4 Steps for Optimizing Situational Awareness and Visual Intelligence | Amy Herman | Big Think

Visual intelligence is the concept that we see more than we can process, and it's the idea of thinking about what we see, taking in the information, and what do we really need to live our lives more purposefully and do our jobs more effectively. I work across the professional spectrum. So I work with police officers and intelligence analysts, and doctors and nurses and librarians, but what's interesting for me is that the four A's are applicable to all of that.

And what they are is any new situation, any new problem, any new client, any new transaction, any new environment that you're in, you practice four A's. The first one is you assess your situation. What do I have in front of me? What information is here? I want people to go beyond the four corners of what they think they see.

So this is what's in front of me; this is where I am. Ask someone. This is my situation; here's where I am; this is what I see. Is there something here I might be missing? Because by asking someone else, we realize that no two people see anything the same way. So, of course, that doesn't work all the time, but if you're in an office situation, if you're in a medical situation and you have the opportunity to collaborate, we get the biggest picture of your assessment if you ask other people what they see as well.

The second step is to analyze the information. That's where you break it down and you say what's important? What do I need to prioritize? What's most important? And what don't I really have to worry about at all? I find that when you make a mental list in your head, okay here's my situation, and you divide it into two categories: information I need, information I might need, and information I definitely don't need.

And for the information that you definitely don't need, put it away because our brains are so cluttered with so much information that if you can, from the outset, get rid of some information, do it, but keep that middle category, information that you might need, because you might have to draw on it when you don't realize that it's important. It could become more important as the process goes on.

And then the third A I think is actually the most important. It's how you articulate what you observe. Whether you send an email, whether you pick up the phone, whether you tell a colleague, whether you write it down, the idea of putting into words what your observations are is the most important because I tell all my groups, I don't know why this is, but something gets lost from here to here to here.

Our brains and our eyes see something, but when it comes to articulating those observations, whether it's poor choice of words or an inability to communicate effectively, there's a real loss that I'm trying to redress. I ask people to be mindful of every word. Every word counts. And an example that I can give you that I give in the book was the investigation of the murder of Chandra Levy in Washington DC back in 2001.

When the instruction was given to look for the body, the instruction was to look 100 yards from every trail in the park where she disappeared, but when the instruction was repeated, they said look 100 yards from every road in the park. Now the change of one word from trail to road changed the whole scope of the investigation.

So in that third A, in that articulating what you observe, I ask people to be mindful of every word because someone is listening and every word counts. And the fourth A is after you've assessed, analyzed, and articulated what it is that you observe, you adapt your behavior or you make a decision, or as I like to say, you act.

You take all that information, then you make a judgment call based on those three other elements. And I find that that model, I want it to become automatic. I want people to be able to think about assessing, analyzing, articulating, and then making a decision based on all those things.

I want people to act according to their observations, so if you're ever questioned about why you made a certain decision, why did you take a certain road, why did you solve a problem this way, you're able to go back to the other A's and say, well, I thought the situation was this. This was the information I thought was important. I perceived this, therefore I made this decision.

Give yourself the tools to back up the decisions you make so that when you're questioned about your decisions, you have all the information you need to make a thoughtful, purposeful, and objective assessment of why you made the decision.