Start with a good-enough definition: Real-time team situational awareness is the shared understanding of the current task environment, the actions of those team members then involved, and potential risks and uncertainties, allowing responses now and in the next steps by the team.
How does this happen? One answer is that each team member is already a team:
I suggest that rather than rejecting the possibility that people can lead authentic lives, we reject the individualist self. . .Heersmink (2018) argues for a narrative self view in which the self is partially constituted by a distributed network of other people and external artefacts. Japanese philosopher Deguchi (2022) has recently provided an extended defence of a non-individualist self, arguing that many philosophers in the East Asian tradition—such as Do ̄gen and other Zen philosophers—have conceptualized the self as something essentially social, a ‘we’ rather than an ‘I’. This view does not deny that there is an ‘I’; instead, it makes a distinction between ‘I’ and the self. Deguchi presents the self as a multi-agent system, composed not just of ‘me’ but also of the many others on whom I rely in my actions and decision-making. In this view, the self is strictly and literally composed of multiple agents. While this whole ‘we’ system is involved in decision making, Deguchi (2022: 10) argues,
‘I participate and play an important role in these ‘we’ decisions. Just as the head of an organization, for example, makes the final decision after deliberations and decisions in various departments, I also play a role in pushing the final button after a long and com- plex process, rather than deciding everything alone. In this sense, I am not an autocrat or dictator, but the final decision-maker.’
The agential ‘I’ still has a special place in this system, but not the ontological exclusivity that it has in the individualist self picture. Call this family of views the social self. . . .
Recall Deguchi’s (2022: 10) example of the head of an organization, who ‘makes the final decision after deliberations and decisions in various departments’. The head of an organization does not just draw from the deliberations and decisions of various departments because that provides her with better information about what the most rational decision would be, but also because doing so reflects what kind of organization they are, what kind of relationships the employees have with each other, and what kind of leader she is.
S.A. Mortimer (2025). “Becoming authentic: A social conception of the self.” The Philosophical Quarterly (accessed on line at https://academic.oup.com/pq/advance-article/doi/10.1093/pq/pqaf008/7989935; I’ve edited out an endnote for readability)
To recast the definition with which we started, team situation awareness is first a kind of authenticity.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 