Situational Understanding Providing Foresight and Insight
By TorchStone VP, Scott Stewart
I was recently talking with a security director friend who noted that he uses the material TorchStone has published on practicing sustainable situational awareness when training his organization’s employees on situational awareness, but he noted that we didn’t have anything on The TorchStone Watch that deals with situational understanding.
Considering that the situational awareness primer is consistently one of the most read pieces on The TorchStone Watch, it seemed like a good idea to put together a piece on situational understanding, which is something complimentary, yet very distinct from situational awareness.
While situational awareness involves paying attention to what is happening in one’s surroundings, situational understanding is what allows someone to place the items noticed into the proper context.
Situational awareness allows one to see what is happening, while situational understanding allows the observer to understand why it is happening, while also allowing the observer to comprehend the implications and consequences of the event—the so what?—for themselves, or at a higher level, for their organization. Situational understanding also makes it possible to identify trends and foresee emerging events.
Individual Situational Understanding
Situational awareness and situational understanding are very closely linked to the concept and practice of OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.) Situational awareness is what allows one to observe their environment, while situational understanding is what allows one to rapidly understand those observations in order to determine where they stand in relation to other actors in an ambiguous or rapidly changing situation—the “orient” of OODA. This orientation then permits the person to make a decision and act quickly.
But this understanding is not something inherent. While intuition, upbringing, and culture play a role in developing one’s situational understanding, it generally requires additional time and effort to gain detailed knowledge of the environment and the actors operating in it.
In terms of effort, developing situational understanding requires gathering all the information needed to achieve a thorough foundational knowledge of the operating environment and then using that knowledge to craft a solid baseline threat assessment.
In terms of time, experience—and especially experience operating in one’s current environment—is invaluable. Practicing good situational awareness over time allows one to develop a good sense of the “normal now,” which assists in spotting anomalies, as well as providing context for observations.
These building blocks of research, assessment, and experience can then be used to shape one’s perception and interpretation of a particular situation which assists in placing it into the proper context. Placing events into the proper context then provides the insight and foresight required to shape effective decision-making.
For an example of personal situational understanding, consider the case of a person walking down the street who notices the behavior of three individuals indicating they may be working as a team, and they move to surround the victim quickly. As the victim is surrounded, one of the bad actors draws an edged weapon and the group attempts to force the victim into a car that pulls up to the curb.
Yes, I know it is better to spot such teams before they deploy for an attack, and then quickly act to avoid the situation, but for our purposes here, let’s just imagine that for whatever reason, our victim did not spot the team until they deployed, and they were able to get the drop on him. In such a situation, the context, and the decisions to act made by the victim, could be very different depending on the victim’s situational understanding of the environment.
If, say the person was walking down the street in Sao Paulo, Brazil, a place where express kidnappings by criminal gangs are fairly common, the likeliest outcome of the attack is a relatively quick ordeal resulting in the loss of money. Attempting to resist the kidnappers could help prevent the loss of the money, but it could also result in an injury or death. In such a situation, unless the victim is the fictional Jason Bourne, he might prudently decide the best course of action is to not resist and cooperate with his abductors. Hopefully, the victim has limited what he is carrying on his person and the amount of money in the bank account his ATM card is linked to.
If, however, the person was walking down the street in a town in northern Syria, a very different environment—the implications of the situation are also very different. Northern Syria is a place where Islamic State operatives and criminal gangs aligned with them have kidnapped foreigners, held them under brutal conditions for years in some cases—and beheaded them in others. In this environment, the victim’s situational understanding is likely to prompt him to act differently from a victim in Brazil. Instead of complying with his abductors, he may decide to resist, viewing it as his best chance of escape before the kidnappers are able to get him restrained and under total physical control. He may be stabbed and seriously injured during the escape attempt, but he is also likely to be seriously injured or killed during captivity, so deciding to run the calculated risk of attempting to “get off the X” and escape from the attack site is quite reasonable.
In these two different environments, situational understanding helps contextualize the very different implications and consequences of a kidnapping for our notional victim.
Organizational Situational Understanding
The same principles we discussed regarding personal situational understanding also apply to situational understanding for organizations. However, depending on the size and type of organization involved, the number of incidents they are required to place into context every day can be very large and incredibly diverse—both in terms of geography and topic.
Many large organizations maintain operations centers (in some cases multiple op centers) to provide them with global situational awareness. Depending on the organization, they can have analysts assigned to the op center, separate teams of analysts, or both. The analyst teams can provide them with the ability to assess a wide range of topics that can impact their operations, from high-level geopolitics to local crime—and everything in between.
For smaller organizations, situational awareness and understanding can be challenging, especially if they have a big operational footprint or a complex transnational supply chain, and very little budget for intelligence functions. This can result in them being caught unaware when an event happens—or at the very least lack the situational understanding of what the implications of the event are for their organization and what consequences it might bring.
This lack of situational understanding can in some instances prevent them from making a decision and acting quickly. In other cases, it can result in them making a poorly reasoned knee-jerk reaction, an overreaction, or a disastrously wrong decision based on an incomplete understanding of the dynamics of the situation.
Of course, this is not just a risk run by smaller organizations. Sometimes large organizations with a big footprint and complex supply chain will not allocate the funds for an intelligence function, or they have an intelligence team that is simply too small to deal with the myriad of issues facing the company.
This lack of situational understanding can result in organizational leadership being caught off guard by breaking events. Many times, leaders will refer to these events as “black swans”—unforeseen events that have a major impact—but in reality, many of these events would have been foreseeable given the proper situational understanding, and steps could have been taken in advance to mitigate their impact.
Unfortunately, it often takes a major shock to prod organizational leadership to allocate the resources required to establish a robust intelligence function—or even a basic corporate security program. It is obviously better to avoid such crises rather than recover from them, and acquiring the means to obtain organizational situational understanding does take time and effort, as it does for an individual. It also requires funding.
Organizations can reduce some of the time and expense required to obtain situational awareness and understanding by finding a partner to act as an analytical force multiplier (shameless plug for what my team at TorchStone does). But it is also absolutely possible for organizations to build the capacity organically given the proper resources, leadership, and training.
No matter how it is obtained, situational understanding is critical to providing organizational leadership the foresight required to see threats emerging and the insight to take appropriate action to mitigate those threats rapidly.