Problem detection

Problem detection is an awareness that allows a person to detect when various changes in their environment, the patterns or cues, the trigger a gut feeling, the spidey sense or your intuitions saying danger is ahead. This is the model that leads to avoidance, i.e. one detects a problem and one avoids it by taking a different route or just turning and walking away. 

How does one achieve a level of awareness or problem detection that is adequate to avoid, etc.? Experience! 

The ability to detect and act is driven by several factors. This speaks to the OODA loop. A person must have a certain awareness along with appropriate experience levels to detect all kinds of information. It becomes more difficult as the level of speed rises in the OODA loop, i.e. you observe your surroundings, you detect something that causes your butterflies to twitter in you gut and then it is a matter of making a decision and acting appropriately. If the information is gradual, if the cues are very subtle, and if you don't notice if soon enough then you don't act quickly enough or with appropriate actions. 

You have to have an ability to put the pieces, the cues, together to see the patterns of problems or in this case as a martial artist bent on self-preservation, danger together rapidly to detect a problem and the decide and act accordingly. 

Lets add another layer, when more than one thing goes wrong at the same time. You might hit on the first one and miss any successive cues. If there is excessive noise you may have a harder time detecting it. If you are not effectively collecting data, awareness, because you have those ear buds with loud music, dual distractions, then you miss those cues and fall into harms way. 

You don't have to be full on ready for battle awareness but it would be wise to determine the environment you travel in outside your own home as to its possible dangers and adjust levels of awareness to detect cues and make adjustments as you go from full safe zone to possible danger of violence zones. 

Learn to recognize situations as normal and as not normal. Recognize anomalies, cues, as typical or not typical and then make appropriate adjustments. This is a step to speeding up the OODA loop that allows for avoidance or actions necessary to remain safe and secure. 

All this and much more come from oodles and oodles of experience in those area's appropriate to real life situations and scenarios that expose you to violence and conflict.