What is Situational Awareness & Why Does It Matter? Program Length: 2 hours Format: Live (virtual) training and includes a live Q&A session with Dr. Gasaway When: On the date and time of your department’s regular training. Train all of your members for $999 Includes a recorded playback for members who cannot attend the live training. […]
What is Situational Awareness & Why Does It Matter – Virtual Training Read More »
This episode explores how our expectations can create stress and how stress can lead to task fixation, contribute to tunnel vision and cause a host of other situational awareness problems. Length: 26 minutes click the YouTube icon to listen _____________________________________________________ If you are interested in taking your understanding of situational awareness and
Episode171 | Expectations can impact Situational Awareness Read More »
Complacency is a big deal for first responders because it impacts your situational awareness on multiple levels. I would like to give every responder the benefit of the doubt that if or when they have found him or herself being complacent that it wasn’t happening on purpose. In other words, I hope every responder desires
Another False Alarm: A Tale of Complacency Read More »
I was recently contacted by email from a Situational Awareness Matters member asking if aggressiveness and safety can co-exist at an emergency scene. My answer was “of course they can.” The two actions, being safe and being aggressive are not mutually exclusive. To think they are is to believe responders must sacrifice safety when they
Aggressiveness and Situational Awareness Read More »
I recently received an email from a firefighter asking for my opinion as to whether or not the administrative chief officers in his department should respond to reported structure fires. My initial response was: “Well, Duh! Yes!” But then I got to thinking about it more. How and when administrative chief officers respond to fires
Administrative chiefs and emergency responses Read More »
The overall number of structure fires are down nationwide. For the sake of the citizens we protect, this is a good thing. But for the sake of firefighters who need to gain valuable experience through the proverbial baptism by fire, this isn’t such a good thing. I often get asked by company officers and trainers
5 Tips For Improving Situational Awareness Through Training Read More »
I recently read an article that was talking about the process for sizing up a situation before making a decision. For clarification purposes, this was an article in a business journal, not a public safety journal. This got me thinking about size-up mistakes made on the fire ground. The author noted that the best decisions
3 Size-up Mistakes Read More »
Developing and maintaining situational awareness at an emergency scene can be a very challenging task. Scenes are often stressful, complex, time-compressed, and complicated with rapidly-changing conditions. Responders have lots of information to process and many tasks to perform. And, sadly, situational awareness isn’t always the forefront on their minds. Under such conditions, meta awareness
The inspiration for this article comes from Situational Awareness Matters member and Fire Chief, Todd Johnson, and the members of the Woodbury Fire Department. I was invited to observe a skills-based training evaluation that was more than a year in the making and involved over 100 practice exercises. The crews were dispatched to a structure
Crawl, Walk, Run Theory of Skill Development Read More »
Oftentimes during situational awareness programs, participants will share stories of incidents they have responded to, or incidents they have read about, or videos of incidents they have watched where the incident ended in a significant near-miss or a casualty. This happened recently during a program where a firefighter with 20+ years of experience showed
The Rational Brain and Situational Awareness Read More »
