situational awareness

Confirmation Bias Impacts Situational Awareness

The foundation of situational awareness is capturing clues and cues in your environment – what some would call “paying attention” – and then making sense of those clues and cues – what some would call “understanding” – and then making projections of future events – what some would call “prediction.” One of the challenges in the […]

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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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Confabulation: It Sounds Better Than Lying

Confabulation may sound better than lying, but it’s no less dangerous. One of the most amazing demonstrations I do during my situational awareness programs is to show how a person, when placed under stress, will lie. Only in the world of neuroscience, we don’t call it lying, we call it confabulation. You won’t do it

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Episode 185 | St. Charles Fire Department Near Miss – Part 3

This episode is part 3 of a 3-part interview with two members of the St. Charles Fire Department (Missouri) discussing a near-miss where four firefighters were overrun by rapidly changing conditions at a residential dwelling fire. Length: 48 minutes Click the YouTube icon to listen   _____________________________________________________ If you are interested in taking your understanding of

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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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Episode 184 | St. Charles Fire Department Near Miss – Part 2

This episode is part 2 of a 3-part interview with two members of the St. Charles Fire Department (Missouri) discussing a near-miss where four firefighters were overrun by rapidly changing conditions at a residential dwelling fire. Length: 45 minutes click the YouTube icon to listen

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Situational Awareness Matters!

Teaching Situational Awareness and Decision Making

Situational awareness is the foundation for good decision making. Situational awareness is formed by observing… and understanding what is happening in your environment, in the context of how time is passing. That “understanding” is then used to make predictions of future events. For those who have attended my full-day situational awareness classes you know this

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Episode 183 | St. Charles Fire Department Near Miss – Part 1

This episode is part 1 of a 3-part interview with two members of the St. Charles Fire Department (Missouri) discussing a near-miss where four firefighters were overrun by rapidly changing conditions at a residential dwelling fire. Length: 56 minutes Click the YouTube icon to listen     _____________________________________________________ If you are interested in taking your understanding

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Complacency: A Killer of First Responders

Curiosity killed the cat. But it’s not curiosity that is killing first responders. It’s complacency contributing to flawed situational awareness. What does it mean to be complacent? I could offer you the Webster’s dictionary definition. Instead, I’d like to offer you a definition based on my observations of those who suffer from the affliction. Complacent:

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Episode 182 | Colorado Springs FD Interview – Part 2

This episode is part 2 of an interview with three members of the Colorado Springs Fire Department discussing recruit training, using science to teach firefighting and more. Length: 50 minutes Click the YouTube icon to listen       _____________________________________________________ If you are interested in taking your understanding of situational awareness and high-risk decision making to

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