Information overload

These are the first responder situational awareness and decision making issues and opportunities related to information overload. 

Fifteen Situational Awareness Barriers

The mission of Situational Awareness Matters is to help you see the bad things coming… in time to change bad outcomes. SA is a complex neurological process and I go to painstaking efforts to ensure that what I teach here, on the podcast and in classrooms is “first responder friendly.” I don’t ever want a […]

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Episode 201 | When Unexpected Things Happen

In this episode, we explore what happens when faced with unexpected situations and your brain tries to make sense of the unexpected.  Length: 33 minutes click the YouTube icon to listen

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Episode 200 | Chesterfield County Interview – Part 3

This episode is the third (and final) segment of an interview with Chesterfield County Battalion Chief Joy Knicely and Captain Rick Grassel.  Length: 50 minutes click the YouTube icon to watch the full VIDEO of this interview!       __________________________________________________ If you are interested in taking your understanding of situational awareness and high-risk decision making

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Episode 199 | Chesterfield County Interview – Part 2

This episode is part two of a three-part interview with Chesterfield County Battalion Chief Joy Knicely and Captain Rick Grassel.  Length: 58 minutes click the YouTube icon to watch the full VIDEO of this interview!       __________________________________________________ If you are interested in taking your understanding of situational awareness and high-risk decision making to a

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Episode 198 | Chesterfield County Interview – Part 1

This episode is part one of a three-part interview with Chesterfield County Battalion Chief Joy Knicely and Captain Rick Grassel.  Length: 46 minutes click the YouTube icon to watch the full VIDEO of this interview!       __________________________________________________ If you are interested in taking your understanding of situational awareness and high-risk decision making to a

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Dispatchers Role in Situational Awareness

One of the situational awareness best practices discussed during the Fifty Ways to Kill a First Responder program is the role played by the dispatcher during an emergency incident. As I have discussed this many times with first responders throughout the United States I have come to the conclusion that in some jurisdictions the dispatcher

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Episode 189 | Communications Overload

This episode discusses the cognitive overload that can occur when there is too much verbal information to process.  Length: 31 minutes click the YouTube icon to listen       __________________________________________________ If you are interested in taking your understanding of situational awareness and high-risk decision making to a higher level, check out the Situational Awareness Matters

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Episode 186 | You Can’t Handle the Truth

  This episode discusses some of the strange consequences of stress, including how employees may say untruthful things without knowing it. Length: 36 minutes click the YouTube icon to listen         _____________________________________________________ If you are interested in taking your understanding of situational awareness and high-risk decision making to a higher level, check out

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Situational Awareness Matters!

Complex Communications

We have many traits that make us uniquely human. Among them is our ability to engage in complex communications. We can look at black ink squiggled on a piece of bleached paper and derive meaning from those symbols.  We call that skill reading comprehension. And we can listen to and comprehend the meaning of more

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Chatty TSA Agents

It is possible that while you are attempting to pay attention to something, you can be drawn off your task by distractions or interruptions to your workload. A distraction is something that pulls your attention away by accident (like a reflex look in the direction of a loud noise). An interruption is something that pulls

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