Andre Arendse, Bafana Bafana goalkeeper · FIFA World Cup participant · RDZHC Brand Ambassador
Why situational awareness is a skill you build — not an instinct you’re born with
I want to tell you about a moment from my career that I have thought about almost every week since it happened.
We were playing an away match — the opposition had been pressing hard in the second half. With about fifteen minutes to go, I noticed something. Their striker — quick, dangerous, the best player on the pitch — had started drifting wide left on every build-up. Not dramatically. Just a few extra metres. Just enough that the angle between him, the ball, and the goal had shifted slightly from what we’d prepared for.
I moved. Not much. Maybe two steps right and half a step forward. I told my left centre-back what I’d seen.
Six minutes later, the striker received the ball in exactly that position and shot with his right foot — which he almost never used — across goal to the near post. The ball went exactly where I was standing.
I caught it. Nobody in the stadium understood what had just happened. It looked routine. But it wasn’t routine — it was the product of fifteen minutes of watching, pattern recognition, and a two-step adjustment made quietly, well before the threat materialised.
| Situational awareness is not a talent. It is a practice. And it is the single most undervalued skill in both high-performance sport and high-hazard workplaces. |
What goalkeepers actually train
When people think about goalkeeper training, they imagine shot-stopping drills. Diving left, diving right. Reflexes.
The best goalkeeper coaches in the world spend a fraction of their time on that. The majority is spent on something harder to measure: reading the game.
That means studying the opposition striker’s preferred foot, preferred angle, preferred moment to shoot. It means understanding where the ball is most likely to travel when played from different positions on the pitch. It means learning to read a player’s body shape three seconds before they’ve decided what they’re going to do.
None of this is instinct. All of it is trained. All of it is deliberate. And all of it happens before the danger arrives.
The safety parallel: hazard identification before the incident
In safety science, situational awareness — or what James Reason called the ‘active monitoring of risk’ — is one of the most reliable predictors of whether an organisation will have a serious incident.
Not whether they have a fatality history. Not whether they’ve invested in PPE. Not even whether they have comprehensive procedures. The predictor is whether the workforce — from the frontline worker to the CEO — has been trained to read the game in their specific environment.
What does that look like in practice?
- A drill operator who notices that the ground feels different underfoot before a blast cycle and reports it without being asked.
- A supervisor who recognises that the pace of production has increased beyond the capacity of the team to safely execute their critical controls — and calls time before anyone is hurt.
- A safety manager who correlates three near-miss reports in the same work area and sees a pattern that each incident investigator missed in isolation.
- A CEO who walks a site and notices not what the workers are doing — but what they’re not doing. The things that should be happening that aren’t.
These are all versions of the same goalkeeper skill: reading what’s happening now to predict what will happen next, and adjusting before the shot is taken.
| The organisations with the best safety records are not the ones with the best emergency response. They are the ones where the workforce has been trained and empowered to see the drift before it becomes a disaster. |
Why experience alone doesn’t create situational awareness
This is the part that surprises most leaders I speak to.
Experience does not automatically create situational awareness. In fact, experience can work against it. The more familiar an environment becomes, the more the human brain starts to filter out signals it has categorised as normal — even when those signals are actually warning signs that the environment has changed.
In goalkeeping we call this ‘getting caught flat.’ It happens most often to experienced goalkeepers. They’ve seen the same type of move a thousand times. Their brain has filed it under ‘handled.’ And then the variation comes — the ball played a fraction earlier, the striker’s run line two degrees different — and the experienced goalkeeper is caught in the wrong position because their pattern-recognition was running on autopilot.
In mining and construction, this is the experienced worker who has done the same task 10 000 times. Their competency is real. But their situational awareness may have atrophied precisely because nothing has gone wrong before. The environment has quietly changed — new equipment, different ground conditions, a new team member changing the communication dynamic — and the experienced worker’s brain hasn’t noticed.
| Experience makes people comfortable. Situational awareness training makes people sharp. You need both — and they don’t come in the same package. |
How you build it as a leader
Three practical things I learned from goalkeeping that apply directly to building situational awareness in your workforce:
- Pre-shift briefings are the goalkeeper’s warm-up
Before every match, I would walk the pitch. Check the surface. Check the wind. Note anything unusual about the conditions. A proper pre-shift safety briefing does the same thing — it activates the team’s attention toward what is different today. What has changed since yesterday. What new variable might shift the risk profile of familiar work.
- Verbalisation builds awareness
Great goalkeepers talk constantly. ‘Step! Step! Away! Mine!’ Not because their defenders are deaf — but because the act of verbally naming what you’re seeing forces your brain to process it consciously rather than passively. In safety, near-miss reporting and verbal critical control verification do the same thing. They force conscious engagement with the environment.
- Debrief what you noticed, not just what went wrong
After training, great coaches don’t only review the errors. They ask: what did you see before that happened? What did you notice that you acted on? What did you notice that you didn’t act on? The debrief builds the habit of conscious observation. Over time, that habit changes what the workforce is able to see.
The goalkeeper who saved that shot sixteen minutes from the end of that match didn’t get lucky. He spent the previous fifteen minutes watching, adjusting, communicating — and then he was in the right place when it mattered.
Your workforce can do the same thing. But they need to be trained to look.
Andre Arendse played as goalkeeper for Bafana Bafana from 1994 to 2004. He is the RDZHC brand ambassador and co-creator of the Riski Diski Zero Harm Championship.
| About RDZHC
The Riski Diski Zero Harm Championship is a structured behaviour-change programme for industrial and mining operations, combining cognitive behavioural psychology, football methodology, and the 2026 FIFA World Cup to build fatal risk culture from the boardroom to the blast hole. Follow Andre Arendse and Linda Buthelezi on LinkedIn for the full series. To explore RDZHC for your organisation, contact KBC. |
