L.O.G. 220 Complexity with Dr. John Black

On that note, John, or I should say, Dr. John Black, thank you so much for coming on the show. For everyone tuning in, I had to hurry up and hit the record button because we jumped right into the conversation, five minutes of magic. I'm super excited to have you on, John. I know the listeners heard a short intro on you, but I'd love to give a little bit of background on yourself and what you're doing. Then, I want to jump, I'm going to throw your own words at you from your website that I loved, and kind of start the conversation from there.

Of course, there is nothing better than to have your own words thrown back at you that you don't remember saying. So first of all, I'm just really glad to be here. For you guys that have talked to me before, I'm all about conversations. I believe my premise is that the question creates a conversation; the conversation creates change. That's in a nutshell. If you think about it, all the changes over time, they all had to start somewhere with a question like, "What the hell are we doing?" or "Hey, you ever wonder if it might be like this?" Someone had to listen, like, "Well, that's interesting. Let's have a conversation." This is not to be overly gratuitous to you guys, but you guys are having the right conversations, just so you know.

Doc, you can never be overly gratuitous to us, and specifically me. So, say that one more time. Yeah, if you can say it a little bit louder, looking directly into the camera.

The fact is hilarious: you guys are having the right conversations. So, to answer your question about what I'm doing, I spend a lot of my time trying to have conversations where people – police, military, and others – don't normally have conversations. For example, I speak a lot. Some places I speak with cops, I'll be speaking at the NTOA (National Tactical Officers Association) conference, and I'm doing a workshop on this: thinking about our thinking. I just finished my postdoctoral master's in psychology. The short answer is, I got tired of judges saying that cops can't talk about thinking because they're not academic, and it's like, "Come on, guys." So, I went and got that done. I'll be presenting the outcome of that, which was actually done based on data that a Force Science study had done. I'm amazingly grateful to Bill (Lewinski) and his crew; I work with them all the time, with Dr. Lewinski and Bond and everybody else. We took a look at how cognitive interviewing, specifically this idea of reducing it and taking the human out of the loop, and my thesis basically found out that it really doesn't work the way we thought it would or should.

So, where is it that I come from? I have these conversations: American Evaluators Association, Society of Decision Professionals, all of these little places, Society for Advanced Management. The Society for Advanced Management is the oldest society in management, and management is about making the right decisions at the right time in the world. It used to be called the Taylor Society, to give you an idea of where it came from. As I go to all these things, I find out there are no cops there, there are no prior cops there, and we're not having—and yet all of this research, all these guys thinking about thinking, all these people screaming about police reform—the same ignorance, the same... And I don't mean ignorance in a demeaning way; I mean ignorance as in simply to be unaware of something. And then these same things: where are these conversations? Well, there's no one there. So, I spend a lot of time.

So, where do I come from? I did 30-plus years of Special Operations. I retired as a Sergeant Major from the United States Army. I was an instructor, a door kicker, all those other kinds of things. I hold seven different MOSes (Military Occupational Specialties). Towards the end of my career, I actually had to be granted a General Officer exception for the amount of skill sets that I had because they don't normally want to have you cross-trained. But in my case, I was a guy that got brought into the intersection of all these things, specifically psychological operations, civil affairs, and special ops. In the police world, I did 23-plus years at an agency: Washington County Sheriff's Office, a great agency, a large agency in the state of Oregon. I went through everything: all divisions, corrections, and patrol, and the whole nine yards, and up to command rank. I was actually the overseer of training and developed programs and human rights, built the mental health teams that lined up with, you know, you had a right seat, left seat of these type of things. So, I dealt with that. Through all of these things that I've done, and all these different things, I saw the commonality: it was humans trying to make sense of really strange things that very often had never been seen before in their life, and trying to do the best they could. Then, as we're watching it cascade nowadays, it's so easy to look at something after the fact—the outcome—and say, "Well, obviously, you should have done this. You would have done that. You know what I would have done, or we could have done." And I'm like, "Guys, we've got to stop this, man. This isn't helping anybody." No. So then, I went, got my doctorate degree in business, specifically looking at visualization decision-making. My first master's was in counter-terrorism, homeland defense. My doctorate is in business, specifically business intelligence into decisions. Then, my postdoc master's is in psychology. So, go for it.

Well, so here's the thing. You're under-qualified, obviously, and that's why we made an exception. I thought it was the music star! No, listen, you're the right guy at the right time for everybody to tune in and listen to. I'll throw this out there at you: the huge problem is that people cannot look at police and think also in the academic. So, they don't think that because you're a chief or a trainer or anybody else, they think it's all "door boot," and "car Ramen," and chasing people down. And they don't... For example, the limits of the law. I love eating up defense attorneys that are unprepared because I understand the law. I mean, I understand from constitutional law to local statutes or ridiculous cases that I can cite to throw people off. The government spent hundreds of millions of dollars checking out the programs that I built to make sure they were academically sound. Why? Because when we showed up—and I know it's the same way as you, John—when I showed up, and they'd go, "Yeah, this 'me, Ben,' is over there. Go in there; there are a couple of cops that are already in there." I would walk in, and there'd be a Neanderthal. And the Neanderthal had 35 years on the road in an agency: Pennsylvania, Miami, New York, it didn't matter where. And he would grunt, you know, with facial scars. And then when they would go to him, he would go, "Yeah, that's right," or "No, that's wrong." That was horseshit. There was no thought behind it, there was no pedigree, there was no connecting the dots. And so, we would be in the room, and we would always be under-serviced, we'd always be underutilized. And then the things came out, was, "Well, the cops liked it." And I saw the same thing happen when we built Combat Hunter for the Marine Corps. They would say, "Well, you know, the private liked it." Of course, the private liked it because he's not washing dishes or peeling potatoes. But my thing is, will it stand up in front of a jury? Will it withstand the challenges of a bench trial? And you do that. That's exactly what you do. Your test market isn't just a one-sided blog on some social media. You get up there and testify to what you say that it is the truth. And that's an amazing standard. I think I want to make sure that our listeners understand exactly what part of that you do.

Yeah, and you know, right away, the things I appreciate about John is, you know, you've got the academic side, obviously with multiple degrees, and then all of the tacit knowledge, the street experience, from all of those. And to me, in my opinion, when you combine those things together, that's where the magic happens because you can really understand at both levels. And that's part of the reason why I wanted to have you on the show. And then, for those listening, I'm probably going to do the least amount of talking today. Right away, before I hit record, John comes right on and says, "Hey, your beard is the wrong color because it's not a sage gray beard like the other two gentlemen on this call." So, I have to respect the guy that walks right onto my podcast and tells me to shut up. You know what I mean? I've got to go get one, right?

Hey Brian, let's hold up here. I didn't say it was the wrong color. Now, let's use that as a next landing, okay? For the next question. Actually, I correct myself. Think about this: the very nature of that, because you've already taken the interpretation of what you've heard, and we've attached a judgment to it: "wrong." And again, we're going to play with this. Yes, what I said is, "It's not at the correct color yet." Which is an important distinction, which is going to lead into the conversation, which I even pointed out. But then, look how I stored it in my memory. I said, "You immediately created this story of you came up, fundamental attribution, and booted me." It said, "You can't do this," and meanwhile, you just said, "Well, you better think about the right color yet."

So, we've got three guys on here, all of them are aware of fundamental attribution error. All of them are aware... And again, I don't even like the word. I lean more with Klein—Dr. Klein—and Snowden: bias. And then Kahneman: diversity. And for those that don't know, I'm an expert witness and actually recognized internationally, and I speak on these type of concepts as well. But these are simply being human. Let's use the word "heuristics" or "leanings." I use the word "leanings" a lot when I lecture on it because, think about this: I've lectured a... not lectured, I've helped a lot of PTSD guys coming back. And I'm like, "Dude, when you were where you were at, and you saw something in the middle of the road driving at 90 miles an hour, buttoning everything up kept you alive. You just can't do it in downtown Portland." It's not right, it's not wrong. It worked over there. So, the thing is, intuition, heuristics, leanings, don't fault them. They will save your life. The question that I spend is, "How do you train to get the most efficient heuristics and how can you recognize when your heuristics are potentially leading you astray? When your heuristics are potentially causing you to dismiss something, it's something that's out there."

And so, Greg, you hit on it. Again, I think Dr. Mitchell Renee does a really good job out of American Side Evidence Like Police, and she calls them "Pro-Academics." They're practitioner-academics, at least a scholar-warrior, and these type of stuff. But Brian, to your point, there is a learning that occurs in the practice compared to a learning that occurs... And I think what has happened so much is we have the Ivory Tower stereotype academic that is theoretical. We have the Neanderthal knuckle-dragger. And I love when I basically come up in my Harley and my leathers, and I basically pull in and step out, and it's like, "Hey, who's talking today?" "Oh, that'd be me." And you teach the entire paradigm. And then the next day, I show up in suit and tie because, dude, it's just a uniform, man. I've worn so many uniforms in my life, I've lost track. But the fact is, at the core, we are humans and human systems doing human things in the constraints of humans. I was having a conversation actually yesterday, and this might be another thing for another podcast, or if you want to explore at this time, that's fine. At what point is the expectation, as seen in the public's leanings, as seen in management by policy of policing, exceeding the capability of even human performance? An Olympic athlete can't do that. We have a certain amount of foveal vision. We have a certain amount of cognitive... We have all these things. And now, that's the max, that's perfection. Now, let's keep slicing that off. "You didn't have any sleep. You only get 20 hours of training in a year, if you're lucky. You'll only get this, you only get this." And just so you know, that everything you do, the first time you do something wrong, someone will notice that. No matter how many times, you're a human, and you just feel beat down after a while. How's that going to affect your decision-making? "Hey, you're going through a divorce." Well, yeah, and that affects decision-making. Every decision is attached to the limbic system. Research shows that. Don't think that emotion doesn't work with us. So again, these type of things, whatever you guys want...

You kind of already started hitting on the elements of it, of what you said, because this is something that I've said too. We were actually just in a training course last week with law enforcement; we'll be in another one next week, and next month, and everything. You said it on your website, you said, "Policing is complexity within complexity, and police use of force is arguably one of the most complex things to understand." And I'm obviously in violent agreement with that. Even to the point, I say to police officers, "I mean, even more so than you realize, you're pushing the limits of cognition, you're pushing the limits of decision-making, you're pushing the limits of psychological and physiological arousal and what you can do. Yet, you're not explained that." So, no one takes the time to go over that part with you. Right? So, that's why these things happen. But you hit on a bunch of the elements right there why it becomes so complex. But I'd like you to kind of take maybe a 30,000-foot view at first to, "What do you mean by that, it's complex?"

John, this is what we need. We need to make sure, first of all, everybody that loves the show, that listens already, is going to love you because this is territory that's familiar to them. Familiar enough that they want to dive in deeper. So, I want to just touch on heuristic very basically. My dad used to tell me—my dad born outside of Sevierville and Stinking Creek Holler, Tennessee. We were fishing one day to eat, and it was pouring rain, and we didn't go stand under a tree or under a tent. And I said, "Why are we doing this?" And he said, "Fish don't know it's raining." Well, that's a heuristic, and I'll never forget it because heuristics work worldwide. They're not bound by language or biases, and all humans understand them. There are template and prototypical matches, whether it's olfactory or vision-based, or anything that makes us all the same. So, all human beings react to the same external stressors in a manner that can be predicted. And therefore, that's where the necessity comes in to understand the complexity, because more complex issues need the gift of time and distance. So, I just want to preface that.

And I want to show you a shortfall, John. This morning, Detroit News, I think it was, I was reading through. I'm still reading the news, I don't know if that's a cool thing, but I have no social media. And there was an article about a 16-year-old Detroiter that wins all of his cases as a juvenile defense attorney. And the very first word of the article is, "Adults don't understand things the same way that we understand things. It's a different time." And talk about the greybeard—this ties in, that's hilarious, that we've talked about so far. And you know what? Those are the people that call themselves SMEs (Subject Matter Experts). Those are the people that are being deposed. John, this is the problem: what you do is, there's no academic vetting, it's already on the news, and somebody goes, "Well, that kid's doing it." Yeah, okay, I got it. So, I agree with Brian, let's do the 30,000-foot view of complexity and where that can lead us. But I just want to make sure that our viewers and listeners sort of had a context for the relevance you're about to play out.

Okay, so yeah, I could talk about this literally for days. I mean, you guys hit on so many things. So, Greg, I'm going to touch on some of the stuff, and then I'm going to tie it back to the question. Certainly. So, let's look at how we think about our own thinking. One of the guys, a friend of mine, was an Olympic athlete, qualified with the hammer throw. So, think about this: you're an Olympic athlete, you're in the top training and everything else. And I asked him point blank, "Hey, were you guys taught about visualization?" So, think, you know, if you're in kata in martial arts or anything else, we're all taught to visualize. I'm like, "Okay, but how did the coach teach you to visualize? This is the closest we'll get to think about our thinking in a compressed event, in high competition stress." And he goes, "Well, you know, we went at the end of the day, and we visualized." And I went, "Okay, fine, but who taught you to be the better visualizer? Who taught you to be the better thinker?" Now, I want you to think about, for all the SWAT guys out there that I'll talk to in the next couple weeks or anything else, you guys will go to the gym every morning, you'll train your six, you'll do this, you'll do this for anything else. Do you dedicate 15 minutes a day to your thinking? And I'm not talking about solving. Solving is about sand tables and everything else, and scenarios or anything else. Well, that's just rote. In other words, I think it was Keegan that said it—developmental psychologist—"Problems that you're used to, they don't really increase your learning that much. They're about memory recall and doing it. But problems that you don't understand are the good problems. If you want to learn, are ones you develop an intimate relationship with." Think about the mathematician that's been working on a proof for five years. What's that problem look like? What's that thinking look like?

So, to the idea of what you guys are talking about with this type of stuff, of the heuristics, and Greg, you were talking about how it's universal. I'm going to put a slight caveat on that, which is, I agree it's universal as being a human, but an interesting thing is, it's both universal and... So, there are... if you ever see the two statues outside of Japanese temples, they represent paradox and confusion. And the idea is that every element of truth has an element of paradox and confusion. In fact, there's actually a saying, "If it's not paradoxical, it's not true." And so, the thing is, if you think about this for a minute, it is both universal and... So then, the other question is, "But why at the same time as a sort of individual?" And you hit upon it, and that's language. My thesis that I just did in the master's is an interesting thing about language. You take a look in discourse psychology, which really studies the effect of language, is that language is both a construct and a constructor. It is the end result of something—our narrative, right? Yes. And so, Greg, to your earlier point, to read something, the cool thing about reading, and why you're seeing it coming in rather than being spoon-fed the video feed or anything else... I get it, man, I want to listen to my audiobook, everything else. Not bad. But when you read, you have to construct your mental model. We will usually take the words and turn them into something, don't we? A sentence is a thought. We put the sentences together in a paragraph, and we're creating this running story in our head. But it's our creation, and it can be uniquely different. Now, think about the very nature of when you're when you're fed tighter constraints, how many different ways can you imagine a video that you are seeing, right? Not the same, isn't it? And so, the thing is, which is why you're seeing them going back to reading.

So, where does this all tie in? The complexity of complexity with police. We have been taught as police... We have, and I'm going to use the Cynefin framework from Cognitive Edge, connecting company Dave Snowden, Nick True, and everything else. And I'm going to use another framework, the DSRP framework by Cabrera's. Two frameworks to just put them up. And you can go into Simon with bounded rationality, you can go into Weick with sensemaking. I cite all of them; they're tenets. But the question is, how do we bring this into our stuff, right? And so, we are taught very good SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures), checklists, "Do this, do it this way." Think about the FDO (Field Data Officer) in the police and everything else. There's nothing wrong with that; it works. So, why fix it? These are simple things that if we do the same way every time, we will, with a high degree of certainty, come out with the same results. So, guys, just do it that way. Pretty simple.

Now, we get into the complicated realm. Still ordered, high degree of certainty and predictability, but it takes expertise to understand. Bring the experts in, analyze it, play with it, beat it up. But chances are, if you can figure out what you're looking at—sensemaking to figure out what you've got in front of you—you'll probably, if you apply the right stuff on the front end, you'll probably get the right things you want out at the end. Now, we're using the word "right," but "right" is even a funny term. "Right" is the desirable outcome. Well, the desirable outcome changes by the perspective of the observer. So, some person may think a different "right" compared to yours. So, I use the words that what we're trying to do when we make a decision and understand the world is, we're trying to have a higher probability that we come out with our desirable outcome. That's it. When you're doing this, you're making a choice. And I'm going to use the word "decision" and "choice" interchangeably because after you make the choice, chances are you're just watching the train wreck. It's just physics, man. It is. And the thing is, but we spend so much time after the choice, trying to understand it. And actually, there's a term that's used, it's called "retro-causal inference," which I love. It's a tendency of humans to connect the dots going backward. Exactly. That's what we do. But there's nothing wrong with that; all humans do that. I do that. Look, at the very beginning to the listeners, every one of us here that understand this stuff is still trapped in the understanding of the stuff. "Hey, you know what? I know about hindsight bias, so I won't do it." You're an idiot, you can't, you're going to do it. Relax. It's like, you know, it's like a bad skit, you know, "Jane, you ignorant..." Right, man, that's good. But it's the same thing. And so, the thing is, but we're pretty good at that. We've got the SWAT teams. I ran MRT (Mobile Response Team) and I was in charge of the Hostage Negotiation Team for many years. It's complex, it's complicated, but if we do it right, chance...

Right now, we get into the sticky stuff: the complex arena. Complexity within complexity. Complexity means that you have a high degree of uncertainty. Even if you apply the same thing on the front end, it might come out completely different. Even... Well, why is this? Because it has some weird properties to it. One, it's got this extreme amount of connection. All the parts in the system are connected to each other, and they affect each other, which is called interdependency. The fact is, if something over here changes, something over here changes. So, we have connected dependency, and we have a lot of different types of parts: diversity. And then the other thing is, we have is that the system itself adapts, and we get out of this property called emergence. In other words, this very nature of being complex is that the system will spit out stuff that no one can predict. Well, guess what? Checklists don't work for that. The same way we were focused because we think that we're going to control all the world. If we control all the variables, we have to admit and get rid of the arrogance that we'll know all the variables.

So, now the question then is, that's a complex system. And the way that I think it's Dr. Page, if I remember correctly, has a great course on this. I think it's a free course on complexity. Just look up complexity and some of the online courses. If you think about the simple... Think about, and he describes that mountain climbing. And we come back to the metaphor because it's pretty good for it. And Cabrera uses a metaphor; he used to be an alpinist, conquered some of the highest peaks. If we don't have Kilimanjaro, it's real simple: take a step. If you're higher than you were a moment ago, keep going that direction. If you're not, turn around. It's the simplest algorithm in the world. Now we go to the Adirondacks. I grew up in Upstate New York, in the Catskills and everything else. Well, now we have, we want to get to the highest peak in a series of peaks. Still not hard to do with an algorithm, but just takes a little bit more than the simple algorithm. But now imagine that you're on the same hike. You go to sleep because you see the far peak in the distance, and you're on a high peak, but you're not on the highest peak, you're not quite where you want to get to. And you go to sleep, and you wake up, and someone's changed all the... every one of them—watch my speech—someone's changed all the heights of the mountains. Because you don't get to control those heights: cities, through the public, the economy, and everything else. Someone over here, you look up, and it's like, "Where the hell did the other mountaintop go?" So, if you are having someone change and control where it is that you want to get to, your desired end state, a result, welcome to the world of complexity.

Now let's take it to a use-of-force situation, micro case. You turn the corner, you're running, you've been training, everything else. You turn around, you see a glimpse, the moment he's drawing a gun. How many variables are in play there? How many variables got you there? How many variables in that moment? Light, illumination, this, your training, all the stuff upstream. Because we were basically taught what to attend to in those situations: hands, hands, hands. Well, you're attending to the hands, and that movement of the hands can be only one thing: threat. That equals threat. It's a one-to-one relationship. When you discuss the meta-cognition, it becomes so clear, but nobody discusses, nobody has the discussion you're having, which is why we built Hoberman, because every time that we went to a trainer, it was painted in it: something pops up, shoot, don't shoot. And we said, "Wait a minute, there's so much..."

No point, John. When, you know, you're working at the Piggly Wiggly, a guy walks in, dead dog on his head, not wearing any other clothes, has a two-pound sledge duct-taped in one hand and a machete duct-taped in the other, and starts playing "The Anvil Chorus" at the checkout line with the people. That's the worst day any of those people will ever encounter. That's just the beginning of your radio run. People do not understand that it is different. Look, I'm not going to sit there and say that, you know, a 7-Eleven clerk doesn't have a hard job, and that liquor store owners don't get clipped during their work. Those are givens. The thing that I like that you're saying is that when we use meta-cognition and look at the way that we're thinking, if we're trying to anticipate all the things that are likely to happen, we're going to become overwhelmed by events, and we're never going to get to the one thing that might save our life. And I go back to what you said because in the Japanese Towers, danger and opportunity are the same set of characters. So, you're spot-on, and I agree with that. But how... Brian, let me let you copy me because I'm just wondering, "How do we get more people to listen?"

That's... I think that's happening in a sense, right? But it's people out there looking for something, knowing, "Okay, we've got all these training, we've got all these things that we do, we know we're good." And anywhere I go, it's like, you look, your TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures), they're either good enough or, at a minimum, they're probably good enough for what you have to do. Can you always improve on those? Of course. But then you're just chasing TTPs. That's not the answer. You can't do that. I mean, it's no different than the military doing stuff. It's like, "Okay, now the enemy's doing this, and we've got to change everything. Now they're..." It's like, so we're just going to react to everything that they do? How do we get in front of this? There's always going to be another way to make a bomb. It's up to your imagination. Once you get to a certain level, it's literally what you're up to your imagination. So, why are we looking at this unless it's for a specific reason? And it's the methodology that we use. And this is the thing: a lot of the folks are reading because they read all... They read Kahneman, they read the first key, they read everything about, even the one I recommend too, with Dr. Malinov. There's a great one with heuristics and subliminal, and it's really, really cool. And you know, they're all reading that, and then they're going, "Okay, I see that there's something else out here." Like they're looking outside into that conference that you're talking about, going, "Hey, I think this applies to us guys," you know what I mean? Because they have so much tacit knowledge and experience to draw from already that teaching this in that sort of law enforcement military world, it's actually almost easier in a sense. Well, it should be almost easier in a sense, because you have the experience to draw from. You don't have to go learn that. You get that every single day out on the road. And law enforcement, especially, gets it in such a short amount of time. I mean, you really go out there, and in a few years, you've seen almost everything you're going to see, or be able to determine if there isn't, you know, what's outside the norm of that. And it's like, "Well, how do we draw on this?" Because you gave the perfect example of someone chasing someone down, and the hands come out. It's like, "Well, there's so much that went into that." It's like, "Why are... Did our training and the way we do things create the inevitability in the situation that I'm going to kill this person tonight?" And because now it's a roll of the dice whether or not that was a gun or not, because as you know, understanding how the brain works in those situations, sometimes it might fill in that picture where it was the cell phone, it was the wallet, and that person saw a gun. And they're not lost enough, they saw it, their brain just filled that in for them in that situation. So, it's like some of what we do creates the inevitability in the situation. And the other thing is with all of these, especially anything that makes the news or becomes some major case, it's actually fairly rare that those things happen. The problem is, it's so asymmetrical. It's like, it's rare, but when it happens, it's the worst thing in the world, and it sets everyone back. So, it's like, "Okay, but the reason why I framed it that way is it means, you know, 99% of the stuff you do, you're good. Alright, keep doing it." You know what I mean? "We only need to focus on this." But here's the thing: I can't just have some sort of training system that focuses on one thing because it's not very utile. I can't use that in everything. So, now we're going to do, "How do I... how do I do this?" Because, okay, talk about things that are vital, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Well, how do I cut through that? I mean, that's our thing. We're trying to say, "How do I get rid of the ambiguity so it becomes obvious?"

Yeah, let's put some stuff in and some concrete as a way of time. So, let's do it. Again, these are just a thought. I was listening to Ackoff's video for everybody there. Watch it and watch other stuff, get smart about it. But he was giving the example of if you were to take all of the best cars in the world—the Bentleys, Rolls-Royces, and everything else—and put them into a room and dissect them. The first thing that we know is the system is never its parts. An engine can't do the purpose of a car. An engine can't transport goods or persons from point A to B. A tire can't. Nothing else, right? But yet we have this idea that to improve or to reduce error, which is what management usually focuses on—to reduce error, to get more desirable outcomes, and to actually remove the less desirable outcomes—it's this engine, this wheel, everything else. Well, just think about this for a minute from a systems theory perspective, and this is straight out of Ackoff's video: if you were to take the best transmission from the Mercedes, the best engine from the Bentley, the best stuff in the Rolls, and put them all together, it would never work. Improvement of a single part never will improve the system per se. The system is looked at in both the holistic fashion. And he gives the example of an architect: if I want these items in my kitchen or this or anything else, well, we have to design that with the house in mind. You design both the house and the kitchen at the same time, and you would never design the kitchen in such a way that the house doesn't have a roof. The system always sort of takes primacy.

So, the first thing, step one: thinking systems. If you want a really good way to do it, I'm a systems trainer. I talk to Force Science, some advanced Force Science analysts. I'm up to the level of Axon now, what used to be Impakt Ace. I'm a video analyst as well. And the reason was, I got tired of people telling me stuff about these things; I wanted to get that. So, get smarter about these things. One of the ways you can do it is just to get smarter. But Brian, to your point, what happens if we do get smarter? So, what I used to have a thing when I talked to the two stars—I routinely briefed two and three stars because of the place I was at and things I did—and my normal thing was situation awareness. "So what? Now what? What next?" You're talking about the "so what?" "Hey, we've got all this, understand, we've got that." "What's the general going to turn around? I guess that's all fine and good. Why should I care?" And if you don't have an answer to that, you're wrong, short answer, right? Because I did intel and ops, I did both sides of the equation. So, to your point, and I think what you said was, "Is what we do causing inevitability?" I would argue it's contributing to it. But first of all, "inevitable" doesn't mean it's a bad or a good outcome. Training should contribute to an outcome; it should be related to it somehow, right? But here's, let's reframe that question. I actually speak on, "What about what we don't do? Is what we don't do—and don't start doing the bivalent thinking thing, 'Oh, it's more about what we don't do.' No, it's everything, right? It's both." What's complexity? Exactly, yes, what we're not doing. So again, I love this stuff because I'm like scribbling notes here. Right, right, right.

So, John, I just want to wedge this in while you're thinking about that. For those at home that are listening, the best time to start your diet and start your workout and really get serious about it is after your heart attack, because that's what it's going to take. That's what it's going to take for the average person out there to do it. So, you need some external schema or motivation or something to happen for you to do something. And in police work, it's always too late. So, you have to—and to use Brian's term—get ahead of it. How do you get ahead of something? Get ahead of something by educating yourself now on these likely outcomes so it doesn't become inevitable. Because inevitability can be a good thing, you know, but it can also be that veiled threat that when you come up against it, you're like, "Hey, wait a minute, it's the perfect storm." So, I'll take a quote from Buckminster Fuller. If, basically, if you want to have this new version—and I'll paraphrase—"If you want the old model to become obsolete, make a new model." That's it. Never, and there's that, and the old maxim from, of course, Murphy, which I've got on my back wall here: "Never confuse simple with easy, and the easy way is always mine." That's so funny. So, we've all been there, done that, right?

So, let's keep going. What you said the first thing is thinking systems. Start thinking in systems, teach yourself to think in systems. That's number one. How do we get there? How's all this stuff related? A perfect example is—and we've talked about this before—you're in a trainer. Let's bring it back to the concrete. For the first X amount of days, and if you ever did bicycling or anything else, or you did martial arts, one of the best things you can do if you want your non-dominant side to be at least catching up, so to speak, is train that side first with the cognitive aspect of a new technique, right? Because what will happen then is you'll actually have greater parity between your left and your right type of things. If you're doing a new drill on the range, shoot the new drill with your non-dominant side. See how it feels, figure it out, "Where are my feet? What am I doing?" Everything else. And then you'll transfer that a lot easier than the reverse way: dominant to non-dominant. Well, we can do that in the way we think, we can add systems thinking to that. So, that's number one.

Number two, and Greg, you hit on this: focus on the upstream. There's a quote by Desmond Tutu, "At some point, we need to stop pulling people out of the river and go upstream and figure out why they're falling in." Sensemaking is upstream. Now, I want you to take the same metaphor. Imagine we're on a bridge over a fast-flowing stream, river, creek, whatever you call it. And we're up there. Most people—if we're going from 12 o'clock to 6 o'clock, the river's flowing from 12 to 6; the bridge is over the river from 9 to 3—most people stare at 6 o'clock. They stare downstream. They see the people being pulled out. They scream, "It's wrong! It's... We shouldn't have this! It's unfair! It's this!" We still have to pull the people out, man. That's what we do, including ourselves. Exactly. Now, what I want you to do instead is, in this metaphorical little story here, turn around and ask yourself, "What's going on upstream?" How many of us routinely face upstream? One of the things I recently taught, I call it the Heraclitus Paradox, and it's a perfect way of examining the intricacies. And this, Brian, goes to the original question, "Complexity of complexity." It's attributed with a quote, a philosopher, "No man steps in the same river twice. It's never the same river; it's never the same man." We usually associate that with the water flow, with the river. Once we step in and we step out of it, the river's passed. But I want you to think about you, anybody listening, you guys here. When you step in a river, you now know something about that river that you never knew before: its temperature, its rate, its flow. Now you perceive that, but now you know, you lived it. And you step out on the other side. Now, when you turn around to cross that river in reverse, it's not the same river. So, even though you think you know the river, you don't. There's an old saying in rafting, "The river that was flowing yesterday ain't flowing the same way today." And that's for raft guides. A buddy of mine's a raft guide. And you have a greater level of knowledge than you had. It's neither good nor bad. You have been changed as well. So, now that metaphorical shooting that happens as just one micro case, even you can't go back in time. You're the best worst evidence of your perception, and you were affected at that moment. But now you will know things because you know the outcome. We have to simply address that. We don't judge that, we address it, we incorporate it.

So now, how do we do this into the training? So, bullet point number two, so to speak: focus on the upstream. That means focus on the moments leading up to. You're in a trainer, you're doing everything else. Spend the first three or four days, have the jury box, because we learn better by other people talking about it. And the people in the jury box are learning between themselves. But the cool thing about it is, they offer multiple perspectives, and bring in anybody. Bring them, freaking lawyers, bring in mental health counselors, bring in—I don't care—bring in people that simply think differently. Now they want something at the moment just before the decision is being made. That moment of choice. Just before that, there's a saying in Weick's work—that he quotes someone else—that "sensemaking is a way station on the way to decision-making." I love it. It's a continuous, incremental process. And I always like the idea that that's a way station at that moment, right? Stop it, turn it around and say, "What were you paying attention to?" Don't ask them about their choice. "What should you have done?" We even use words like that: "What should we do now?" "What could... Well, what five other things could you have done?" We're actually teaching them to think in hindsight. We're teaching them to think that way. Instead, ask them, "What are you paying attention to?" Just ask them. The guy there, the gal there. Now it's the jury box. "What were you paying attention to?" Exactly. Cool. Now I ask the next question, "Why was that important to you?" Now get an expert cop over there. You have to be careful that because experts can become the so-called authority figure, and that people start thinking right and wrong. So, you've got to build a relationship that an expert is just another perspective. And ask the expert, think about expert intuition with Gary Klein and recognition, Brian Moon, and the Naturalistic Decision-Making Society and everything else. Expert intuition, right? "What were you paying attention to?" Now, let's have a conversation, "Why was that important to you? Why is that important to you?" Everything else. And now, just leave it at that. Don't pass judgment on this side, and let them as learners come, "I never really thought about that. I never really thought the guy could turn anything else." Do that for three or four days, and now, to your earliest thing, "Hey, it could have been a cell phone, it could have been everything else." Brian, what you said, "The guy turns around the Galaxy..." And I said, "Yeah, I recognize that, but it happened so quick, I just couldn't take the chance." Now we're beginning to understand, didn't mean to look for it. "What could you have done?" "Well, I could have..." "Could you've given yourself time?" "I want to cover what were you waiting for." "Well, I knew it might be this or this, and I knew I had enough time." Oh, wow, okay. Because the attention drives perception, perception drives meaning. All these being iterative loops, meaning will eventually dictate choice. Think about it. We actually say in cops this, we give it a conclusionary meaning: "threat." Things that you guys deal with all the time with your program, right? "Threat." Once we have given it that meaning, there's only so many things on the à la carte menu that we're going to pick. And...

And that speaks directly to a lot of language and everything, and how we... absolutely seen. I mean, that's even the one we tell people: I'm going to leave one thing because I know you guys are just going to run with this. We write police reports. We've been taught "subject," "suspect," everything else. Why not use names? You know what their name is then. "Hey, you've lived through this, Mr. So-and-So." Exactly. Because at that point, the reader who doesn't know them, you've told them there are three.

John, police work is still in the days of "soft felon arrested sane," and we have to grow out of that for the beards and the hair to get grayer. But Brian, please bring up your point, because the language is so important. And then we see certain ones that we go, "Here's why I wouldn't say that. Here's why I wouldn't ever call something a 'pre-attack behavior' unless it's so obvious it doesn't need the term." Right? It just prejudices everybody. It's like, "But hold on, Brian, and think about this: we can say that, but we don't say it. We say it when we're talking about ourselves, on why we came to that perception." So, write down all the facts. Exactly. Write it clean and then say, "Now I have a separate section," and actually write it on a separate page. So, Dr. Deor, who does linear sequential unmasking for forensics, perfect example of this, his statement is, "Don't give anybody the information they don't need until they might need it. And if they don't need it, don't give it to them." And they found out forensics and everything else is supposed to be pure, that we were still skewed by our human understandings of names and our beliefs or anything else. So, the thing is, give them a clean thing. Get rid of the metadata. Let someone read through the narrative that is more "Mr. So-and-So," "Missus So-and-So," everything else. Now for someone that's doing a review on it, I have to understand, "Well, what did that mean to you?" Page two: "What it meant to me. Yes, these were indications: threat. I've been trained this." Right now, "Okay, got it, man. I'm with you." But I don't need that for another reader per se. And we can parse those things out. Anyway, go ahead, I cut you off.

No, no, no, sorry. That's spot-on. And I think to dovetail on what Brian was saying, if you're talking about pre-threat behaviors, pre-event indications of violence, what you're doing is pigeonholing yourself and not saying there was a panacea of different things. And these coalesce to form my opinion, and my opinion is my own. I drew a reasonable conclusion based on this. Now, here's the thing: when we talk to you—and Aragon is your company, there'll be links to it on the podcast—we talked to folks from Arbinger, a fan of Arbinger's way of thinking. And when we talked to Vaughan Klein or Chris Butler or Bill Lewinsky over at Force Science, the idea is this: the reason... and Klein's been around as long as I have. And we've argued over who came up with something first, which is a great humbling factor and an honor, right? Just like when you're talking to an intellectual, and all of a sudden you hear them quote something that you've been quoting, and you feel great about it. Why? Because we've got to be like Saul on the road to Damascus and have the scales fall from our eyes and look down and in as much as we look up and out. There are no challenges in principle faced by modern-day cops that haven't been faced by police all the way back to Ughluck and Mukhtar in cave dwellings. Now you're saying, "Well, technology and this and the speed of information, all of us..." But we ask that all of society has those same challenges. The difference is where we have to intervene, where we put the sharp end of the wedge in there. And the idea is, rarely do I show up on the scene and just get involved with something. Those "on-view" things happen, the better cops are out there doing those. Why? Because they see those situations start to develop and say, "I want to get involved." But when you've got a radio run, the problem is that you're already starting to force yourself into a line of thinking. Now, what heuristics and biases do we face? The person making the call, if they're a witness, dispatch taking down the information. Now the radio call comes out, and other units start chiming in. So, when we take a look at something as complex as police work, and then we add a "shots fired" call, or "shots fired officer down," or a "pursuit," then that layer of complexity, to me, goes out amongst the solar system where math and science start to get a little wonky. So, if you don't study for it now, you're never going to get ahead of it as it's unfolding.

So, I think that the way you think of things, the way some of these other people do, we should never be in competition. We should be supporting fires because they're on the right track. I think we're all going in the same direction, and I think it's a very cogent direction. We're not just sitting with 16-ounce gloves swinging. We are all seeing this materialize in front of us, and we're having hard conversations about tough problems. One thing—and I'll shut up—one thing on your site that I loved, and you started off: I fly fish, and I guide fly fishing. It's the only thing that relaxes me, and I don't get to do it nearly enough. When you get a fly-fishing knot, the very first thing is to stop, give yourself the gift of time and distance, and make that problem bigger. Because when you make it bigger, when you blow that knot up, then you see all the little intricacies that are your challenges that you face. And you at Aragon, and you personally, and guys like John Peters, and again, Arbinger, and the guys at Force Science, are the ones that are doing it right. And we know John in an odd way, but I just like that, and I like when you come on here because you're challenging those assumptions. You're not just spouting pablum and saying, "Hey, this is what I read." You're saying, "Hey, look, this theory," and these... I love the use of systems. I love the use of looking upstream to see what you are because ends justification is horse crap. And you're not going to be an expert witness long if that's what you're coming in.

And I'll give you an example of that. So, I've commonly used something as a framing mechanism: the Four Truths Model. Four Truth models are out of Human Systems Dynamics, and it argues for the fact that at any given moment, there exist multiple truths. There is the objective truth, and the way to think about the objective truth is time, space, distance—things that we know by science, everything else. Now, here's an interesting thing. So, imagine right now, it could be anything. We're going out, and we're about to do a raid. Put on our old Special Ops hats, we're about to do this. We're going to do some afterward. Put on a cop hat, put on a business hat; it really doesn't matter, right? The objective world is known by what we would call "hard science." But the funny part about it is—and think about it—psychology is an offshoot, way back when, of philosophy, right? So, let's think about philosophy for a minute. Do we ever interact with the objective world, that which is causing the stimulus to our senses? Now, that's been a philosophical argument forever, that we can actually directly interact without this thing. Cabrera, who does the DSRP (Distinctions, Systems, Relationships, Perspectives) theory—Dr. Cabrera at the Naval Research Labs—calls that "the mother of all biases," reality bias. There will always be something between us and the objective world. And it's a way, and think about it, what does the objective world mean? We already know that we can only see down to certain wavelengths, we can only see up, we can only hear certain frequencies. We have ones and zeros. Everything that's coming in, the refraction of light, the sound that's going off of our eardrums and everything else, is being transferred into ones and zeros, and it's being processed. All of these things affect our perception of the objective world. So, we have the objective reality. That means that objective reality is never known in the moment of action.

Now, think about this then: if we do that, and we understand that no one has ever come up to me in an interview and said, "Well, I then recognized at 16.7 feet away, recognizing that the trigger pull occurs at a quarter of a second, knowing that he was closing it..." No, what he says is, "I thought I was about to die. I turned around, he was right in front of me. I then pointed my gun, pulled the trigger until he wasn't there." That I trust. And we can unpack that. But that means that the objective world is a causation of the subjective perception. So, objective truth, subjective truth. Everybody looking at that will have a subjective perception. And we say that because the perception is inaccurate, it doesn't comport with the objective reality, only known after the fact, that somehow the subjective truth is false. It's not false. It is their subjective truth. It is neither right, wrong, or anything, or false. It is sometimes inaccurate, but it is not false because that's what they acted upon. It is their truth. We have the normative truth—third truth—remember the Four Truths Model. That is the truth that society has agreed upon to honor. "We're going to call this X, call this Y, this is day, this is night." It's normally a truth found within language. And then if we put them all together, and we say, "This truth is most meaningful at this moment," and we mix them up and manage them—and this is a concept that comes from Jürgen Habermas, a philosopher—is that we would call this thing mixed up, the complex truth.

Now, the reason why that's nice in courtroom presentation is, the objective truth we know by the forensic science, video analysis, and time and speed and everything else. The subjective truth we know by cognitive interviewing, everything else: memory and recall, and the way we structure and impression. And we can also go upstream: what was her training? How was her culture like in their police agency? What led to this type of stuff? What Brian, you called in the very earliest, the inevitability, watching this stuff unfold, right? Quantitative is done by experimentation and measures and everything else. Qualitative is done by case study, phenomenology, grounded theory, discourse psychology, for example. Both are equally relevant if we're focused on understanding. If we're not focused on understanding, we're focused on proving. And this goes back to your stuff, Greg: when we're in a courtroom, it's a competition. We have winners and losers. You don't want a tie. A tie is called a mistrial. You're not focused in a courtroom. The courtroom is not designed to increase understanding. In fact, the word "verdict" comes from verdictum, and it's the only time that I can see where they're saying to seek the truth, to get to the truth. But we are guilty and not guilty. We don't use any judgment of morality in the courtroom, right or wrong or anything else, because it's not part of the standard. You either meet a level, a burden of proof. And the competition is trying to say, if we were to put this on the metaphorical playing field, you have to get to the 20-yard line, or you have to get to the 50-yard line, preponderance of the evidence of 20, at the 95, whatever five yards within the goal, so they can kick. Whatever it is for your metaphor, our job is only to get you there. Now, as an expert witness, my job is exactly the opposite. My job is to help you understand the game, and to understand how the players think and everything else.

So, back to your earliest question and bullet point number three: How do we get people to listen? One, the cool thing about this is, everybody listening to this podcast right now can choose to focus inwardly. Start with yourself. Amen. Number one, there's so much stuff out there. And I will—reach out to me—I will give you a laundry list of stuff that you will not get through. Anybody that talks to me, they're like, "My head hurts. I just don't want to do this again." I get it. But, man, just take... It's like the Berlitz Method of language learning. Just keep shoving it, and eventually your ear will tune itself to it. Then the other thing is, when you're looking outwards, remember that you're only looking outwards or externally with one perspective. So, if you want to listen, how do we get people to listen? It goes back to the earliest part of this podcast: start with conversations that are focused on understanding, non-improving. Get away from a solution-centric mindset. "We have to solve something else." That's called efficiency. That's something quicker, faster, everything else. I want you to be more effective. And to be more effective in your decision-making, to get a higher probability in uncertain, complex environments to the desirable outcome, you need to start focusing on your sensemaking, that which occurs upstream of the decision. And Greg, to your earlier stuff, the time to do that is not in the crisis. It's an old saying by Elizabeth Dole, "I dealt with a lot of humanitarian assistance disaster relief projects. The time to build a relationship is not during a crisis." And one of the issues I ever see is, everyone wants that, "Well, what are the decisions then? What are the answers?" They're all looking at the answers. "Give me the Ishikawa diagram. Give me a decision tree. Give me the yes/no." Right? Complicated. It doesn't work for complex. Well, that's the thing. It's like, "Give me the Matrix. Give me the threat assessment model, and I can just use that." It's like, "Well, we'll know because even the guy that wrote that threat assessment model said that's not how it's supposed to." I call it the "Name of the Three Notes Model." So, the fact is, every time someone... "I can name it seven notes." "Well, I had a system now that can name it in five notes." There you go. It... you're reducing it to just in absentia. Every model is wrong, but some are useful. We model so that we can simplify the complexity, so that we can swim in and interact with it. But never, ever confuse your model with that. Now, going back to something that all of us are very much used to, what we're always told: "The map is not the ground." The model is not the ground. And when you watch someone think that the map is more important than the ground, you know what happens? Absolutely.

And, you know, one of the ways I put it too is because you talked about this with objective truths and, you know, what our perception of things are. You know that, obviously, the objective truth is, it's 42 degrees, and you know that that's what it is. But, you know, the subjective truth is, "Well, I'm cold." Well, some people it is. So, that's not the truth here. But it's funny because I hate all these reality shows that are out, but I heard one of the greatest lines ever on it, and that was they were all yelling and screaming and drinking Chardonnay, and they could create these moments for this drama, and then the one girl is like, "I want to speak my truth." And I'm like, "You know what?" I go, "I wonder if I make fun of these shows, that's about the greatest line I've ever heard," because that's so true. That's exactly what it is, it's her truth. It's not what happened at all, but it's what happened to her. And, you know, a lot of times we're just bad, or we're—I don't think we're always good at measuring and assessment. Measurement assessment is very difficult. It's very complex, or it can be very complicated. But we don't always pick the right things to measure and assess. And then so we get these outcomes, and we—because we're trying to quantify data, we're trying to quantify things that are non-repeatable events. This isn't flipping a coin. You can't do a statistical analysis of it. It's non-repeating. I go, "Everything. You can take the exact situation, let's say a police shooting is a perfect example. You take the exact situation, you change one element, everything changes. You go from night to day, and it changes. Now you want to talk about a different officer? Oh, that completely changes the math!" Like all of those things are... But we try to quantify it and go, "Well, let's measure and assess this." It's like, "Look, Bayes' Theorem isn't going to work here, man. It's just not." You can't do that for these things. Like, these are... and that's part of what, because so now we're on the right... We're not even on the right track because we're measuring and assessing the wrong things. So, now we have to use that as some goal to come to. And it's like, "Why is that the goal?"

And Brian, you're hitting on a crucial understanding when we use the word "measure" in the way that you just used it, and you're pointing out the fallacy of it, right? Is that we are measuring an outcome, and we're going backward. A measurement can't occur unless we have an outcome. What are you measuring? And this, that's if we're measuring outcomes. But is there a way to, for lack of a better term, measure process, the thinking? And there is, there are many different ways to do it, but the difference is, they're kind of fuzzy. They don't have that great, "Oh, because I want to know if it's seven or eight." "It's somewhere between two and ten." "Well, that's not good enough." Why isn't it good enough? That's the first question we should ask, is, "Why isn't it?" The fact that, you know, it's not a hundred, and it's ten, I can plan with that. We plan with high degrees of correlation. We never plan off of certainty in the weather or anything else we do, or where you're going to be that night. You live in a world of accepted probabilities, not a world of accepted causations.

Now, the fourth bullet on this for people that are trying to follow the transcript—like I don't even know where the hell the second bullet was—is, "Live in the question." Berger wrote a beautiful book, The Art of the Beautiful Question. There's actually, out of Harvard Kennedy School, you can take it, I think it's like 99 bucks, out of the Right Question Institute. We have gone away, and this is a quote by Voltaire, "Judge a man by his questions, not by his answers." We have gone away from the value of the better question, the value of the insightful question. The question in a complex situation is more important than the answer because once we focus on the solution—and this comes from like, think about, and this is the D in DSRP Theory, Distinctions—when we have a distinction—this is the way the human brain works—we have identity and other. If we call something "A," the moment we call it "A," we have also labeled everything that is not "A." The very moment of labeling, we do that. And you actually can read the Tao Te Ching; it's in there about... It's so old. And again, the one thing I forgot, and as I'm switching from four jobs to three, as I joke with my wife, on retirement, is, "I did not adequately budget for alcohol and nicotine for the level of frustration that I experience." So, thank you for that, because I'll have to go do that afterwards about this. But anyway, you're welcome for the gift of PTS (Post-Traumatic Stress). Exactly. So, what I'm getting at is, when we ask a question in the cop in the military world, you're often viewed as weak. "How come you didn't know?" Everything else. But what happens if all was focused on questions for a while? Just play those questions. The Right Question Answered has a format; it's called the Question Focus Technique (QFT) that can help you become comfortable again with the power of the question. So, sensemakers—and this is actually like the last two presentations I gave—was we had the Type One Thinker, the Type Two Thinker, think Kahneman and everything else. What I'm proposing is, can we create the Type Three Sensemaker? Someone that does a little bit of both. It doesn't... We have to stop getting away into this "A or not A" or "this or not that," right? We have to be able to look at, and this is zooming in and zooming out, so to speak, is the holistic and the part, the holistic and the part, the system and the whole, the action and the reaction. So, if you have relationships, every relationship has an action and reaction. If you have a perspective, everything has a point: the observer where they're looking from, and an impression, the view that they make out of it, the meaning they give it. If you have a system, you have parts and wholes. If you have distinctions, you have identity in others. And there's actually jigs in this. And then the Cabrera Research Lab, there are ten. I'm a trained... I'm allowed to teach their methodology. I'm not pushing it, go on your own, become the healthy skeptic, ask your own questions. Ask your own questions about your own thinking: "What might I be missing?" "What I'm not seeing?" "Who could help me see what I'm not seeing?"

Yeah, it's so spot-on. And we call that the semi-Socratic because you can't be all Socratic. Because if you're all Socratic, you're going to stunt the decision-making process maybe when you need it the most. But you can be right up along the edge of that. And this is why I love the law so much. This is why you look at the decisions of the Supreme Court, and if you actually take a moment and read them, and you see the beauty of things like constitutional law and the Amendments, and you understand that it's a jury of your peers. It's not the most learned or the richest people in the community that are judging you. It's an amalgam of everybody because we want that differential thinking. And, you know, when you see terms like "precedent," "Well, how did they do it before?" Somebody had a good idea, or we wouldn't be here. All of those concepts are thinking points. And I love thought leaders. We talk about: "Spire, Sensemake, Problem-Solve, Adaptability, and Resilience." You cannot become resilient if you're not adaptable. You cannot engage in law enforcement if you're not cognitively flexible, if you're able to stand outside of your corporeal self and look back at you. And those are such important points that you're bringing up, and we're only... we're just touching on the surface, touching on the surface.

Oh yeah, we're just... we could do, you know, literally a "K series" on this. So again, perfect example what you just gave. Let's take what we learn and apply it back to a concrete example. So, to all the lawyers out there, or cops that have dealt with lawyers, I don't care, anything else. I want you to think about a normal jury process, and we're going through a trial. Once the jury is seated, their job is to judge. Now, they're supposed to be listening and finders of fact. But basically, if you think about it, the metaphor I use is, you're in the optometrist's office. Every piece of information that's given out is, "Better now? Or now better? Now or now?" They're listening and discarding. They're doing it, and it's completely linked to leanings and heuristics and everything else. And that's okay because we're humans, and that's what's going to happen. But you've told them, "Your job at this point is to hold this person's outcome in your hands." And they're just like you just described, Greg, they're just, for the most part, they're your peers, right?

So now you get the expert in. If you bring the expert in there, and they're going to explain it... I brought in, I've been brought in as, it's called an "expositional expert" to explain cognition and that kind of stuff, not talking about the case. And I get, routinely, I've got tons of activities. I could probably talk about the case, which is fine. But to the lawyers, the other folks out there, "Why aren't we talking about these concepts during voir dire?" Exactly. Think about it. In voir dire, we're asking the jury questions, we're helping them, "Hey, do you think this way or anything else?" And there are people that are already doing it, lawyers, some of the lawyers are doing it where they develop a little five-minute thing. And I get it, the judge is a gatekeeper, they say, "Yeah, we're not doing that," but we've got to start somewhere. And they've got this little five-minute quest. Think about the... Think about video. We think video's truth. Show them the basketball and the gorilla. Show them something, right? Five minutes. They say, "What do you think?" "Now, do you realize? Can you objectively come to an opinion of guilty or not guilty, recognizing that a jury is not truth?" "Will you take that in? And everybody will say that, 'Well, they can't unsee what they just saw.'" But the difference is their mindset. "You're not in the job of judging. You're in the job of 'Why am I here?'" Now you do a little quiz on... you get the same facts set to half the 30 people sitting there because you're doing voir dire. You give another, you give the same facts out to another, and you just change a simple word or anything else, and people come out with different results. "Do you understand how influential hindsight can be, knowing the outcome?" And one fact that you give are the outcomes unknown, and the other facts that you give them the outcome first. When you get the jury instructions, you'll be taught up, you'll be shown that hindsight is, et cetera. And if you do that, can you make sure that you are not falling into this trap of thinking? You can refer back to those things during your closing and everything else, and they'll remember it. They'll remember that little test, a little demonstrative. And they all came in before the first opening argument. Exactly. Because from that moment happens, we are immediately becoming co-opted and biased because an adversarial system is not inquisitorial. It's not designed to understand. It's designed one side has to win. Those arguments are given to influence and make it more likely that one side will win, whoever's opening it is.

Now, "How do we get ahead of this?" was some of the themes that we've been talking about. We can take what we know and we can apply it to the training and the simulator, to the jury on the outcomes, to the policy about teaching the policymakers. We can do all that. In fact, I have been trying desperately to get in front of people to do just that because that's where these conversations need to be had. They need to be had at the bottom and the top. Greg Satell does a great job in his book, Cascades. Him, Ed Morrison, and crew have a great thing, a clubhouse where they basically take incubators. But what they talk about is, the way any movement of transformation moves is, you basically have what they call the "apostles." You have to get a couple people on the team. It doesn't happen just because it's right. It doesn't happen because science proves it. It happens, we begin to transition by the very nature of beginning to get a group of other people that believe and go forth and have these conversations until we reach tipping points in certain places that the momentum picks up and up. And it becomes, in fact, I've got a quote behind me, Schopenhauer: "All truth passes through three stages. First, it's ridiculed. Second, it's violently opposed. Third, it's self-evident." There you go.

Well, I'll tell you what. Brian and I use the "Raptor example" all the time because, you know, "Is it better now? Is it better now?" because we understand the lenses. I would say another of the 90 gems that you just dropped: listen, folks, if you're doing training, get your prosecuting attorney in on the training. Have them review your training guides. Because when you're standing there and you've written a report, and then you go in and they're making a deal, they're making a deal because that's what they do. They're making a deal because they've got a set of systems that have worked for them. They're not thinking about you or your training. And they're going to come out of left field sometimes with ideas. But if they understand what you're going through, your community managers, your church leaders, ride-alongs—all of those are ways to get this essential message out there from a grassroots level. And that's what John is talking about: he's talking about creating an insurgency. And that insurgency is the advocate on the ground, the boots that are helping you send that message. That's great stuff.

Oh, no, remember, I'm going to put my old SF (Special Forces) hat on. What's the difference between a foreign internal defense, counter-insurgency? And that depends whose side you're on. Right? It depends on where the government said. Am I on this side of the border or this side of the border? Right, man.

And that's why you always carry a bug-out kit too, John, because that's the card that changes all the time.

Exactly. That's why even with the 11, going on 15-year-old, I guess, girl I have here at home, where I call her "the Insurgent." Everyone out here knows her because I refer to her as "the Insurgent." But at the same time, someone was actually having a conversation about it, they're like, "Yeah, it's really funny, but isn't it more like foreign internal defense because you're kind of training her?" I go, "Yeah, but she also might... you're right, but she also tried to attack me." So, maybe here's the thing, guys, and this is another thing. So, we joke about this, but we have a common language. We have shared experience. These common languages exactly speak to a model. And once we bring the model out there, sometimes it never meets the stuff that we have, the shared experience, right? And so, if you want to have these meaningful—and this is why I love these type of things—these meaningful conversations, go in with your troops, go in with your people, and learn about them.

So, I help on some of the AI (Artificial Intelligence) stuff. Think about AI, everybody, okay? AI cannot care about you. A leader can. You can care about your partner. AI is as biased as the first human that wrote the algorithm or the data set by which AI is learned. So, don't think that AI is more objective. It isn't. So, what differentiates you as a learner? What differentiates you if you want to learn about complexity? What differentiates you as going into the workplace? Care about each other. That's it. Care about what you're doing, care about quality, care about effectiveness, not this idea of efficiency or quicker, anything else. And sometimes we have to do that and stop thinking bivalently, "I'm going to choose effectiveness." No, stop. Just care about learning, care about these things, care about each other, get in there and do it. But more importantly, have the conversations. And the very act of conversation is the old adage: we should be listening more than we're talking. Which, obviously, all of us have done here. But you can't have all... You can't even helping males in a room like this. Everybody's buying content, right?

Well, this is a great conversation, just a wonderful... And the problem is, all conversations for this type of medium have to be a certain length of time. I know. The idea is, though, that it doesn't have to be because we can revisit some of the magic that we had today. I try at the end here to kind of recap a few of the highlights that we talk about, but like now I'm like, "No, I don't... Where would you go?" Like, "Hang on, you brought up a podcast that's going to be the recap of a podcast." You brought up some really great points. And, you know, we always like to boil those down to simple messages, or what you were talking about too, with your takeaways as well. And what objective reality... I mean, there we go. So, we try to really boil that down to very, very simple things. And, you know, for a takeaway, because, I mean, you know what happens when you guys start getting into this, or they look into decision-making science or complexity or anything, it's almost like they get lost, like, "Holy crap, well, everything is subjective and everything!" It's like, "Well, no, I mean, yes it is, but, like, no. You've influenced the situation that you're in, and you have more knowledge and experience, I think, than people realize that you can draw on." And if we're focusing on that internally, "What can I draw on to make a better decision here?" or "What else do I know that I'm not thinking of right now?" I mean, those are simple ways to cut through this. And that's what I like doing, is really just, "Okay, well, how do I make it less ambiguous? How do I make it less complex? How do I get rid of some of the uncertainty?" Some of those things you actually do without realizing it. So, first it kind of becomes this sort of recognition of what these words mean, and understanding the situation that I'm in, the sensemaking that we hit on. You know, that's our major thing, is all about sensemaking. And then it's up to you to make the decision. Some people don't like that. We're like, "Well, you tell us what the decision is." Like, "Well, wait a minute, well, I thought that was date. We're not getting that." So, tomorrow the course isn't about decisions. Like, "No, no, no, no, no, you have to draw the reasonable conclusion yourself." But there's so much to unpack here. So, I would kind of, I'm interested to see some of the feedback that we get. And, you know, if you're interested, you know, we can get some feedback, see what people think. And maybe there's a specific thing that we could have, we want to deep dive some of these, if you want to come back on. And really start, try to keep it around one topic, which is next to impossible to do when you're getting into this. But again, we can keep bringing it back. So, I get this can be overwhelming. I get this.

But I want to tell—and this is a message for the listeners—you're already doing this. You do this every day, and you are an expert at it. This is becoming a little bit better at being an expert at it. You do it every day. And if it seems like it's overwhelming—and I'll just pull one maxim or quote out of Zen—this idea of knowledge. The way they tell it is, "Knowledge, or all these book knowledge, everything else, knowledge is like a raft that you use to cross the pond. But once you cross that pond, leave the raft behind on the rest of your journey. There's no sense carrying the raft." So, read through these things, listen to Ackoff, do these other things. Read through them, and then just put it to the side a little bit, and just see how your thinking has changed. Don't try to do anything with it. Don't try to solve something. The very act, they say, to sit and say "Zot!" You've already achieved the purpose. You're sitting. Eat when you're hungry, drink when you're thirsty, sleep when you're tired. Just do it 15 minutes a day. Just do it. And everybody here is disciplined enough to just do something like this. Read, think, look at systems differently. Do this. And then the other thing too is, reach out, have conversations with Brian and Greg, have conversations with me. Reach out to all the other folks that are doing this stuff: Vaughan, and Mike, and Bill, and Chris, and all the other folks that everybody here knows, Adam, and all the other crews. I saw you at Scott's the other day. Just reach out, have the conversations. That's all I would leave it with.

No, and I love that idea of leaving knowledge behind, you know, on the raft. "Don't bring it with you." You know, Greg always says that, "Read every book and then put it right back on the shelf." And it's... you don't carry that around and point to it and say, "See here!" You know, it's like, "No, no, read it, absorb it, throw it on the shelf, get another one." "Make it your own." If you don't agree with it, tell me why. It's okay.

Exactly, exactly. Absolutely. That's great. Of course, it will get us further. We came up with the tagline a long time ago, "Training changes behavior because it changes the axons and dendrites." It changes the electrochemical neurotransmitters in your brain, the mirror neurons when you hear something you like, and the chemical reaction when you don't. Those are so essential to building your capacity for sensemaking and problem-solving. So, essentially, there's a quote from Ackoff, "It is much better to do the right thing wrong than to do the wrong thing right." And so, the thing is—and again, I'm not a big fan of "right/wrong" as in a descriptor because everybody's subject to that—but one of the first things we need to sort of take a step back, a step upstream, is, "What are you concentrating on?" Are you more outcome? So, take a breath and just go upstream, even with just a little bit, and just look around metaphorically, turn around in 360, and say, "Wow, this is an interesting place." That's it. Amen. I love it. That's a great spot to end on.

So, I appreciate your time for coming on here, John. Thank you so much. I appreciate you guys for sharing that with everyone. Folks, of course, you'll get all John's information in the episode details. And again, you can reach out. And thanks, everyone, for listening. And don't forget that training changes behavior.