse data from variety
of sources. A vast amount of data is already available; public organizations
such as traffic, road, transportation, water, law enforcement and other
authorities are actively opening their databases to be integrated and utilized
by other public organizations and private companies, such as software
developers. Smartphones, which actually are mobile computers on perpetual
on-line mode have become everyman’s tool for searching and disseminating
information in real-time. They also provide your location; imperative
information when forming operational picture. From these building blocks is created,
for example Obshare, a comprehensive and cost effective service providing
highly usable collaboration and situational awareness service to organizations.
Dr. Rich Gasaway’s website:
http://www.samatters.com/
