Why Zoom is ruining our Situational Awareness instincts
“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate. Some men, you just can’t reach. So you get what we had here last week — which is the way he wants it. Well, he gets it. And I don’t like it any more than you men.” — The Captain.
This text comes hot on the heels of my recent rant about my own work-from-home experiences. I deliberately used the word rant, because although I tried to do a detailed breakdown of the problem I did not provide any ideas for a possible way forward. The idea for this text sparked from a conversation that I had with Adam Schaub, who is incidentally my new boss. I am mentioning this not because I want to kiss the ass of my new superior, but because it was a spark that got me thinking in a new direction.
In our conversation, Adam mentioned the term Situational Awareness, which is something that was not on my radar but turns out to be quite relevant for the discussion about the problems induced by the daily practicalities of remote work.
Situational Awareness
The term itself originates apparently from military jargon and is especially relevant in the research about so-called human errors. Naturally, it was extensively explored in high-stakes contexts such as air traffic control or air combat dog fights. I always instinctively shudder when such dramatic scenarios are used as metaphors for work in the games industry. After all, unless you are an avatar in one of our games, we don’t normally face life and death situations in our daily lives. However, I find this concept insightful.
Simply put, situational awareness is “knowing on around us”. More specifically it includes awareness and understanding of the elements in the environment, their meaning and shared context, and ideally projection of their status in the future.
Consider a typical intersection of two roads. It is an environment with limited area and your interest in it is limited in time to the period you spend traveling through it. To safely pass through it you need to be aware of all the relevant elements and actors in this environment. This includes the cars, trucks, vans, pedestrians, bicycle riders, electric scooters that might be passing through. It also includes all the static objects, such as trees or parked cars that might obscure your view and things like traffic lights.
Other elements of the environment can be safely ignored, the patch of tulips does not play the part in this context, regardless of the color of its flowers. A couple of sparrows flying around are also very unlikely to affect the situation.
The final part of situational awareness is our ability to create a model of the state of the same environment in the near future. This is our ability to project where the cars and pedestrians will be in the next couple of seconds judging by their current speed.
One of the most popular formal models of Situational Awareness specifically defines three distinct levels:
- Perception — ability to identify the relevant elements in the environment.
- Comprehension — ability to understand the interactions of these elements.
- Projection — ability to predict the future state of the environment and the relative position of the elements within it.
I know that this is highly abstract, but if you think about it this is very relevant and directly translatable to our work environments. I am not talking about Situational Awareness in terms of workplace safety. I am talking about actual project-related work.
The context there is the time allocated to complete the particular project, sub-project, or a set of tasks. Elements of this environment include everything from people that form the team working on the project, and tasks that they need, to complete to resources that they have at their hands. By very nature, this kind of teamwork implies that actions of all of these elements are interconnected. Typically, work on some task cannot begin until another task is completed, someone is blocked from doing his part of work before another person completes his bit, etc. In order for this kind of work to proceed, everyone involved needs to have at least a certain degree of situational awareness.
Current reality
The term Situational Awareness might sound scary, but we humans are actually quite good at it. Most mammals are. We have a whole array of senses that have evolved to help us gather the input needed to create the situational awareness necessary for our daily survival. We also have the central nervous system capable of integrating these inputs into a coherent mental model. An average human is quite capable of crossing the street. If you are extra good at it, you might become an MVP of the NBA or a star football player.
The office environment is arguably quite different from the urban rainforest or a basketball court. However, it is still a physical environment. Our senses are reasonably capable of helping us keep Situational Awareness in this context. We also have a set of tools that were developed over centuries to help us in this matter.
The problem is that we have been shifted into a new type of environment. While working from home our work no longer takes place in the physical world but in a virtual one. Our senses and our established tools are not as adept at dealing with this environment as they are with the physical one.
Remember the arguments about the virtues of physical task boards and daily standups made by many in the pre-COVID world?
To illustrate how inadequate our current tech is, consider our visual system. Our eyes are our primary sense. An average human has a field of view of about 210° in the horizontal plane. An average laptop screen placed at a standard typing distance will occupy about 15° of that span. In the office environment, this is not a problem. These 15° are neatly reserved, let’s say for the document you are editing, the rest of your field of view is used for communication with others, for papers on your desk, for the glimpse of that physical task board in the corner of your eye. In work from home environment, your whole work context is squeezed into this narrow 15° window!
Visual sensations are only an aspect of this. Everything else from choppy lagging audio to tiny images of your coworkers contributes to the problem.
I realized that what I, and many others, were facing is a breakdown of Situational Awareness. My brain is constantly trying to construct a sort of mental model it needs, based on very distorted and inadequate inputs. This is what causes most of my fatigue and mental exhaustion!
There are two sides to this coin. If your work involves a task that requires deep focus but can be done largely independently from others, i.e. does not depend so much on Situational Awareness, the physical office environment is most probably very distracting. People mingling around, constant chatter, random office noises, etc. This is multiplied severalfold if you are stuck in the open office. Work from home in this case allows you to better filter the unneeded sensory inputs and thus focus better.
If on the other hand, your role requires coordination with multiple people on multiple work tracks work from home quickly turns into a war of attrition.
Way forward
Obviously, what we are lacking is a better set of tools and means of communication. The laptop screen and Zoom (or any other current video conferencing software) are inadequate. Part of the solution of course lies in a better quality of video and audio and more reliable broadband connections. However, even if you fix these technical problems, conceptual problems remain! What we need is a paradigm shift. This is finally the problem that VR, AR, XR people were looking to solve. This is where this kind of approach might actually find a useful application.
After all, the origins of AR are in the aircraft industry, the same place where Situational Awareness was first postulated!
Please, I don’t mean to suggest that we need some sort of new Second Life dystopian uncanny valley. Skeuomorphism is not the answer. Pretty much none of the current generation of AR workspaces is going to cut it. We do not need something that replicates the physical world, what we need is a new kind of UX.
I don’t know how would this new UX look and feel, but I can speculate on the goals it needs to hit:
- Offer a greater degree of immersion than my current laptop and headphones setup.
- Take in the information that we already have in various forms, from video and audio streams, to chat, email, Slack channels, etc., and filter it in a contextual way.
- It needs to discard the noise and present the rest in a way that would promote Situational Awareness.
This is not going to be easy, but at least it’s a direction forward.
Good luck and good night!
Links
- Flin R, O’Connor P, Crichton M. Safety at the Sharp End: A Guide to Non-Technical Skills. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press; 2008.
- Endsley M.R. “Toward a Theory of Situation Awareness in Dynamic Systems”, Human Factors Journal 37(1), pp. 32–64.
- Endsley M.R. “A Survey of Situation Awareness Requirements in Air-to-Air Combat Fighters”, The International Journal of Aviation Psychology
Volume 3 (2), pp. 157–168. - Situational Awareness in Air Traffic Control.
- How Many Senses Do We Have? — Neuroscientist explains hidden abilities of the human body.
- Human Field of View — Wikipedia Article.
- 4 advantages of the physical task board.
- The origins of Augmented Reality.
- Varjo — a company doing VR workspaces from Helsinki.
