Developing shared situational awareness

I recently attended a conference organised by the police about school lockdown procedures. It was an eye-opening insight into how emergency services mobilise in response to possible threats.

One of the most important things the various agencies need to do when arriving at the scene of an incident is to quickly develop what they called a ‘shared situational awareness’. In essence, they need to have a shared sense of what is going on. Without this, the individual response of each agency may be effective, but the collective response will not.

Shared situational awareness is not just about exchanging information. This is important, but so too is sharing how the circumstances are perceived. With regard to incident response, this includes an assessment of risk. This is a collaborative sensemaking process in which situational awareness will be formed by the interactions between people. One can only imagine how difficult this is in perilous situations, where every second counts and decisions may have critical consequences.

The phrase ‘shared situational awareness’ stayed with me.

Mountains of the mind

Over the last few years, I had the privilege of working with Dr Neil Gilbride on the Getting Heads Together project. This collaboration of schools and universities from across Europe set out to create a new leadership development model which recognised the complex environments within which school leaders make decisions.

In one of the pilot leadership development sessions, we were exploring how school leaders make sense of complex challenges – so called wicked problems. Neil came up with an analogy which he knew I would like.

To illustrate, look at the two pictures of mountains below. How do you feel about each image? In what way do these pictures portray the idea of a mountain expedition?

Your response to these images will likely reflect your disposition towards venturing into the mountains, which in turn will be influenced by your past experience. Many may not relish the prospect of the trek depicted in the left hand image, but it is unlikely to strike fear into their hearts. After all, there is a clear path and plenty of people who look well-equipped for the conditions. However, there are few who would relish the opportunity to partake in the activities depicted in the right hand image.

In fact, these two images are of the same mountain: Ben Nevis in Scotland. If I ask you to come and climb Ben Nevis with me, you may have very differing views of what it is I am asking you to do.

As an analogy for wicked problems, the mountain invitation thought experiment reminds us that we can view the same problem in very different ways. Combining our perspectives can be beneficial. First, we can clarify that we are talking about the same problem. Second, we can ascertain which angle we are coming at the problem from. Third, we can explore how our perception of the problem is informed by our past experience. Fourth, we can be better prepared to tackle the problem. We might think we’re setting out on a clear path, but being prepared to end up on more perilous ground is wise.

I have written before about how school leaders’ perspectives can vary significantly from others in the school. School leaders’ status, positional authority, length of experience, exposure to risk, and temperament (given they are the sort of people who have actively taken on more responsibility) can mean they perceive a straight forward walk in the hills where others see and arduous trek. A senior leader may not think twice about challenging a group of boisterous year 11 boys at break, but others may perceive this challenge as altogether more foreboding. It is important that we view the mountain not just from different angles, but from different perspectives.

Developing a shared situational awareness of wicked problems

School leaders can have a tendency to be overly solution-oriented. Of course, we want leaders to be proactive and move things forward, and the job doesn’t allow much time for ponderance. However, for complex problems, we must ensure that we have a good handle on the problem before ploughing ahead.

So, how might a shared situational awareness be achieved?

Here is my back of an envelope framework which I sketched out when I should have been paying more attention to the police. I’ve called it a PERO analysis (coz we all love a snappy initialism!).

The idea is to get a bunch of people in a room together and use the above framework to explore a wicked problem. The group may be people who have a shared interest in solving the problem. Alternatively, it may be a diverse group of poeple selected because they are likely to see things in very different ways.

Broadly, I suggest working from top to bottom, although there is likely to be some flitting around.

It is important to start with the problem and its possible causes because you may not be talking about the same mountain! There are persistent problems in schools which manifest in different ways over time and within different contexts. Problems are also interconnected and nested within bigger problems. For example, everybody may be noticing that students aren’t behaving as well as they were. However, one person may be thinking of this problem as a societal problem due to increasing disregard for authority, another as a problem arising because teachers are not being consistent with their enforcement of school rules, and another as an indication that there are underlying mental health difficulties caused by the pandemic. What we notice may also vary. One person notices increasing low-level disruption in their classes, another may be experiencing push back from parents when their children are sanctioned, and another may be struggling with students during their break duty. Reaching a shared definition of the problem is challenging, but it is worth doing. So too is taking the time to consider all the possible causal factors and to rigorously question how significant each is. Remember: causes work in teams.

What you are likely to find is over-confidence, both in how well people think they understand the problem and whether they have the expertise to solve it. Maslow’s law of the instrument applies – if we have a hammer, all we see is nails. This tendency should be mitigated to some extent by collaborative sensemaking, but you should be open to the possibility that your group is not sufficiently diverse or expert in some fields. The task at this point is to test your assumptions by sending group members out to state these assumptions explicitly to others and invite their challenge.

One of the risks to take seriously is how school leaders can make the situation worse, not better. For this reason, we should avoid the ‘O’s’ until we have a full and robust understanding of the problem. The ‘obvious’ solutions should look very different once the problem has been fully explored.

As I say, this is a back of the envelope attempt to bring together a few years of work into a usable frame to promote shared situational awareness. If you use it, I’d be interested to know your thoughts.