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Situation
2 min read · 528 words
A situation is the configuration of conditions the operator is currently in — and accurate reading of the situation is the precondition for accurate response.
The mind tends to read situations through the operator’s prior expectations, current emotional state, and habitual patterns. The reading often diverges from what the situation actually contains. The situation read as crisis when it is not. The situation read as benign when it is genuinely difficult. The situation read as familiar when it differs in important ways from what came before. Each misreading produces response calibrated to a situation other than the one the operator is actually in.
The mechanism: the system is fast at categorization. It assigns the current input to a category based on superficial features, and runs the response associated with the category. This works in many cases — the categorization is roughly accurate, the response is roughly appropriate. In situations that don’t match the operator’s prior categories well, the misclassification produces miscalibrated response. The operator can be running effective response to the wrong situation, with the response failing to address what is actually present.
The other distortion: failing to read the situation as a coherent whole. The operator who attends only to specific elements — what one other operator did, what one outcome occurred — without reading the full configuration of conditions, often misses what is actually shaping the situation. The boss’s behavior the operator is reacting to may make sense given conditions the operator hasn’t accounted for. The relationship dynamic the operator is fighting may be a response to something happening at a different layer. The full reading of the situation often produces a different response than the partial reading produces.
From the chair: when responding to a situation that is producing difficulty, run the diagnostic. Am I reading this situation accurately, or am I reading it through my prior expectations. The diagnostic is uncomfortable because it requires the operator to consider that their current reading may be wrong. It is also necessary, because response to a misread situation rarely works.
The questions that produce more accurate reading. What is actually occurring here, distinct from what I expected to occur. What conditions exist that I haven’t accounted for. What is each operator in this situation actually responding to, distinct from what I assumed they were responding to. What would change about my reading if I had access to the same information from different perspectives. The questions take time, which is part of why operators often skip them and run with the first reading. The skipping produces the miscalibrated response.
The other application: situations change. The reading that was accurate last year may not be accurate this year. The operator who continues responding to the situation as it was — without updating to the situation as it is — produces miscalibrated response. The discipline of periodic updating is one of the more important operating practices: noticing when the situation has shifted, and updating the response accordingly. Many operators continue running last year’s situational reading into this year’s conditions, with the response failing because the situation is no longer what it was.