Most situations look ordinary right up to the moment they are not.
We read the world through what we expect to see. That works well as long as the situation behaves the way it usually does. It works less well in the minutes when something is beginning to change and nothing has yet gone visibly wrong. Self Simula trains people to notice that shift while it is still happening — in scenes built from the environment they actually work in. It is e-training, not e-learning: nothing to read, nothing to memorise, only situations to read.
Start a conversationThree people seated. Nothing has changed in four minutes.
One person has moved to the door and turned away from the desk. This is the moment to act.
The situation is rarely the surprise. The recognition is.
When people are asked afterwards what happened, they can usually point to the moment things turned. What they could not do at the time was see it as a turning point, because it looked like a slightly unusual version of something familiar. Under pressure, attention narrows, interpretation leans on what we already believe, and decisions follow from an understanding that may no longer fit the room we are standing in.
Training has traditionally answered this with procedures: what to do once the situation is defined. Self Simula works one step earlier, on the perception and the judgement that define it.
What self-simulation means.
Simulation has usually meant simulating the world. Self-simulation means simulating the person in it.
Most simulation is built to model things: a structure under load, a fluid through a pipe, a machine before it is made. The person looking at the model is outside it. Self-simulation turns that around. The object of the exercise is the individual's own perception and judgement — what they notice, how they interpret it, and what they decide — rehearsed against situations that have not happened yet, so that the first real encounter is not the first encounter.
That is why the name begins with the word it does. The simulation is not of a place or a process but of the person: their own way of seeing, individually, in the environment they actually work in. Everything on this page follows from that — the scenes are built from the individual's own context, the questions are asked of the individual, and the measurement is of what the individual noticed.
Four questions, asked in the same order, in every scene.
PERCEIVE
What do you actually see? Not what the scene is about, but which details are present. This is where most errors begin: the cue was there, and it was not noticed.
UNDERSTAND
What does it mean? Two scenes can contain almost the same elements and mean entirely different things. Learning to tell them apart is the core of the training.
DECIDE
What happens next, and what do you do about it? The decision is only as good as the understanding it rests on.
ADAPT
What changes when new information arrives? The ability to let go of a first reading is as important as the ability to form it.
The structure follows established research on situational awareness and on how experienced people recognise patterns and decide under time pressure. Each scene is scored against the same levels, so the measurement is built into the training rather than added as a test at the end. Over time this gives an organisation something it rarely has: a picture of what its people notice, and what they consistently miss.
Every scene is scored on the same four levels. Aggregated across a group, the result is a map of attention and judgement: which cues are seen by nearly everyone, which by almost no one, and where understanding breaks down even when perception was correct.
Each programme starts with one environment — the counter, the ward, the classroom, the control room, the vehicle — and builds pairs of scenes from it. In one, the situation is developing into something that requires action. In the other, it is not. The two look alike, because in real life they do.
Validated by people who have stood in the room.
The scenes are produced digitally and validated by people who have worked in the situations they depict. That validation is not a final check; it is where the value lies. A scene is only useful if someone who knows the environment recognises it as true.
Because nothing is filmed, a programme can be built for a new setting in a short time, revised as conditions change, and extended to new situations without a production cycle. A scene library grows with the organisation, and the measurement grows with it.
of organisations will require skills assessments where no AI is allowed to help.
Gartner expects the erosion of critical-thinking skills through generative AI to push half of all organisations to test their people's judgement without AI assistance. Earlier, it had already placed simulation-based training among its strategic technology trends, forecasting that adoption among large businesses in training and simulation would rise from under one per cent to more than a third in two years.
Both point to the same ability: a person's own reading of a situation, with nothing between them and it. That is what self-simulation trains.
One method, three degrees of presence.
The scenes on a screen. Individual training, at scale, wherever the participant is. Same questions, same scoring, same scene library.
The same scenes in a headset. Nothing is added except focus: no colleagues, no notifications, no periphery. For situations where the training gains from being fully in the room.
Live imagery from drones delivered to headsets before a team arrives at an incident. The same discipline of perceiving and understanding, applied to a situation that is real.
For anyone who has to read a situation before they can act.
Industry
Recognising the difference between a deviation that can wait and one that cannot, on the floor and in the control room.
Health
Reading a patient, a relative, a waiting room; distinguishing distress from threat.
Schools
Seeing the early stages of a situation among pupils, or with a visitor, before it becomes an incident.
Public services
Front-line staff who meet the public in situations that can turn quickly, and who are expected to make the call alone.
Transport
Drivers, conductors and station staff who have seconds to read a passenger, a platform or a queue — and who are often alone when they do.
Emergency services
Arriving at a scene and reading it before the situation reads you; recognising what is already in motion, not only what is visible.
Security and reception
The first person a visitor meets, and the last one who can still decide whether the situation stays ordinary.
Leadership and crisis teams
Managers who must recognise, from fragments, that a workplace issue is turning into something the organisation has to handle as a crisis.
These are examples, not limits. The method applies wherever a few seconds of prior recognition change what a person does next — a front desk, a ward, a shop floor, a control room, a road tunnel a driver is shown before entering it.
What we want to achieve.
We want people to meet difficult situations they have, in a sense, already seen. Not because they were told what to do, but because they have practised looking at their own environment closely enough to notice when it is beginning to change — and have learned what that change tends to mean.
The ambition is simple to state and hard to do: that the first time someone recognises a situation is not the first time they are in it.
Self Simula is developed by Bråten Innovation AS with support from Innovation Norway, and builds on research in work and organisational psychology, situational awareness and naturalistic decision-making.
Who is behind it.
Ole André Bråten
Specialist in work and organisational psychology, author and researcher on human factors under pressure. He has written handbooks on conflict management and crisis management, contributed to international volumes on crisis negotiation, and has worked with people in situations shaped by uncertainty, conflict and pressure across the police, the defence sector, academia and the Nordic public sector. Self Simula grew out of that work: a long-standing interest in why capable people misread situations, and what could be trained.
Anette Falkum
Organisational adviser, crisis and conflict researcher and author, with a background as a nurse and as a leader in specialist healthcare. She has led organisational development processes in business and the public sector since 2010 and works in particular with risk assessment and decision-making in the front line. She worked on the development of the Self Simula concept through Google's startup programme, shaping how the training meets the people who will actually use it.
This is a system, not a course.
Self Simula is being built in stages: recognition training on a screen, the same training in a headset, and in time live imagery for teams on their way to a situation that is real. Along the way we work with organisations, research partners and public bodies who want their people to see more, earlier.
If that describes you, we would like to talk — about your environment, your situations, and what your people currently miss.
