Driving Success Through Situational Awareness

Have you ever been in a situation, when you heard something and you were like, oh! really — I never saw that coming.

If the answer is “YES”, then this article is for you.

Pro tip — don’t just look at the bullets and call it a read, do go through this article with patience and reflect upon it. Share your story in the comments or on my youtube channel.

Let’s Define Situational Awareness

In very simple terms it means, being aware of everything going on around us. This concept has been around for decades and has been used widely in aviation and the military. However, it has great application in the corporate world too.

It means you are able to perceive, understand, and are able to predict the impact of the change. The key element is time, which means the faster you predict the safer you are.

Challenges you face

• Access to information — A lot of times we don’t have access to information and then there are scenarios when it's widely available but we are not able to comprehend the fact this piece of information may be useful for us.

ie. Going out hiking or for a picnic, it doesn't harm checking the weather forecast. However, very few people actually do it.

• Capability to understand the information — Stock market is available for everyone to watch, how many can really understand looking at the day’s Sensex or let’s take a simple example,

ie. One of your long-lost relatives is suddenly trying to connect and talk with you and keeps calling and messaging you. I hope you are smart to understand the reasons and manage the situation.

• Ability to gauge the impact — Predicting the impact is actually the game, the previous two items are more like the prep work. Without having the ability to gauge the impact, the available information will be of no use. This also means the ability to filter out the noise and only listen to what matters and be able to act on it.

ie. Your company is launching a new product, you are aware of it and you understand that customers would use this — however if you fail to understand that this new product would bring in more customers as well as existing customers will call in for help to use this new product — you are doomed.

How to be situational aware?

It is the most important question from my point of view, even though I called out that the ability to gauge the impact is the real deal, I believe perceiving the information is the most important stage in becoming situationally aware.

The reason is a lot of the time people are not able to access the information since they are not able to build relations across their organization. They keep to themselves and believe as long as they are able to complete their task on time and with quality — they will be the star.

Well, that’s true they will be the star but a star that may not see any movement.

Hence I suggest — Learn how to navigate the organization!

Learn who’s who

Build relations

Nurture your relation

and finally, read! this will help you increase your horizon.

I hope you found this interesting, if so — please clap. I will also share a detailed video on this topic with more real-life examples here, hence subscribe to my channel.