The Anchor Point
Ideas that hold up under load
Hey Reader
When an incident needs an immediate response, you need a well-thought-out and documented plan before you need it: one that’s practised from the fine detail on the ground right through to the incident management happening further away.
That plan has to work with how your brain actually functions under pressure, not against it.
In rescue and incident management, we talk about Manageable Span of Control: the idea that we can only manage a limited number of people or things effectively at one time, usually somewhere between 3 and 7. That number isn’t arbitrary. It comes from the brain’s working memory, the amount of information we can hold and use at any given moment. Working memory drives reasoning and decision-making, and it’s been described as a temporary sticky note in the brain. Stick too much on it during a rescue and things start falling off.
You can’t make your working memory bigger. What you can do is get more experience.
Experience widens the range of patterns you can recognise. When you size up an incident, you’re matching what’s in front of you against patterns you’ve seen before: that’s part of situational awareness. Once you recognise the pattern, you respond, ideally with a strategy that’s worked for you in the past.
Over time, experience lets you chunk what you’ve learned into bigger blocks, so you stop having to think about each piece individually. That’s what frees up working memory for the parts of the incident that actually are unfamiliar.
This is the core problem worth considering: most teams don’t get enough real rescues to build this kind of pattern library on the job. So where does the experience come from instead? That’s what the next post in this series covers.
If you’re finding your team freezes up or loses the plot when a scenario doesn’t match the textbook, that’s usually a working memory problem, not a skills problem. It’s exactly the kind of thing I help teams work through in on-site preparedness training. Drop me a line by replying to this email if you want to talk through what that looks like for your team.
Grant
