Rethinking
Situational Awareness
by Steven Adelman
I have long been annoyed by the admonition
to “See Something, Say Something.” There is ample evidence
across time and demographics that most people do neither.
See, for example, Amanda Ripley’s very readable book about
people’s “disaster personalities,” or my article about the inap-
plicability of common active shooter training to live events.
Everyone who has ever attended a concert or sporting event
has observed that people who are impaired by alcohol,
drugs, or the excitement of the moment are slow to perceive
and react to anything unexpected. When I talk about the sort
of situational awareness on which many emergency plans are
based, I show an image of a unicorn.
everyone’s brain tries to fit unfamiliar things into familiar box-
es in order to keep us from being attracted to shiny objects
all day long. Even (presumably) sober event professionals en-
gaged in their daily tasks walk past errors and hazards all the
time. Faithful readers will recall my many pictures of rooms set
up with blocked emergency exits. Not only were the rooms
set up wrong, but smart people who came to hear me talk
about safety in public accommodations walked in, sat down,
and neither saw something nor said something. I don’t think
they were all outliers.
Here are two new additions to the gallery I’m calling, “Yeah,
That Looks Fine.” In each of these emails, the typo should be
obvious both because (1) it appears in the title and (2) the
misspelled word is the whole point of the communication. I
am confident that my peers at Arizona State University’s law
school know how to spell “trial,” just as I am sure that the peo-
ple who promote my local professional soccer team know
how to spell “Phoenix.” So what explains this?
It has to do with situational awareness,
but not the way we usually think about
it. I believe that situational awareness is
not something we all have that makes
us notice strange things in ordinary sit-
uations. If anything, that is precisely the
awareness most people lack.
We filter out things that don’t fit what
we expect to see - this is what allows us
to get through our days. Everyone has
something called a reticular activating
system that allows our brains to deal
with the two million bits of information
we receive each day by simply ignor-
ing most of it. We are not “situationally
aware,” as we usually use the term, be-
cause we’d all be paralyzed by sensory
overload.
Situational Awareness
Reconfigured
There is a different sense in which
the term “situational awareness” does
make sense. And, satisfyingly for peo-
ple who take seriously our legal duty
to behave reasonably under our cir-
cumstances, it turns out that our aware-
ness depends significantly on context.
Check this out.
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Now we’re getting somewhere. Since
we know where everyone is looking
and what everyone is listening to, we
can work with that to help inform them
and move them in an emergency.
Here are a few common procedures:
Bring up the house lights, kill
the effects. This is both to help peo-
ple see their way towards an exit and to
change their experience so they know
whatever is about to happen IS NOT
part of the show.
Communicate from the stage.
Everyone is looking towards the stage
anyway, so get the first messaging out
from there, either by playing pre-re-
corded messages on video or by re-
placing the artist with an authority with
a mic on stage.
Don’t count
on the talent
to help move
the
crowd.
Their
manag-
er will want to
get them back
on the bus, and
the talent has
never practiced
your safety mes-
sages anyway.
Emergency op-
erations are for
venue and event
operations peo-
ple.
“Yeah, That Looks Fine”
Consider just a couple of recent examples. A DJ working Pulse
nightclub’s outdoor patio when shooting broke out in 2016
told reporters, “ I heard shots, so I lower the volume of the
music to hear better because I wasn’t sure of what I just heard.
I thought it was firecrackers, then I realized that someone is
shooting at people in the club.” Earlier this month, a man sit-
ting at a café outside YouTube’s headquarters observed, “It
was a surprise, because you don’t really expect something
like that. I heard some pops, I obviously thought it was bal-
loons, but then I thought that doesn’t make sense, not today.
Then I heard more shots and that’s when everyone started
scrambling for the door.”
It’s not just fans who suffer from “confirmation bias,” by which
wards the action. For a sporting event,
everyone looks at the field; for a cor-
porate event, we anticipate the MC
taking the stage. In each situation, the
crowd’s awareness of what’s happen-
ing at front of house center is fantas-
tic. And entirely foreseeable. Because
event professionals put in a lot of work
to make that the focus of everyone’s
attention.
When concertgoers are standing in
a general admission area as a band
strikes its first chords, we know where
their awareness is focused - front of
house, center, on stage. As this picture
reminds us, even the guest services
people can hardly help from facing to-
a GA floor pointing towards an exit, have
your highly-visible staff head towards
the exits, gesturing for people to follow
them out. I know I trust someone a lot
more if they’re doing the thing they say
I should do.
It is important to accommodate people
as th