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Time to observe rapids
A river with complex rapids
Someone to set safety
Data vs. Information
Situational Awareness
Understanding Spheres of awareness
Creating Proper Mental Pictures
In this lesson, Trevor is discussing how to improve your situational awareness and more efficiently deal with what’s coming at you on the water. We like to utilize the spheres of awareness model to help tie our understanding of hydrology, hydraulic jumps, flow states, and CORC rapid scouting principles together.
Data: Data are individual facts, statistics, or items of interest. Data by it’s very nature is raw and unfiltered.
Information: Information is processed, organized and structured data. It provides context for data and enables decision making process.
Observation - The first phase of situational awareness is the data collection phase. In rafting this would be encountering a new rapid for the first time. This is typically characterized as a barrage of data which may overwhelm your senses, especially if you are a newer boater. This phase has the highest potential for error of any phase of situational awareness.
Understanding - The second phase is processing and organizing data into structured information. On the river we do this through the CORC scouting system. This system allows us to easily structure data into actionable information. Having a useful and complete mental model of how to scout will help sort out useful data from noise by being goal oriented. In this case the goal is the successful completion of the rapid.
Prediction - The final stage of situational awareness requires us to have complete mental models of hydrology to more accurately predict the outcome of the scout. This is why we lean so heavily on our understanding of hydrology, flow states, and hydraulic jumps. Having good models for prediction allows you to more accurately assess risk.
When we look at the human factors that reduce situational awareness, Mica Endsley’s study on situational awareness showed that the greatest error potential lies in the observation phase of situational awareness with the following percentage of error:
Failure to observe or monitor data: 35.1%
Data not available: 13.0%
Data hard to detect or discriminate: 11.1%
Misperception of data: 8.7%
Forgetting data: 8.4%
Simply not paying proper attention to or not being able to see the data collectively was responsible for 59.2% of all human errors.
In understanding phase incomplete or incorrect mental models create the most errors in situational awareness. A prime example of this is calling every hydraulic jump a hole. We always want to strive be using greater degrees of specificity whenever possible to help ourselves properly predict future outcomes. When someone refers to every hydraulic jump as “a big hole” they are generating several errors in the situational awareness model:
You will not be able to detect or distinguish the raw data flowing into your senses
You will misperceive data
Incomplete mental model; or
Utilizing an incorrect mental model
Reduce the requirement for people to make calculations.
Present data in a manner that makes understanding and prediction levels easier.
Organize information in a manner that is consistent with the persons goals.
To improve situational awareness more practically for ourselves we like to use the concentric ring model by creating layered spheres of awareness in 3 distinct zones:
Red Zone - Inside the boat – People focused on the red zone often won’t be able to articulate what just happened in a rapid.
Advantages – Hyper focused on paddlers – Good in a rescue situation where you are engaged fully with the victim
Disadvantages – There are few advantages to being locked into the red zone and you typically find yourself in this zone when you have a surge of adrenaline and your fight or flight response kicks in limiting your vision.
Yellow Zone - within ~15 feet of the perimeter line or 1 boat length away.
Advantages – You can focus on effectively making paddle strokes as well as feed information to a paddle captain. You can also focus on paddling in the most efficient currents.
Disadvantages – You aren’t looking downstream. Often experience a failure to proact when you encounter an obstacle or hydraulic feature. You end up not setting yourself up for success downriver.
Green Zone – Outside of the yellow zone for as far as you can perceive. The eddy above and below the drop, where you always want to live
Advantages – Largest field of view, can pre plan what comes next
Disadvantages – Can be detached from what the boat is currently interacting with or can be thrown off balance if the boater failed to detect a slightly submerged obstacle.
