Learn to Think Ahead: How Teams Project, Prepare and Perform.

Why situational awareness is not held in one mind, but built between many and why it must always look forward

The call came late in the sequence.

Not because it hadn’t been noticed, but because the person who saw it wasn’t sure if they were right.

A new operator, barely six weeks into the role, spotted a discrepancy in the cooling cycle, a flow rate just outside the expected range. It wasn’t alarming, but it was unusual. 

They hesitated. The shift lead was buried in a parallel issue, cross-briefing a vendor. Two colleagues were talking across channels, running diagnostics in real time.

By the time the concern was voiced, the deviation had increased. By the time it was heard, the response window had narrowed.

The system recovered. It didn’t fail. But the team had missed the moment to act earlier, not because they lacked skill, but because the awareness wasn’t aligned.

No one acted improperly, but the information was unspoken, the assumptions untested, and the shared picture incomplete.

This is how situational awareness erodes, not in dramatic failures, but in ordinary busyness, when the future goes unspoken and the present is misunderstood.

NUTA: Notice, Understand, Think Ahead.

In aviation, we use a simple phrase: Notice. Understand. Think Ahead.

It’s more than a checklist. It’s a habit. A shared language. A self-check we use in flight, in briefing rooms, and in debriefs.  

Did we notice what was happening? Did we make sense of it accurately? Did we think ahead far enough?

This three-part loop reflects the structure of situational awareness described by Mica Endsley in article 1 on SA:

• Level 1: Perception : What’s happening?

  
  

• Level 2: Comprehension: What does it mean?

  
  

• Level 3: Projection: What’s likely to happen next?

  
  

Most organisations spend time training people to notice and understand. Far fewer build the muscle of thinking ahead.  But it is projection that determines whether a team can stay coherent in motion, especially under complexity.

Projection: The Skill That Buys You Time.

Projection is not prediction. It’s not about getting the future right. It’s about preparing for what might unfold,  holding plausible futures in mind so the team can respond without shock, without delay.

For pilots, this is second nature. We project constantly, across terrain, weather, fuel, automation, radio traffic.

It’s a way of buying time before time is short. It reduces the load when things go wrong. It shields us from the twin forces that most disrupt performance in surprise events: startle and surprise.

Startle is a reflex, a fast, involuntary bodily jolt in response to something sudden. It hijacks your nervous system. It narrows your thinking. It can cause you to freeze or overcorrect.

Surprise is cognitive, the mind encountering a mismatch between what was expected and what’s now happening. It slows down interpretation. You hesitate. You double-check. You lose your rhythm.

Both reactions are natural. Neither are helpful in high-consequence moments. And both are mitigated when teams project together.

Shared Awareness Starts with Alignment.

Thinking ahead cannot be done in isolation. It depends on what the team shares.  Shared situational awareness means the team is aligned on:

• What’s happening noW

  
  

• What it means

  
  

• What might happen next

  
  

This doesn’t require everyone to know everything. It requires clarity about who knows what, and confidence that no critical piece is missing.

Mica Endsley distinguished between:

• Team SA: the sum of everyone’s role-specific awareness

  
  

• Shared SA: the overlapping information that everyone needs to work in sync

  
  

In other words, you don’t need to see the whole picture yourself. But you do need to know what others are seeing and thinking.

In complex systems, trading desks, operating theatres, control rooms, incident response teams, this shared alignment is fragile. It can be broken by assumptions. It can be lost in noise and without regular verbal realignment, it silently decays.

Distributed Cognition and the Forward Loop.

In practice, effective teams act as distributed cognitive systems.  Each person holds part of the task, but the system as a whole moves forward together.

To do this, they build and maintain a shared mental model, of what they’re doing, what the goals are, where the risks lie, and what comes next.

When shared awareness is strong:

• People anticipate each other’s needs

  
  

• Gaps are noticed early

  
  

• Future steps are prepared in advance

  
  

When it’s weak:

• People duplicate work

  
  

• Errors propagate

  
  

• Decisions are reactive or misaligned

  
  

This is why projection needs to be verbalised. A pilot might say, “If the wind shifts past ten knots, we’ll switch runways.”  

A plant operator might say, “If the temperature hits threshold, we’ll isolate the circuit.” A senior trader might say, “If the price crosses that floor, we exit immediately.”

These small, future-facing phrases let teams get ahead of the moment. They align expectations, prepare actions, and reduce ambiguity under pressure.

Communication as a Structure for Shared Projection.

Thinking ahead together requires more than individual vigilance. It needs rhythm, structure and feedback.

Closed-loop communication is one of the most proven tools:

• One person sends a message

  
  

• The recipient repeats it back to confirm

  
  

• The sender acknowledges the confirmation

  
  

This simple loop ensures shared comprehension and intention. It replaces assumption with clarity. It prevents partial communication from becoming silent error.

In emergency services, this is standard. In aviation, it’s law. In finance, medicine and energy, it’s increasingly embedded, not as pedantic ritual, but as resilience infrastructure. 

Under time pressure, people don’t default to clarity. They default to speed. And speed without alignment is a recipe for drift.

Shared projection also relies on briefings, handoffs, and “what if” talk. Teams that take the time to align before the storm are better able to respond when it hits.

Why People Stop Speaking Up.

Projection also breaks down when people withhold what they know.

They hesitate. They filter. They wait. Not because they’re careless, but because they’re human:

• They’re unsure their observation is valid

  
  

• They don’t want to interrupt or contradict

  
  

• They’ve spoken up before and felt ignored

  
  

• They assume someone else already knows

  
  

This is where psychological safety intersects with awareness.  Amy Edmondson’s research showed that better-performing teams didn’t make fewer mistakes. They shared them earlier.

In shared awareness, the earlier a gap is noticed, the easier it is to correct. And the more normal it becomes to project forward out loud, to say, “What happens if.. ” the stronger the collective resilience becomes.

Leadership matters here. When leaders invite input, acknowledge projection, and model curiosity about future scenarios, they give permission for others to do the same.

Application Across High-Consequence Environments

In energy, shift handovers are critical, not just for what happened, but for what’s coming. Teams that speak in NUTA rhythms are better prepared for outages, load shifts and cascade effects.

In finance, projection is the heartbeat of risk management. Great traders are rarely just reacting. They’re building conditional futures, holding scenarios in mind, and aligning responses before the signal comes.

In tech, incident response lives on shared mental models. The best teams don’t just describe what broke. They model what could break next and shape their roles accordingly.

Across industries, this projection habit is not just valuable, it is now essential. Without it, teams survive by firefighting.  

With it, they perform with foresight.

Resilience Is Thinking Ahead Together.

This trilogy has traced the arc of situational awareness, from noticing what matters, to understanding what it means, and finally to thinking ahead in motion.

Each layer is essential, but it is projection that turns awareness into action, and individuals into teams.

It creates readiness before pressure arrives.

It builds margin where complexity lives.

It allows us to move, decide and recover, not as solo performers, but as shared minds in motion.

Situational awareness is not a static skill.

It is a loop. A language. A discipline.

In the best teams, it lives in every person, but no one carries it alone.

Because in complexity, nobody knows alone.

But together, we can think ahead.

This changes everything.