Synthetic Situational Awareness

Creating a synthesis between Situational Awareness and Self-Awareness

A decade ago, I worked with a group of young women in an addiction recovery program. I would meet with them each week to work on the life skills they would need once they graduated.

One of the skills we’d work on just about every week is situational awareness.

Situational awareness is a skill of insight, anticipation, and respect for personal boundaries in social and organizational contexts.

It is the skill of perceiving reality as it is, not as we want it to be, or how others see it, but as it is.

Situational awareness is knowing how to be yourself regardless of the context you are in.

This is situational awareness.

A friend invites you to a business-after-hours event or a presentation at the local community college. You arrive. Walk into the room. You don't see your friend. The room is filled with people that you do not know. They are mingling around talking with one another. What do you do?

There are two choices.

You find a wall, or the corner of the room, and hope no one sees you.

Or, you begin to introduce yourself to people.

Situational awareness is a missing element in many people's lives. It explains why the relational and social skills needed for a healthy society seem to be missing. The COVID pandemic lockdowns had a negative impact on the capacity of people of all ages to engage in healthy social interaction. Even with a natural comfortableness in social settings, learning to function in unknown and uncomfortable situations is a skill that has to be learned.

The lack of this skill can easily make every situation centered on ME instead of the group or the other person. This pattern of behavior comes from either a fear of being discovered as a fraud or the need for social acceptance by dominating the conversation. In either case, this is the result of an inadequately developed self-perception.

The strength of situational awareness correlates to the strength of self-perception. Both are needed to function at a high level.

The Keys to Situational Awareness

Situational Awareness is a skill, not a cultural condition outside of us.

It is a capacity to see, engage, and discern what I am to do.

Situational awareness is a skill that requires preparation, practice, and mastery of those skills.

Anyone can learn them. Even the most introverted person can learn how to walk into a room, function well in that social environment, and walk out having accomplished a specific goal for their time at the event.

In addition, I know no skill that is more valuable than being able to function well in social situations that are uncomfortable and alien to our past experience.

Situational awareness is an important skill for individuals or groups who are in the midst of transition. There are three keys to developing the skill of situational awareness: Objectivity, Engagement, and Discernment.

Objectivity

Objectivity helps us see things from a more objective, detached perspective. We can, in effect, stand apart from the crowd, read it, and know what we are do in response.

It is virtually impossible to be absolutely objective. Absolute detachment is a mental disorder exhibiting a loss of empathy or the inability to connect with people emotionally.

The kind of detachment needed is the ability to stand apart and see the various facets of a situation. We have to develop our perception of the world through intuition and imagination. We observe the situation. We sense the mood or tone of the conversations taking place. We distinguish between those that are intense and those that are light and congenial. We intuit this part of the situation because we have been in these situations in the past.

In becoming aware of the atmosphere in the room, we do not personalize the situation as being about me. When we make a situation about me, we are unable to see the range of motivations that may be affecting the attitudes and emotions of people.

Personalizing narrows our situational awareness, making it more likely that we won't understand what is happening.

Example #1: We walk into the crowded room of strangers described above.

We ask ourselves,

What are the power dynamics of the room?

Who is comfortable?

Who is shy?

Who likes to draw attention to themselves?

How long are they spending with each person?

Prior to an event, we ask, “What is my goal for being here?” A friend would go to these events to make new contacts. She’d decide a number of people with whom she would exchange business cards. Each encounter was about setting up a follow-up meeting to pitch her business. Once she reached her pre-determined number of meaningful contacts, she’d leave.

This kind of detachment identifies why we want to meet someone, what we'd like to see happen in the encounter, and how to structure the beginnings of a new relationship. We are reflecting upon the situation using our imagination to discern the situation.

Example #2: You are a board member of a local not-for-profit organization. You arrive for the quarterly meeting. It is quiet in the room. People are reading their board packets. The executive director and board chair are not in the room. Without a word being said, the tension in the room is growing. The meeting is late starting. The board chair enters the room. Calls the meeting to order announcing the resignation of the executive director with immediate effect. All of a sudden, a normal meeting becomes a critical situation requiring everyone to think big picture and short term action. Intuition and imagination are needed as the organization is thrust into a leadership transition that it did not seek.

Working in this situation is more than sharing my stories of past experiences. As a board of directors, we need to put aside our personal feelings about the executive director and objectively see the steps the board must take in this transition.

To be objective in this way is to see time suspended, so to speak, in the moment.

I am fully present and attentive to what is being discussed.

I am listening to discern what to contribute.

I am not looking at my phone or thinking about my next appointment.

I am observing what is being said and how the group is responding to one another.

I am right there in the moment, not thinking about myself, but about the situation before us.

Objectivity, therefore, is the ability to connect and be present with people in situations in such a way that we understand what is going on and how we can contribute.

Engagement

For this kind of detached objectivity to work, we need engagement. It seems counter-intuitive to say that being detached requires us to be engaged.

To be engaged is to connect with the people we meet in the room emotionally.

We are detaching ourselves from making our interactions all about us, about validating some perception about ourselves by other people.

Engagement requires a kind of empathy that sees into the life that this person is leading. As social settings and communities become more culturally diverse and less homogeneous, we need the ability to engage people as people, as individuals, rather than as representatives of various socio-political ideologies in a transactional mode of seeing what I can get out of the situation. We need to engage people with dignity and respect so that we can find the relational ground to work together toward a common goal.

The portal for engagement or the path into a relationship of respect and trust begins with an ability to listen. Every person's story is a set of cues about who they are. Even the statements and stories that the other person uses to hide their true thoughts and intentions that present themself in a stronger position than they actually are because it is a lie reveals who this person is. We are the same way. We can be equally disingenuous because of fear or the desire to look important.

We want to manage other people's perceptions of us as if that perception is a brand. You can see how social media is oriented toward creating a perception of the self that is a brand concept. However, the more manufactured that perception, the less engaged we are able to become. The pathway to engagement is through the kind of vulnerability that Brene' Brown describes.

Engagement, as a result, is how we establish ourselves as authentic people. Not by showing authenticity but by being authentic. By this, we must learn to be transparent (vulnerable), open, and listening, while at the same respecting boundaries. The boundaries are ours, not the other person's. Essentially what we are doing by engaging the other person is establishing the ground for trust.

Discernment

In the social context of a room of strangers, we need to discern who people are and know what I have to offer in that situation. 

Recently I attended a celebration event for some friends. As I walked into the living room of the home, I saw that I was the only male in a room with 35 women, two-thirds of them I did not know. I immediately realized that my presence could create an awkwardness in the room. I didn't go hide in the corner. I didn't pay my respects to the host, and quietly leave. Instead, I went around the room and introduced myself to every one present. I did so to create an individual comfort level between me and each person in the room. The event was a great celebration and I came to know some new people whom I respect for their support of the cause we were celebrating.

Discernment is a process of seeking answers to the questions we have about people and situations. I'm trying to answer, for example,

Do I know this person from another context?

Do we have any mutual friendships?

Are we Facebook or LinkedIn friends?

Is he trustworthy?

What is she interested in?

Am I am being trustworthy?

How far can I go in being transparent with this person?

Do we share some value or commitment that gives reason for us to develop a relationship or a friendship?

This is why discernment is the third leg of the stool. It helps us answer the questions that flow through our minds in new or dynamic social situations.

The goal of engagement is to determine whether there is a possibility for a relationship. For a relationship to work, be healthy, or happy requires each person to be open, respectful, and trustworthy. It is important to understand that our responsibility is to be open and trusting, not really to determine whether the other person is. The engagement and interaction will bear this out in time.

Establishing clear boundaries for our relationships is so important. These boundaries must first be my boundaries. Without an understanding of how far I'm willing to go in being transparent and vulnerable, I cannot see or discern to what extent the other person or persons are open and trusting and whether they have an understanding of what is appropriate for the situation in which our relationship is being formed.

Discernment, therefore, is a skill that understands how to translate the values that guide our lives into decisions that affirm those values in action.

This is how learning to be situationally aware can lead us to find strength in our lives and build relationships of openness and trust so that we can make a difference that matters in any situation.

Situational Awareness as Synthesis of Time

The above description of situational awareness is the conventional perspective. Think of it as a micro-level understanding of time from moment to moment. We transition from one situation to the next and often do not see the connection between them. While the situations are not the same, we are the same person in the midst of those moment-by-moment situations.

If we look at time through a longer lens, we see that the situations we find ourselves in are significantly different throughout our lives. Early in life, we are children, dependent upon our parents for food, shelter, and our developmental needs. Then as we enter emerging adulthood during our mid-teens, situations change. Our relationships change. A new kind of permanence appears. We meet someone, fall in love, and marry with the intention of spending the rest of our lives with him or her, “for better or worse, through sickness and health, till death do us part.” We find that the consequences of life carry a heavier and heavier burden upon us. Our formal education is done, and the weight of responsibility for family, job, and life is on our shoulders. We marry and must go through the changes in life that happen.

Time for us is a measure of change, specifically the sequence of transitions that define our life. The challenge for us is to maintain a clear situational awareness through the years. Situational awareness in this regard has to be joined with self-awareness. When we know how to walk into a crowded room of strangers, we gain the self-awareness needed to function.

What, then, does self-awareness mean in the context of situational awareness?

How do we synthesize the two as a way of approaching the transitions in life?

It begins by being clear about your values. I didn’t come to see my values as defined by respect, trust, dignity, integrity, and honor from some book. It came through my interactions with people from childhood all the way to today. Those interactions were not philosophical lectures. Rather, it was how I was treated by specific people in my life.

I deepen my appreciation and understanding of those values through study. But that supplements my experience. So the synthesis of experience and study has provided me with a learning environment to define who I am. With that understanding, I can enter into any situation and function well. My identity is not a philosophical abstraction or an emotional perception of where I fit into the world. In many respects, I don’t fit in at all, while at the same time, I can walk into any environment and find a way to connect with respect and trust.

The sooner we gain this kind of perspective, the sooner we can find the freedom to see ourselves within the wide range of situations we encounter.

Self-awareness begets situational awareness,

just as our experience in situations provides us a way to better understand our true selves.