Page 22 - index

A Good Problem Management is about Dealing with Situational

Awareness

Milica Djekic, an Online Marketing Coordinator at Dejan SEO and the Editor-in-Chief at
Australian Science Magazine

In the modern world, there is the growth in a use of cyberspace. Our lives are getting virtual and
a number of potential risks and issues in such a term is getting higher. What we can see as
crucial in resolving some problem is situational awareness. So, what would be situational
awareness? It’s obviously about understanding the current situation. Partially, yes. In cyber
terms, it’s about understanding your cyber environment and accurately predicting and
responding to the problem that could appear. Well, let’s explain this closer.

Situational Awareness – What is All About?

Situational awareness is being aware of what is happening around you in terms of where you
are, where you are supposed to be, and whether anyone or anything around you is a threat to
your health and safety.

Our knowledge, experience and education enables us to understand what is going on around us
and helps us to determine if it is safe. They are crucially important for our safety, security and
defense. This means that everyone’s situational awareness is individual and potentially
different. It can be a very subjective term. We use our situational awareness to make decisions
and instruct others.

Our situational awareness is only as accurate as our own perception or reading of the situation,
so what we think is happening may not accurately reflect reality. How we read a situation can be
influenced by many things such as the type of information we have been given, our own
experience and distractions in the workplace.

What is important in case of situational awareness? It is important that you know how many
problems you face and how serious they are. The temporary loss or lack of situational
awareness is a causal factor in many construction accidents.

Often there is so much ‘going on’ in your working environment, or you become so absorbed in
your own thoughts, that you fail to spot those things that could pose a serious threat to your
health and safety.

From the Lowest to the Highest – The Levels of Situational Awareness

The three-level model of situational awareness (Endsley, 1995) was developed initially to
understand aviation tasks, but it is argued that it could been extended into other domains.
Endsley’s model is arranged into three hierarchical levels of situational assessment, each stage
being a necessary (but not sufficient) precursor to the next, higher, level. This model follows a
chain of information processing, from perception, through interpretation, to prediction. From the
lowest to the highest, the levels of situational awareness are as follows:

22 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – October 2014 Edition
Copyright © Cyber Defense Magazine, All rights reserved worldwide