I held a fascinating interview with a private jet pilot (↑ that’s the jet he flies), and discovered how to utilize what pilots call Situational Awareness in my work on stage as a performer. If you’ve never heard the terms Situational Awareness, or OODA loop, there’s lots you can learn from a pilot that could help save your life. It can also help you make better decisions if you are a presenter or entertainer, when one foul-up on stage could cause you to lose credibility.

What is Situational Awareness?

Situational Awareness, in its simplest sense, means knowing what is going on, so you can figure out what to do.  Any time you have a high flow of information, if you make a poor decision on that information, it could result in disaster. It’s crucial to be trained in Situational Awareness as a pilot, and this awareness becomes better and better with experience, during what’s known as “flight time.”

It doesn’t only apply to pilots, but to anyone who must make decisions quickly that could result in catastrophe or death: paramedics, surgeons, police officers, firefighters, and SCUBA divers.

Scot Evans, the pilot I interviewed, was in the Coast Guard for 21 years. During that time he did everything from serving as a rescue swimmer and jumping out of helicopters, to salvage diving and underwater construction and welding.

Now, he pilots an Embraer Legacy 600 for business people, rock stars and A-list movie stars.

He’s a pretty amazing guy.

Here are some photos of Scot during his Coast Guard days:

Scot in Mark V surface supply rig

Scot cutting steel underwater using oxy-arc method

According to Scot, Situational Awareness doesn’t come naturally, other than through close calls during your experience of life. If you have close calls with death, you start to think, “Hey, I’d better figure out what’s going on, so I can figure out what to do to stay alive.”

What is the mindset of someone with strong Situational Awareness? The first step is the perception of the environmental elements within a particular volume of time and space. It’s not only paying attention to where you are moving within three dimensional space, because it’s actually four dimensional — you also have the dimension of time. That’s crucial. The second step is comprehension of everything you observe, and what each detail means. That comprehension is very quickly followed by projecting the status of those elements into the future.

So you’re calculating the events and predicting the outcome. In a way, you’re watching yourself as a third person, and seeing yourself in the future. And you’re figuring out what those elements are going to do to you in the future. You’re always asking yourself, “What could happen next?” and “What do I need to do, if that happens?”

The OODA Loop

A US Air Force fighter pilot, Colonel John Boyd defined this system of attention as the OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. As you are fulfilling the final step (“act”), you must rapidly loop back to the first step again, observing how your action has played out. As you’re engaged in the process of flying, you must constantly observe, orient, decide and act, to determine your next maneuver.

You’ve probably heard the expression “to be out of the loop.” This phrase was directly created as a result of Boyd’s OODA loop. It essentially means that you are neither aware of your surroundings nor of the events that have unfolded during your lapse in attention.

Here’s the part that I found most interesting. If you’re able to operate faster than your opponent (assuming that you’re flying a fighter jet against an enemy pilot), you can get inside his loop, and anticipate how he’ll act next. The rapid decisions you make serve to rattle your adversary, resulting in a lapse in his ability to judge your next move.

In the world outside of fighter jets, which is all the rest of us, the speed at which you think can help you anticipate how a client/audience/opponent will act, even before he does so.

Here’s how I think about this as an entertainer.

Life and Death On Stage

When an audience responds with wild enthusiasm, show biz veterans walk off stage and proudly announce, “I killed them” or “That killed.” In magician-generated literature – catalogs, instruction sheets, and product reviews – it’s common to find phrases such as “This trick will devastate any audience.”

Is a magic show truly a life or death exchange? At first glance the answer may seem to be no. In my opinion, however, a single moment that is unforeseen by the magician can instantly kill the experience of magic for an audience. A magic show is a delicate and frail interplay that relies on an unspoken contract between audience and magician. The audience knows that they will be fooled, and the magician agrees to offer them the sensation of experiencing an impossibility. However if the magician does not exhibit Situational Awareness, he may, during the course of his act, accidentally expose the secret of his trick, and therefore kill the sensation of magic for the rest of the performance.

It is difficult to recover from an obviously botched trick, or something simpler such as a brief flash of a hidden gimmick that the audience catches. At that moment, the audience is smacked with the clarity that this is not “magic” any longer, but rather a fellow who is executing a series of actions that fouled up.

In that moment, the show has a seizure. I’ve been there. It’s not pretty.

So, having done my Chamber Magic show thousands of times, I have obtained a strong sense of Situational Awareness, and can foresee possible mistakes. I “watch” myself perform, imagining what the show looks like from the audience perspective. I make adjustments and changes along the way to preserve the integrity of the show. This comes from becoming comfortable enough with the material that I’m not thinking about the technique involved. It’s become so internalized that I can pay attention to the flow of the performance, and how any minor mishaps that occur now, will affect the show later.

One way to learn how to “watch yourself perform” is to take a dance class. When I was in college I took a jazz dance class, to fulfill a phys ed requirement. I was a lousy dancer, but the class offered me my first exposure to standing in front of a wall of mirrors. I observed how my body looked to an audience, how the shape of my body appeared. From that class, I took the “wall of mirrors” concept and internalized it. Even when no mirrors are available, I visualize how my performance would look if I were observing myself – the shapes my body make, the hand gestures, the angles which I point my feet.

Like I said, I’ve internalized this now, so if an issue arises, I think about how to solve the issue in the most unobtrusive way from the audience’s perspective.

Ideally, Situational Awareness helps you to foresee problems before they occur since you are projecting the current events out into the future.

How have you experienced Situational Awareness in your life? Have you ever been able to avoid or deflect a life-threatening (or other) issue due to Situational Awareness?