People-focused knowledge management

Ability to Analyze
Increased ability to analyze situations given
Reduced ability to make sense of the situation due to
critical thinking skills, knowledge, and 
lack of knowledge, resources, etc. —
other resources —
Leads to misclassifying or even ignoring important
Leads to better and quicker understanding of
situations.
broad ranges of situations.
Preoccupation and
People who pay attention and are not
If people are preoccupied or have misplaced
Lack of Attention
preoccupied —
attention —
Tend to understand situations faster and with
They misunderstand or even overlook important
greater situation awareness.
situations, at least initially.
Time
Given enough time to digest and understand
Lack of time to project importance and consequences
the given information about the situation —
of the situation should it be allowed to evolve on
Leads to better sensemaking in complex
its own —
situations.
Leads to misclassifying — even ignoring important
situations.
Fast Changing
Situations that change quickly —
When a situation is changing too fast to make sense
Conditions
Require people with great familiarity and
of its current state —
situational awareness skills to make sense
Leads to conditions where it is either too late to handle
and understand the situations.
the situation or a new and different state emerges 
that requires different handling.

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A Knowledge Model for Personal Situation-Handling
131
person encounters a situation, no matter how insignificant and
minute, he observes it by obtaining information about it and pro-
ceeds to understand it by decoding, analyzing, interpreting, and
accepting it as being believable. These tasks are largely performed
tacitly. In some cases he uses specific and detailed knowledge about
similar situations to make sense of the situation from the accepted
information.
3
In other general or less known cases he uses more
abstract knowledge. He normally will already have an understand-
ing of the general context. That is often part of his work environ-
ment and general role. During the Sensemaking task, he uses his 
a priori Situational Awareness capability to understand the target 
situation. The quality and proficiency of his Situational Awareness
determine the extent to which the current situation, its context and
environment, are first observed and then perceived and the accuracy
with which the resulting perception — the understanding of the sit-
uation — mirrors reality. Without appropriate Situational Aware-
ness, he does not have sufficient understanding of the situation and
its context and cannot make proper sense of it. Inadequate Situa-
tional Awareness limits the ability both to observe and to perceive
the situation adequately, and in such cases becomes a Sensemaking
constraint.
In organizations, the corresponding structural knowledge is 
manifested in many ways — it can consist of shared beliefs, stories,
or even embedded knowledge in practices and organized systems and
procedures. In some enterprises, these models can be reference cases
embedded in work-aids such as automated case-based reasoning
(CBR) systems and other kinds of intelligent systems. The structural
reference models can also be embedded in operational and manage-
ment practices as well as in systems and procedures.