Situational Awareness Management Model: Take the First Step
Start moving. Observe. Learn. Evolve.
SAMM is a situational and adaptive model. It does not define a leadership style or tell a Lead exactly how to act in every situation.
Two leaders may observe the same situation and respond differently depending on the context, the people involved, their experience, and their leadership style. SAMM provides a common foundation for understanding that context before deciding how to act, considering the system, the people within it, its trajectory, and the different perceptions of those involved.
SAMM provides situational awareness, not leadership recipes.
Adopting SAMM does not mean replacing the team’s delivery framework or adding a new collection of ceremonies. It means incorporating situational awareness into existing leadership, communication, and delivery dynamics.
SAMM requires only two specific spaces: an initial SAMM Onboarding and a weekly SAMM Tech Space. The rest of the model is integrated into existing 1:1s, retrospectives, Product–Tech alignment, and everyday leadership.
1. SAMM Foundations
SAMM assumes a system where iterative value delivery, collaboration, communication, feedback, and continuous improvement already exist.
It does not require a specific framework and can coexist with Scrum, Kanban, Crystal, or other approaches. SAMM recommends following Agile principles, with particular attention to Extreme Programming (XP) because of its focus on technical excellence, continuous feedback, shared knowledge, and collective ownership.
SAMM does not replace the way a Lead supports the team or follows the evolution of its members. It adds a situational perspective, considering how people, capabilities, motivation, challenge, relationships, context, and previous situations influence the evolution of the system.
Regular 1:1s between the Lead and each team member and recurring Product–Tech alignment, preferably once per iteration, are highly recommended regardless of SAMM. The model incorporates its situational perspective into these existing dynamics.
SAMM begins where the delivery framework ends: in the human system that makes value delivery possible.
2. SAMM Onboarding
The SAMM Onboarding is the entry point to the model.
Who: The whole team or new members.
When: When adopting SAMM and whenever a new member joins.
Its purpose is to establish a common situational language.
The session introduces the essential concepts:
- SAMM & Situational Map: situations and Situational Memory.
- Human Systems & Observer Theory: the team as a human system and the role of different perceptions.
- Motivation & Psychological Foundations: motivation, challenge, learning, frustration, growth, and performance.
- Human Representation: System Actor Attributes.
- System Capabilities: Evolutionary and Technical Capabilities.
- Situational Process: moving from observation to intervention.
- Situational Tech Debt Behaviour: technical debt according to the system situation.
- SAMM Intervention Roadmap: possible intervention directions.
SAMM proposes the common Evolutionary Capabilities, while Technical Capabilities are defined together with the team according to its product, technology, responsibilities, and context.
After onboarding, each member receives a private self-observation questionnaire to complete individually and in their own time.
2.1. Personal Self-Observation
Each person observes themselves through the main System Actor Attributes:
- Role & Knowledge Level: Low / Medium / High
- Mindset: Fixed / Growth
- Frustration Tolerance: Low / Medium / High
- Learning Shape: I-Shape / T-Shape
We are not looking for a definitive description of the person, but for their current self-perception within the system.
2.2. Capabilities Self-Observation
The same questionnaire includes an initial observation of Technical and Evolutionary Capabilities, using a 1-to-5 scale.
The value is not an absolute score. It represents the perception of an observer at a particular moment and within a particular context.
A difference between observations is therefore useful information to explore rather than something that needs to be corrected.
The numerical value is a starting point for the conversation, not its conclusion.
3. Individual Evolution Through 1:1s
SAMM recommends regular 1:1 conversations between the Lead and each team member, avoiding more than two months between them.
The first 1:1 after onboarding contrasts:
Self-perception ↔ Lead perception
The Lead can incorporate their own observation together with perspectives from other relevant observers — Product, other Leads, or peers when appropriate.
System Actor Attributes and Technical & Evolutionary Capabilities are contrasted, paying particular attention to differences in perception.
The goal is not to determine who is right, but to understand what each observer is seeing and why their perspectives may differ.
SAMM should generate conversations, not scores.
This creates the initial Human Representation, which evolves together with the person and the system.
Personal Representation Example
Team Representation Example
Future 1:1s revisit this evolution, professional goals, changes in context, and the person’s perception of their own situation and the wider system.
The conversation adapts to each person’s profile, context, situation, and stage of evolution. It is also bidirectional: the Lead observes how the person can evolve, but also whether the leadership and the system are creating the conditions they need to develop their potential.
The Lead observes the person within the system while remaining part of that same system.
4. SAMM Tech Space
The SAMM Tech Space is, together with Onboarding, one of the specific spaces required by SAMM.
Who: Lead + Tech team.
When: Weekly.
Tech Space provides a recurring and safe space for technical and human communication.
Through an open round, team members can raise anything they consider relevant: technical debt, decisions, concerns, knowledge they need or want to share, technical or product areas they do not fully understand, difficulties, frustrations, or how they are experiencing their current situation within the team.
The Lead should actively manage and prioritise technical debt, while encouraging the team to continuously surface new concerns.
But Tech Space goes beyond technology. Its value also comes from allowing signals to emerge that no dashboard would ever detect.
The Lead participates as another member of the system, helping create an environment where asking questions, disagreeing, admitting uncertainty, requesting help, or raising concerns feels safe.
Tech Space is where the system talks and trust is built.
5. Integrating the Situational Pulse into Retrospectives
A retrospective — or an equivalent space focused on processes, collaboration, and ways of working — provides a natural place for SAMM’s collective situational self-observation.
SAMM recommends performing a Situational Pulse at least once every three retrospectives. This leaves enough time for the system to evolve and for previous decisions or interventions to produce observable effects.
If the team already uses a shared digital board, it can be adapted with three SAMM observation areas.
Challenge / Skills — Flow Theory
Each person positions themselves according to the challenge they are experiencing and the skills they perceive as available to face it.
The purpose is not to calculate an average, but to make different perceptions visible. If six people are in Flow and one is in Anxiety, that difference may be one of the most relevant signals in the observation.
Arousal / Performance — Yerkes-Dodson
The second perspective observes perceived activation and performance:
Under-arousal → Optimal Arousal → Over-arousal
SAMM does not use Flow Theory or Yerkes-Dodson as psychological diagnostic tools, but as shared structures for observation and conversation.
SAMM Situation
Finally, each person indicates which situation best represents their perception of the system:
Cruising Speed · Fluctuation · Indirection · Pressure · Stabilize
Different observations are information in themselves. The team makes those perceptions visible, discusses what lies behind them, and builds a shared understanding of the situation experienced during that period.
The board preserves the last five SAMM Situations, making the recent trajectory of the system visible and progressively building its Situational Memory.
An isolated situation tells us where we believe we are. Situational Memory helps us understand how we arrived there and how the system responded to previous decisions and interventions.
Where did we come from? → Where are we now? → Where do we seem to be heading?
The distance between Pulses matters because the system needs time to respond.
The dashboard provides signals. The conversation provides understanding.
Observations can lead to specific actions agreed by the team, with clear ownership for follow-up.
Each SAMM Situation provides a situational intervention roadmap with possible directions to explore, not prescribed actions.
The team contributes observations and possible ways forward. The Lead uses those inputs together with the people involved, the context, Situational Memory, and their own experience to decide whether to intervene, what to do, and how to do it.
Sometimes this means reducing pressure or allowing the system to stabilise; at other times, creating a learning opportunity, restoring direction, or challenging an existing dynamic.
SAMM suggests where to look and what to consider. The team contributes possible ways forward, while the Lead uses experience and situational judgement to decide when and how to influence the system.
6. Product and Technology Alignment
SAMM recommends recurring alignment between the Lead and Product, preferably once per iteration.
This is not a SAMM-specific ceremony. It is an existing Product–Tech practice where the model introduces a situational perspective.
Alongside product direction, priorities, technical reality, and value delivery, the conversation can include the team’s situation, needs, capabilities, dependencies, conflicts, and possible interventions.
This becomes especially relevant when priorities, pressure, responsibilities, or technical challenges change.
The conversation is also bidirectional: Product and Tech can observe their own collaboration and how they can jointly create better conditions for the system.
Product direction, technical reality, and the human system should not be observed independently.
A Starting Point, Not a Prescription
SAMM generates information that evolves with the system: people, capabilities, observations, situations, interventions, and Situational Memory.
Digital support can help preserve this information while maintaining a clear separation between collective system information and individual private information. In the future, SAMM Suite can use this evolving memory to retrieve previous observations and interventions, detect patterns, and support decision-making.
But the tool is secondary.
The initial adoption of SAMM can be summarised simply:
SAMM Onboarding → Private Self-Observation → Situational 1:1s → Weekly Tech Space → Situational Pulse in Retrospectives → Product–Tech Alignment → Everyday Situational Leadership
Among these, SAMM Onboarding and Tech Space are the two specific spaces required by SAMM. The others integrate situational awareness into leadership and team dynamics that already exist or are recommended independently of the model.
The objective is not to introduce another layer of process.
It is to incorporate situational awareness into the way we observe, communicate, evaluate, and lead the system, keeping people and their evolution at the centre.
Observe. Contrast perceptions. Build Situational Memory. Intervene with context.