An Exploration of 4 Star Sea Providers’ Understanding and Development of Situational Awareness and Decision Making During 4 Star Sea Training

By John Carmody
Academic Research

By John Carmody

Decision-making has been described as essential to the process in outdoor leadership (Galloway 2007; Tozer, Fazey & Fazey, 2007) and Adventure Sports Coaching (ASC) (Collins & Collins, 2015). However, the only way the developing leader can become more proficient is to expose themselves to situations they have fewer experiences in, thus increasing the risk (Collins & Collins, 2013). Training courses may assist in this development, however, little is known about the extent to which they provide for the development of decision making. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore what a group of current Providers’ understanding of situational awareness and decisionmaking is, what skills they identify as critical to effective 4 Star leadership and how they develop these in the context of 4 Star training.