The four sisters of Understanding
I introduce my mini-series of four related concepts: Situation Awareness, Sensemaking, Weak Signal Detection and Attention Economy. I call them sisters, because they have close relationships.
Situation Awareness: the ability to perceive and understand what is happening around you in the present moment.
Sensemaking: the process of creating meaning from experiences, particularly in situations that are unexpected, complex, ambiguous, or uncertain.
Weak Signal Detection: Weak signals are often hidden in a sea of information and can be easily missed if you're not paying close attention or if you do not have the right tolls to detect them.
Attention Economy: a proxy for things like tunnel view, the need for peripheral view and the problems described in Kahneman’s “Thinking fst and slow”
While Attention Economy plays a special role in explaining human behavior, it is not easy to delineate the first three concepts as they often overlap, interrelate and contribute to each other. However, this table provides a general overview with some key distinctions:
Key Differences & Relationships include
Sensemaking & Situation Awareness: Sensemaking often contributes to situation awareness. You can't understand the situation (awareness) without making sense of the information within it. However, situation awareness is more immediate and focused on the present, while sensemaking can be more retrospective and focused on constructing a coherent narrative.
Weak Signal Detection & Sensemaking: Weak signals are the raw material for sensemaking. Detecting these signals is the first step, but sensemaking is necessary to understand their meaning and implications.
Weak Signal Detection & Situation Awareness: Weak signals can enhance situation awareness by providing clues about future changes in the environment. However, they can also be easily missed if individuals are overly focused on the dominant signals and current state.
First, I want to introduce each of the sisters. Then, I will continue with a dicsussions of consequences, conclusions and open questions.