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,...

Why experience sharpens our judgement, but can also lead it quietly astray. We don’t see the world as it is.  We see the world as we believe it to be. In complex, high-pressure work, that distinction matters. Because performance is not just about gathering facts. It’s about how we make sense of them and in environments where information is fast, partial, and uncertain, the mind relies on something far more efficient than constant analysis: mental models. These internal maps help us interpret...

In high-stakes environments, it’s not knowledge or skill that fails first.  It’s what we didn’t notice in time. Situational awareness isn’t lost in a moment.  It erodes quietly. Not because someone didn’t care, or wasn’t qualified, or lacked commitment, but because their attention, under pressure, narrowed just enough to miss what mattered. In complex work, we ask people to stay across multiple tasks, absorb new inputs, adjust for uncertainty and still remain alert to signals they may never...