What is situational awareness?

What is situational awareness? It as been the catch phrase in many of  the discussions but what is it? How do you achieve it after a disaster? How do you retain it during the operational phase?

In the chaos of a disaster. What specific steps should be taken to gain situational awareness for yourself and your team? There has to be a formal set of procedures to gain a complete picture of a disaster. You cannot simply say you need to have it without a structured set of policies and procedures you implement to attain it and retain it. What do you and your organization use to sort and prioritize the flood of information that will be generated after a disaster into an accurate and understandable shared situational awareness for yourself and your team.

In my book Disaster Operations and Decision Making I lay out a specific set of steps to gain the type of situational awareness needed during a disaster. It is a structure for the information to sorted, prioritized and shared so the whole team understands not only their own specific challenges but the situational as a whole. The following is an outline of that set of procedures.

Essential Element of Information (EEI)- what specific resources, and critical infrastructure in your community or organization is vital to your response and to make decisions on how to use those resources. What  specific facilities i.e. hospitals, schools, nursing homes and the myriad of other high priority life hazards have been affected. This can be as long and as complex as needed then divided ESF’s  specific responsibilities. 

Visualization- turning the Essential Elements of Information into a actual picture of resources, damage and operations.

Common Operating Picture (COP)- once a picture of the entire disaster has begun to emerge then the EOC team can begin to have a COP of the disaster. A COP is created by a common visualization showing the whole picture not just the narrow view of a single ESF.

Shared Situational Awareness- once a COP has been obtained then a shared situational awareness for the EOC team has been achieved. Now informed decisions can be made but a disaster is a moving target. The ground truth will continue to change, continue to evolve so the previous steps must be continuously updated so the COP is always changing. As your information changes then priorities and decisions can change to meet the new challenges based the best and most important information available.