The Anchor Point
Ideas that hold up under load
Hey Reader
I was visiting family in Melbourne last week, at an open-plains zoo, when I came across a hand-painted sign wired to the lion enclosure fence: "Trespassers will be lunch." Paw print and all.
It's blunt, but it does exactly what a good sign should. Anyone reading it knows exactly where the boundary is, what's on the other side, and what happens if they get it wrong.
That's often how situational awareness gets treated, as well. You've either got it, or you haven't. You're switched on, or you're not. Action and consequence.
In the field, howevever, it splits into four separate jobs: gaining it, keeping it, sharing it, and recovering it.
Recovering situational awareness matters because you will lose it. Something moves faster than you can track, or you're running on empty, or you get pulled into one detail and the wider picture slips. What you do in that moment decides how the rest of the job goes.
This process, known as situational awareness, is the ability to know what is happening around you, understand what it means, and what is likely to happen next. That's accurate, but it only describes the state. It doesn't tell you how to build it, hold it, pass it on, or recover it once it's gone.
That's actually what the twelve leadership prompts I teach are. Not twelve separate habits. Twelve different ways of doing one of those four jobs, depending on what's in front of you.
I'm covering all four jobs (gain, keep, share, and recover), and which prompts serve which job, in the upcoming Leadership Prompts webinar.
[Save your seat for 16 October →]
Grant
