Shared Situation Awareness in the Globalised World

Well-developed and properly implemented concept of situation awareness (SA) improves decision-making at all levels of governance and management, especially when it comes to risky or emergent scenarios. The importance of SA increases with the level of uncertainty and dynamism of the surrounding environment, as well as with the number of external collaborators. The general complexity of such problems is high, and it is difficult to structure them in a directly applicable and interpretable way. Therefore, our goal was to discover whether it is possible to reasonably simplify, systemise and incorporate specific aspects of national and global dynamics into SA of both independent and collaborating organizations in order to formulate viable policies and plan development indicators with respect to external changes. As the main result, this paper suggests a conceptual design of a qualitative model of organizational SA, composed of two major components, data, and knowledge. It internalizes the four key aspects of national performance, accompanied by two distinct resources of global changes. This input information was initially identified in terms of disjoint, internally well-structured and mutually unrelated national indexes, for which the historical time-series data were available. Adopted datasets were processed with supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques, which discovered the most influential general and country-specific predictors of external and global changes. These variables and identified relational patterns served as a foundation for designing a qualitative dynamic model of SA in the form of a Causal loop diagram. Because of the predictive nature of the proposed model, its adopters can either directly follow its suggestions or continuously share their own indicators of quantitative availability and qualitative willingness towards external partners. Related comparative analyses of typical scenarios can discover possible asymmetric bottlenecks caused by national specifics and global disturbances, which could prematurely harm otherwise smooth bilateral collaboration.