Situation Awareness DEGRADATION FACTORS: Org Level

In a previous post (Strategic Planning or Strategic Blindness) I wrote about the dual effects of the Situation Awareness degradation factor, attentional tunneling, and confirmation bias.  I described how these two forces, acting in concert, can put blinders on the organization around the point of view about the future expressed in the strategic plan.  In this post I’ll describe several other situation awareness degradation factors and how they show up at the organization level.

A description of the factors and a description of what you can implement in your organization to counterbalance these factors, as well as other cognitive biases may be found in the book:

Top Gun Governance – Using Situation Awareness to manage and thrive in an increasingly complex and unpredictable world

These degradation factors were first identified by (Endsley, Bolte, and Jones 2003; Endsley 2021).  As much, or most of the research, on situation awareness has been conducted at the individual level or team level, I have elaborated these factors to the organization level. How many of these factors do you recognize in your organization?

Situation Awareness Debilitation Factor	Enterprise-Level Characterization
Attentional tunneling— locking in on certain aspects of the environment and either intentionally or inadvertently stopping visual scanning (SA will suffer when significant events fall outside what the person is focused on)	Management seeks more control over mundane factors that may have little to do with the current situation, but it provides a sense of control. Organization constricts to “stick to its knitting,” relapsing to focus on core traditional business at the expense of newer and perhaps more strategically relevant endeavors. Management gets very expense or cost focused instead of value focused. Focus is restricted to the business model and mental model defined in the strategic plan.  salient events, metrics, or data that don’t support that point of view are ignored or discounted.
Requisite memory trap— overload of short-term memory caused by too many features of the situation being present simultaneously	Workforce is overwhelmed with day-to-day issues and with no strategic filter to prioritize or eliminate what comes across everyone’s desk. Or filters are so tight that real outliers and weak but important signals are missed. As employees are interrupted by constant email and instant messaging, their productivity and ability to “focus and finish” tasks are diminished.
Errant mental models— causing a decision maker to miss cues or explain away cues that don’t fit the chosen mental model	Being dismissive of new entrants or competitive business models Strategy or business model that is not keeping up with the time The organization is missing objectives, but these are being explained away or minimized.
Out-of-the-loop syndrome—gaps in understanding of how automation is performing or is supposed to be controlling the situation	Decision-making buried in complex algorithms, making frontline personnel rely on tools and systems they understand less and less Systems that are not integrated to provide clear dashboards with valid and accurate information Reduced ability to correctly predict what the next move is because people are unsure what the systems are telling them

This last factor, Out of the Loop Syndrome, has special relevance for the new generation of Pre-trained Generative AI models.  Not only is there not an actual algorithm that someone wrote and understands, but the models only perform as well as the data they’ve been trained on.  If a class of events, data, people, medical outcomes, financial outcomes, or whatever, is under-represented, or not represented at all, the model may have very poor predictive capability in that area.  Worse, it may “hallucinate” an answer with as much certainty as a result in which there has been ample training and therefore reliability.  A case may therefore be made that these models may actually automate confirmation bias.

Is more and more of your business model and decision making buried in complex algorithms that fewer and fewer people truly understand, and exposing you to potential litigation?  Perhaps it’s time for a check-up of your algorithms, statistical models, and now your methods for building robust AI generative models.   

References

Endsley, Bolte, and Jones 2003; Designing for situation Awareness: An Approach to human Centered Design.  CRC Press.  Taylor and Francis Group

Endsley 2021, Situation Awareness Measurement: How to Measure Situation Awareness in individuals and Teams.  Human Factors and Ergonomics Society

Stevens, Derek M., Top Gun Governance. Using situation awareness to manage and throve in an increasingly complex and unpredictable world.  Newman Springs Publishing, 2023

Amazon.com: Top Gun Governance: 9798887635972: Stevens, Derek M: Books