There are four key factors that may affect situational awareness, and which must be considered when planning. They are: experience, training, environment and shaping factors.
1.Experience
Experience is a key factor when perceiving a situation. If we have seen or done something before, it is easier to assess the situation. If we have seen something many times before, recognizing the situation almost becomes second nature.
However, a person’s experience can quickly become ‘out of date’. For example, they may be unaware of a new procedure. If someone relies only on experience and does not refer to procedures, this is bad behavioral safety, and may negatively affect the team’s overall situational awareness.
This is why it is important that everyone in a team refers to the correct procedure, and avoids completing tasks from memory.
2.Training
Good training will improve the quality of a person’s situational awareness. This is especially true when an individual is working with a complex system.
Training addresses two groups; those with little or no experience and those whose experience may be outdated. In both cases, having little experience, or outdated, experience will undermine the situational awareness of individuals and the overall situational awareness of the team.
Imagine how dangerous a situation could be with team members on the same shift, following different processes and procedures as they tripped pipe!
Training to improve situational awareness is not easy. It requires personnel to train in all types of well control operations that a well site team expect to face.
Simulators are an excellent tool to train a crew’s situational awareness during complex tasks and emergency situation, all from the safety of a classroom.
Pilots train regularly to stay up-to-date with new system processes and changes to procedures.
This is an important factor of both behavioral safety and situational awareness, and is known as ‘currency’. Pilots will always be up-to-date, or ‘current’, on the aircraft systems and procedures they use, and anybody who works in a complicated or hazardous environment should stay current with all relevant procedures.
3.Environment
The environment includes the setting for the situation or event. For example, how well the situation is sheltered from the weather, the design of the work station, if it is day time or night time. Sound and even smells all have a part to play in developing good situational awareness.
As an example, aircraft co*ckpits are designed in line with situational awareness. They have been developed to allow a lot of complicated information to be presented to the crew in a way that improves their situational awareness, without distracting them from piloting the aircraft.
Modern drill rigs and ships have highly complex drilling stations from which to conduct operations. Poor design, little experience and/or a lack of training will all have negative effects on the situational awareness of the driller, equipment operator and well operations team.
4.Shaping Factors
Shaping factors include fatigue, stress and illness. For example, tiredness and stress, near the end of a long shift, can have a serious impact on situational awareness, and can directly affect our decision making process.
So..., How Full is Your Bucket?
Imagine an individual’s capacity to perceive and interpret information as a bucket. The liquid in the bucket is the information. The size of the bucket is not fixed, and will vary depending on many things. For example, experience will help individual understand a process, if they have done it many times before, then they will know what to do and understand what to expect. This increases the size of their situational awareness bucket. Their bucket will be even bigger if they have been trained and are current in their job procedures. If the individual is rested, is focused on the job and is not distracted by external factors, their situational awareness bucket’s volume will be at its top capacity.
The larger the capacity of a bucket, the more able someone is to cope with multiple tasks. An individual with little experience will have a small bucket and will reach ‘task overload’ after one or two inputs.
It is important that team leaders understand the capacity of their team’s individual situational awareness buckets, and understand that situational awareness is not a constant, and anyone can have a ‘bad day’.
The key is in knowing who in your team is having that ‘bad day’.
