Building a Structure of Common Language

November 29, 2015 in Applying The Observations

In a prior post titled, “The Cure is a Common Language,” we outlined some of the benefits of a common language for organizations, including bringing your team together, eliminating gray areas, and improving overall communication. In the work that we do with our clients at The CP Journal, we teach the baselining process to improve situational awareness, which incorporates the four pillars of observable behavior. We do this because it offers clear terms and justification for individuals, groups, the environment, and the collective mood, which can help make more informed decisions. It is worth noting that we aren’t in favor creating and requiring formal scripts for employees, because it often takes away their ability to think critically. Instead, we favor creating a framework and vocabulary that can be applied to any environment at any time that everyone can universally implement as part of his or her operational processes. In our experience working with our client partners at The CP Journal, we have identified three basic steps that you can implement immediately to build your own internal common language.

The first step is to get everyone Continue reading »

For School Leaders – Three Steps to Improve Readiness

November 12, 2015 in Veterans, Business, and Security

As more and more potentially life threatening events impact the day-to-day operations of schools around our country, we at The CP Journal are often asked by school leaders what steps they can take to improve the overall sense of security for their staff, students, and parents. While there are many things that schools can do to improve the overall safety of their facilities, the work that we do at The CP Journal primarily focuses on teaching people how to improve their overall sense of situational awareness and gain skills in recognizing the signs of potentially threatening human behavior. Bear in mind that once a person with violent intentions enters a school building, your time to prevent a harmful situation is significantly reduced. Because of that, we often work with schools to build processes to observe people much further left of bang to identify actions that warrant further attention. “Bang” in this context serves as any harming incident that you are working to prevent on school grounds, and we want people to be able to get as far left of bang as possible. Here are a few steps to consider when you are building your internal processes of observation and threat recognition in order to get there.

The first step that school leaders can take is to define Continue reading »

The Cure is a Common Language   

November 5, 2015 in Applying The Observations

Have you ever been in a situation in which you and another person witnessed the exact same thing, but described it completely differently after the fact? When two people observe something and they are asked later to describe what they saw, the responses might go something like this:

Person #1: “Well, he was tall and had dark hair… his shirt was brownish black, it might have been blue, and he was standing kind of strangely, like he was waiting for something.”

Person #2: “He was 6’1” with a dark complexion. He was wearing a black shirt and it was buttoned all the way up to the top. He was very uncomfortable, which I could tell based on the the fact that his feet were bouncing continuously, he was moving his arms a lot, and he was constantly looking around.”

This is a very basic example, but the question you should ask yourself is whether your organization has a common language to describe situations and instances that occur throughout the day. This could be as simple as the best way to report something strange to the security team to as detailed as specific language that everyone should for observation, reporting, and action. There are three specific benefits that can come from building a common language for situational awareness within your team and while Continue reading »

Applying the Pillars to Your Everyday Life

October 14, 2015 in Assessing Individuals

In the work that we do with our clients here at The CP Journal, we teach a process of observation that we categorize using the four pillars of observable behavior: individuals, groups, the environment, and the overall collective mood.  Much of the training work that we do is with clients in the security world, but we have also spent a good deal of time helping organizations in other sectors that aren’t focused specifically on security to grow their businesses, improve their customer service strategy, and increase their sales, using these same pillars. As we continue to work with non-security-related organizations, understanding these pillars in non-security terms and explaining how to recognize them is crucial. One of the easiest ways to begin thinking about this in your own life is to consider personal examples of how that information can help lead to more informed decisions in everyday circumstances. In this post, I will outline the first pillar that we teach, the individual, explain what exactly you should look for while observing, and offer some examples regarding how this information can improve your overall level of confidence in any interpersonal interaction.

Of the four pillars of observable behavior, the first pillar is the individual. Within the individual pillar we use four clusters to categorize any human being at any moment in time.  Each person you see out in the world can be categorized as being comfortable, uncomfortable, dominant or submissive. These four clusters are the universal results of Continue reading »

The Candy Bowl Theory

September 30, 2015 in Applying The Observations

In my professional experience, getting to know the people you’re working with is one of the first important and productive things that you can do when starting a new job. This isn’t only important in terms of making your day-to-day enjoyable, amiable, and fun, but it will also help you be more effective in your job moving forward. Discoveries such as who on your team or in your office prefers a two-word email versus a thorough, explanatory email, who likes to take charge and lead meetings, and who would prefer to sit back during group conversations and absorb, taking notes, all add up to better efficiency and a more ideal, humming work environment.

Beginning at a new office can be intimidating and, after that welcome lunch or quick introductory walk around the office, it can be difficult to proactively meet people until the time comes when you begin working on a project with them. It’s vital, however, that you make a pointed effort to do so. Simply having knowledge about other people can help you prepare for potential responses to stressful situations, plan more effectively for the completion of tasks, enhance your situational awareness, and ultimately make you better at your job. This proactive initiative to get to know everyone on your team and in your office doesn’t have to entail any elaborate plans, logistics, or fuss. It can literally come in the form of a candy bowl.

Yes, putting out Continue reading »

Which Training Program Is Right For Me?

September 7, 2015 in Background Information

One of the questions we often get asked at The CP Journal from people thinking about purchasing the Tactical Analysis online program is whether there is a difference between all of the courses that are available. The short answer to this question is that, for each level of the program, the different, market-specific courses are both similar and different. Allow me to explain.

When the Tactical Analysis program was first adapted to an online format, we only had one version available for all of our clients. Based on the feedback from those early students we realized that, because they were coming from a variety of different professions (private security, law enforcement, the military, universities), there were a few areas we needed to tailor to the individual student.

A common question we would get would be something like this.

“In ‘Module X’ of the Level One class, the example you provided showed how a police officer could apply the clusters to their job. The explanation made a lot of sense, but can you help me understand how that same concept applies to my job in private security?”

We continued to receive similar questions, and when we opened our Online Academy in February of 2015 and re-released our Level 1/Basic Program, we decided to offer four versions of the class for the four different types of professionals that we typically serve. We now have one program designed for members of the military, one for police officers, one for security providers and one for people concerned about school safety. Today, we have found that people who are interested in the program want to see if there are advantages and tradeoffs to taking the course tailored to one market versus another.

In our Tactical Analysis Level 1/Basic Course, there are Continue reading »

How We Work: The Tactical Analysis Online Program

August 28, 2015 in Books and Resources

As part of our “How We Work” series, we answer questions that we have received from readers to pull back the curtain and show you the technology, principles and processes that power our business. If you’re looking for the usual weekend reading, make sure you sign up for our Weekly Profile to see those articles that we want to pass along.

In the first “How We Work” article in this series, I wrote about the technology that we use to power The CP Journal, but what I left out of that post was the technology that allows us to actually deliver our products. Our website is the place where many of our clients spend all of their time interacting with us. Whether it’s reading something on our blog, downloading a resource from the library or going through the Tactical Analysis Program in the Academy, there are few things that impact the learning process for our clients as much as our website does.

These are the tools we use to build and deliver our online program on The CP Journal website: Continue reading »

3 Ways That Tactical Analysis Supports the Future of Security

August 25, 2015 in Learning About Learning

In his article, “The Fox and the Hedgehog: Contracting Approaches to Anticipating the Environment,” Dr. Randy Borum talks the type of professionals who will be well prepared to deal with the violent, uncertain, complex and ambiguous conditions that characterize our current and future security environment.

Navigating the contemporary environment requires a different mindset than was needed during the Cold War. Leaders most likely to succeed are those who embrace uncertainty, are highly adaptive, constantly learning, and know how to maneuver incrementally and with agility. [i]

Dr. Borum’s article, which you can find here, talks about how our next generation of leaders and strategists in security related fields need to be adaptive and need to be able to function effectively in the dynamic and ever-changing situations that will likely characterize the future global security environment. Dr. Borum refers to the type of leader capable of not only embracing uncertainty, but also being able to maneuver incrementally and with agility within it, as foxes. He contrasts the characteristics of the fox with those of the hedgehog, a leader who only has one response to potential threats and is unable to adjust their approach as the situation faces. I happen to agree with Dr. Borum’s perspective. With my experiences as a Marine and how I assess the current challenge faced by America’s police officers and security providers, I believe that the professionals who are able to excel in ambiguity are the ones who will quickly prove their value to their organization.

Embracing uncertainty, however, doesn’t mean that we will avoid attempts to see through the “fog of war.” It means that by acknowledging the presence of uncertainty, adaptive leaders are the ones who Continue reading »

The Tactical Analysis Advanced Course is Available

August 23, 2015 in Training, Updates

Depending on where you are in the world and what types of risks you are concerned about encountering on a daily basis, the challenge of recognizing threats can appear to be daunting.

  • Members of the military may be overseas and deployed into any country on short notice.
  • Police officers can find themselves in an unfamiliar area of town.
  • Executive protection professionals could be conducting an advance and doing surveillance detection in a country that they’ve never been to before.
  • Corporate security professionals may be preparing employees to travel abroad into areas they are unfamiliar with.

How does a professional prepare for these types of situations? Because being an anomaly is a relative term – for someone to stand out and attract your attention, they have to stand out from something – the most capable protectors are the ones who have built an extensive database of experiences allowing them to quickly realize what is normal for the area they’re in and the people within it. Historically, developing this understanding hasn’t been done in a deliberate or repeatable way. It has been left to chance and is often done without any conscious attention.

The problem with that unstructured approach to building a database of knowledge is that it limits who becomes capable of recognizing threats. It becomes hard to pass those experiences and that intuitive understanding of “normal” on to others. The result of an unrepeatable process is often one of two things. One common result is that people are unsure of exactly what they have been told because it wasn’t done in a clear way, which causes them to doubt themselves the first time they are actually consciously assessing someone or an area. The other scenario is that in the absence of valid pre-event indicators, they rely on inaccurate biases and subjective definitions of what the baseline for an area is. Naturally, neither one of these outcomes is desirable.

Until today, the solution to this problem was only taught to elite military and law enforcement units through intensive training seminars. With the addition of the Tactical Analysis Advanced Course to The CP Journal’s online Academy, the process to deliberately establish a baseline by reading human behavior is now available to all of the professionals who serve our country in the military, police our streets and protect us from attacks. For the people who are expected to be capable of proactively preventing violence, the challenge of being able to clearly define the norm in an area, so that anomalies present themselves, is no longer a hurdle that can’t be overcome.

With over six hours of video lessons and real world examples, the Advanced Course expands on the behaviors taught in the Basic Program to provide our students with the ability to read three of the four pillars of observable behavior and the process to establish a baseline through sequential searches. Following the lessons designed to teach the process and the behaviors, the course shows students how to conduct a red team analysis on your baseline so that you can look at the area from your adversary’s perspective and find the vulnerabilities that they could exploit in their crimes and attacks. The class teaches you how to figure out what is going on in the areas being observed and how to anticipate what will make someone stand out from the crowd, so that you can be prepared to be proactive against anyone who requires investigation or action.

According to many of our clients, the biggest takeaway from the Advanced Course wasn’t just the ability to make the observations and assessments needed to get left of bang, but also the newfound capability to clearly articulate and explain what led them to recognize someone who warrants attention. The way that you can learn to do this is by learning:

  • How to assess the collective mood of an area.
  • How to read the environment.
  • How to conduct a hasty and deliberate search.
  • How to think like the adversary to find holes in the baseline that could be exploited.

In the Advanced Course you will learn how to do these things while using real life events and situations to elevate your situational awareness to a level of informed awareness. Knowing how to look for threats and knowing what cues will make the adversary stand out from the crowd is what separates the professionals who are information hunting from the amateurs who are information hoping. The baselining process taught in the Tactical Analysis Advanced Course helps professionals reduce the uncertainty that is inherent in military, police and security operations so that getting left of bang isn’t just a tagline, but the new reality.

When you’re ready to be empowered to take control of your personal safety and shorten the time required to be proficient in analyzing your environment, make the baselining process yours by taking The CP Journal’s Tactical Analysis Advanced Course.

Start Training Today

 

How We Work: Collecting Information and Staying Current

August 21, 2015 in Books and Resources

As part of our “How We Work” series, we answer questions that we have received from readers to pull back the curtain and show you the technology, principals and processes that power our business. If you’re looking for the usual weekend reading, make sure you sign up for our Weekly Profile to see those articles that we want to pass along.

A common question we get from Weekly Profile subscribers relates to the variety of sources of information that we pull from each week in our recommended articles. The question is usually expressed along the lines of, “Do you guys actually go to all of those websites every week to see if there is anything new? Isn’t that really time consuming?” The short answer to this question is no, we don’t go to these sites every week. Instead, we use a number of tools to organize our reading and all of the research that we are doing. We know our readers are busy. We can help you find a way to centralize information in one spot. Here is how we at The CP Journal do it and how you can access it.

We rely on two tools, Feedly and Hootsuite, to centralize information and research. These platforms let us create streams for the eight different areas that help us find sources of information that are relevant to us. These eight areas include: Continue reading »

Are We Looking For One Cluster or Two?

August 18, 2015 in Assessing Individuals

A question that we frequently get asked during our classes here at The CP Journal is whether a person can be displaying two clusters at the same time. In other words, can a person be both “dominant and comfortable” at the same time or “uncomfortable and submissive” simultaneously?

The short answer to this question is no, a person can’t be displaying two clusters at the same time. The dominant, submissive, uncomfortable and comfortable clusters used to assess a person’s current state are mutually exclusive because they each represent a different survival response that the brain can choose from in threatening situations.. Since your brain makes the decision to either fight or run when a perceived stressor or threat presents itself, you can’t be displaying the dominant cluster, the manifestation of the fight response, and the uncomfortable cluster, the manifestation of the flight response, at the same moment in time. It is by the same logic that a person can’t be displaying the dominant cluster and the comfortable cluster concurrently. As the comfortable cluster is the type of body language displayed when no flight or fight response has been triggered, a person can’t be displaying body language that is associated with the stress response and body language associated with the absence of a stress response at any given point either.

It is important to remember that the body’s responses to potential threats are not permanent decisions. As a situation Continue reading »

How We Work – Technology and Platforms

August 14, 2015 in Veterans, Business, and Security

I got to sit down with a friend this week before I presented at the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals (ATAP) conference. I listened to him talk about how he was getting ready to strike out on his own and start his own company. As he talked, his excitement was hugely apparent, but he had a few questions about how we at The CP Journal work, set up the underlying processes that we rely on and what technology we use. Since I was getting ready to speak in just a little while, I only gave him some big picture thoughts, but told him I’d follow up with more detailed information. The email that I was planning on sending to him grew to be quite long, so I figured I’d break it up into a series of posts to share it here so that any other entrepreneurs getting ready to make the leap can find it useful as well.

Over the next few weeks, we will be posting new pieces to this series to show how we collect information to stay current, the technology that runs our website, and some of the processes we use to run our company. If you’re looking for the usual weekend reading article we post each Friday, sign up for the Weekly Profile to see the articles we are reading and want to pass on.

The technology and platforms that we use to stay connected are chosen because we work remotely and spend a lot of time travelling, which requires that everything powering our business is synced across our MacBooks, iPhones and iPads. While the software we have chosen to use make life easier for us, they also help us to deliver better service to our clients.

Platforms and Software

Evernote
Everything we do is stored in and collaborated on through Evernote. With different Continue reading »

Our Answer To a FAQ About Training Online

August 11, 2015 in Learning About Learning

Q: I am thinking about taking an online course but I’m not sure if I will be able to learn as much as I would if I were in-person?  Can you shed some light?

A:  Because we offer our training programs both in-person and online we often get asked about the online learning environment and whether it is right for you.  The short answer is that sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t.  If you are the type of person that needs the physical environment to fully understand and grasp new material then online learning could pose a challenge.  One of the biggest challenges to online training is that there is no community of students physically in a classroom with you, no teacher/professor at the front of the room to answer immediate questions, or stimulation of people around you to help enhance the learning process.  However, there are benefits to training online.  Based on the feedback we have received from students in our online learning courses, here are the top three reasons people like learning online: Continue reading »

Weekend Reading and a Podcast

August 7, 2015 in Books and Resources

Here is the weekly reading list of articles that we found to be valuable.

1. “The Writer’s Most Important Skill.” This article by Steven Pressfield looks at the one very controllable element to becoming a successful artist and entrepreneur.

2. “How To Avoid Getting Pickpocketed.” This article from the Art of Manliness provides a look at some of the techniques that criminals and pickpockets use to separate you from your cash.

3. “Why It Takes So Long To Board an Airplane and  How To Fix It.” Interesting, thought provoking, and something you will think about anytime you fly.

4. The “New Rules” for musicians by Bob Lefsetz. While the rules are written about how to get ahead in the music industry, the applications to startups are readily apparent.

5. “Entrepreneurship: The Purest Form of Unconventional Warfare.” An article written by EM Burlingame at the Havok Journal about the parallels between military operations and getting a company off the ground.

Want to listen to a podcast?

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to talk to Jordan Harbinger and Jason DeFillippo from the Art Of Charm Podcast about “Left of Bang” and situational awareness.  They’ve had some incredible guests on their podcast and put out some great interviews, and once we started talking, it became clear why.
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I had a lot of fun on this one and there are two ways you can listen to it:
– On their site which you can find here.
– Download it from iTunes here.