Chris Groves – How to deal with huge amounts of information in intense situations

Simon: This isn’t a normal sort of oral history question but it seems that for somebody who has been in a situation of such intense pressure, it’s a failure for me not to ask really. Your top tips on dealing with huge amounts of information coming in?

I think experience allows you to pick out the key pieces of information and discard the information that’s not important to you. And I think I’m reasonably good at that. You see people who can’t do it. You’re in a really busy scenario, there’s information coming in from all kinds of places in the Control Room. You know you’ve got information coming across the main broadcast from the Manoeuvring Room, from the Engineering spaces.

You’ve got information coming from the Sonar, you’ve got information coming from the Radar, you’ve got information coming from the Navigation, you’ve got information coming and you see that information coming in and as the Commanding Officer, you’ll sit back and you’ll hear the one report that comes from the Sound Room which makes you think straightaway ah, and it might be there’s a Warship that’s suddenly started transmitting on Sonar, and then the rest of the Control Room are so in the moment and you’ll see the Watch Leader, the person who’s got charge of the Watch and should really be doing your job if you like with charge of the submarine, will miss that piece of information and you’ll think, ‘why is that?’ You know it’s the only thing he should be worrying about at the moment is that.

The rest of it is all fluff but experience gives you that ability to be able to deal with that and again I suppose there’s the nature and nurture piece of it, but experience is definitely the thing that allows you to do that.