The Security Circle
An IFPOD production for IFPO the very first security podcast called Security Circle. IFPO is the International Foundation for Protection Officers, and is an international security membership body that supports front line security professionals with learning and development, mental Health and wellbeing initiatives.
The Security Circle
EP 114 The Security Mindset: Protecting, Teaching, and Innovating with Christopher Stitt: Founder of CrisisLead,LLC
Christopher Stitt, CEO of CrisisLead, LLC
Christopher Stitt founded CrisisLead, LLC, in 2023, leveraging over 25 years of expertise in converged security, risk management, crisis leadership, and organizational development. Through CrisisLead, Chris consults for and coaches businesses worldwide, delivering innovative security solutions, robust program management, and leadership training with a strong focus on team building and leader development. He has also partnered with Risk 2 Solution with whom he serves as a Senior Consultant and Trainer in the Presilience methodology and framework.
Previously Chris served as a Supervisory Special Agent with the U.S. Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service. His distinguished career included roles both domestically and internationally. Among his overseas positions, he served as the Regional Security Officer in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and Panama City, Panama, and as Deputy Regional Security Officer in San Salvador, El Salvador, and Baghdad, Iraq. Among his domestic positions, he twice served as Chief of Emergency Planning and concluded his career as Deputy Regional Director for International Programs in the Americas and Caribbean.
Since 2020, Chris has been shaping the next generation of national security professionals as Adjunct Faculty at George Mason University, teaching courses in homeland security concepts. Beyond teaching, he contributes thought leadership through articles, podcast appearances, and speaking engagements at conferences and events.
Chris is actively engaged in the professional community. He serves on the Board of Directors for the DC Chapter of the Association of Continuity Professionals and is a member of IAEM, ASIS International, OSAC, and the Wheeling Area Chamber of Commerce.
Chris holds multiple credentials, including Board Certification in Security Management (CPP), Certified Emergency Manager (CEM), Security Risk Management Certified Professional (SRMCP), Registered Presilience Practitioner (RPP), and Certified Facilitator for Whole and Intentional Leader Development (WiLD Leaders). He is a Fellow of the Institute of Strategic Risk Management (ISRM) and holds FEMA’s Master Continuity Practitioner Certificate.
His academic achievements include a bachelor’s degree in Sociology (Criminology) and Psychology from Ohio University, a master’s degree in strategic Intelligence from the National Intelligence University, a Graduate Diploma in Organizational Presilience, Risk, and High Performance from the Institute of Presilience, and the ISMA Leadership Certificate from Georgetown University. Currently, he is pursuing an Executive MBA.
An Eagle Scout, Chris has been honored with numerous awards, including the FBI Medal for Meritorious Achievement, the Department of State Innovation in Use of Technology Award, the Secretary of State’s Career Achievement Award, and several Superior and Meritorious Honor Awards.
Security Circle ⭕️ is an IFPOD production for IFPO the International Foundation of Protection Officers
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Yoyo:Hi. This is Yolanda. Welcome. Welcome to the Security Circle podcast, the award winning Security Circle podcast. IFPO is the International Foundation for Protection Officers, and we are all dedicated to providing meaningful education, information, and certification for all levels of security personnel, and make a positive difference where we can to our members mental health. and well being. Our listeners are global. They are the decision makers of tomorrow and today. And I want to thank you all, wherever you are, for being a part of the security circle, wherever you're listening, whatever you're doing. And don't forget to subscribe as well, or even better, just like, comment, and share the LinkedIn post. Thank you for your company today. I have with me. An amazing young man and, I got to meet him for the first time, even though he's well known, well known and notorious on the, security community circuits. Welcome Christopher Stitt to the Security Circle podcast. How you doing? Thanks
Chris:Well, thank you very much. Yolanda. I am thrilled to be here with you today. it was great to meet you actually in person out at our last GSX and get to know you a little bit more. And, uh,, I've been, you know, a listener of the podcast for a while, and I'm really just thrilled to be here. You know, helping to continue this mission and vision that, you and I IFPO have, uh, for the security circle. Also I greatly appreciate you referring to me as young because man, I'm, you know, not as young as I may seem.
Yoyo:Note to self, always compliment the guest within the first few minutes. It bodes well for an open and relaxing conversation.
Chris:Good to note when I, host my own podcast coming up in a couple of weeks.
Yoyo:Listen, I'll put out all the tricks today so you can catch on and use them. You're a security professional, no doubt about it. Seasoned, experienced, confident. Well known, well liked. There's another one. did you get into the security industry? For those that don't know you, I want to hear the story.
Chris:You know, it's funny. It really comes back to, even in my youth, part of my goal was to, you know, help people. And, it's corny, right? The protect and serve. Even as far back as when I was like five years old, I wanted to get into federal law enforcement, investigations, things like that. And I was following that path. I, you know, majored in criminology, sociology and criminology, with a double major in psychology at Ohio University. While I was there, I started as an intern and then became an admin assistant and then a full time agent with an undercover narcotics task force. did that total for about a year and a half before I, uh, got my first federal job at U. S. Capitol Police. And, uh, spent about a year and a half at the U. S. Capitol, uniformed police officer, guarding the Capitol, investigating crimes in and around the Capitol. I managed to work, a, the inauguration of, uh, President Bill Clinton. That's how long ago this was, And then I, also worked, uh, the State of the Union and things like that. So some really big events. And it was a really a great opportunity, because I also through that,, it wasn't just law enforcement, it was the kind of security side as well. So it was a lot of physical security and understanding how all the integrated systems work for access control and investigations and different things like that. I didn't plan to leave as quickly as I did, but, I'd always wanted to go and be an FBI agent, but I didn't want to be a lawyer, and I didn't want to be an accountant. Um, so I was waiting, biding my time to be old enough to apply to the FBI, when over lunch, a friend of mine told me about this organization called the Diplomatic Security Service. And, The Diplomatic Security Service, for those that don't know, is the law enforcement and security arm of the U. S. Department of State, and in short, um, we do investigations, like the FBI, we do protection, much like the Secret Service, but we have postings all over the world. Our jurisdiction is literally the whole world. And when I was hearing about that, I was like, where do I sign up for that? Um, I'd always been intrigued and interested and desired to, you know, travel internationally, interact with other cultures, learn other languages, things like that. Um, that comes back to my dad, uh, when he was growing up, he lived in a couple of different countries because his father worked for an oil company. Um, and even in college, I actually lived three out of my four years in the International Residence Hall so that, again, I could interact with people from different places and experience different cultures. So, started with the Diplomatic Security Service in 1997 and spent the next 25 years, 26 years, with them finally retiring in, in 2023.
Yoyo:Retiring. Really, you'll not hold it off.
Chris:Let's be honest, much more of a transition than a retirement, especially given all of the different projects and activities that I've gotten myself into since then.
Yoyo:You dropped a few things I've got to pick up on here.
Chris:Please.
Yoyo:Number one, how did having a criminology? You know, BA sociology and psychology. How did all that help you
Chris:so in a couple of different ways, and I really liked pairing the sociology and the psychology together. And, to an extent, there's an old saying, society prepares the crime, the criminal commits it and the sociology psychology blend really gives. You know, that kind of, um, gives power to that statement because, you know, going through my classes in sociology and learning all kinds of things about, you know, demographics and people groups and understanding how societies change and evolve and things like that, how, you know, the various influences work, um, to make those shifts and things like that. And then on the psychology background, you know, understanding On the individual basis, right? And even the psychology of groups, which then lends itself back into into sociology, um, you know, really kind of give some insights into some things that are going on in the world. Um, and so when you're looking at a particular problem, the ability to look at it through both lenses of that. I think is really useful and really powerful.
Yoyo:I'm going to dig into your past a little bit here because you happen to say, on LinkedIn. Now this is phenomenal. I've just seen this. I was uh, glittering through your profile under education. I'm going to ask you a question because you said during your second and third years, you assisted a PhD candidate with data analysis regarding how media affects perceptions of race. I thought, how progressive. What did you learn?
Chris:One of the things the the PhD candidate was actually looking at, uh, specifically, um, media portrayals of race, and he was looking specifically at how big do you think different ethnographic populations are in the United States, he wasn't looking at things like, how are they portrayed or things like that, but literally focused on how large do you think they are. My role was to take the surveys that people had submitted and put it into the statistical software so that we could run the statistics. And you sit there and I'm going through the statistics and how, how large do you think the African American population of the United States is now at the time, the truth was between 10 and 12%. But the question, especially even then, as you were trying to, as you were getting more diversity in various media, movies, television, radio, et cetera, right? A lot of people thought, well, it's gotta be at least, 30 or 40%. Same question on, the Latin X or Hispanic population, right? How big is that in the United States? Now, that one is actually much larger, but was more underrepresented at the time, so people thought that was probably about a 10 or a 15%. Okay, so how big do you think the white population is? Well, the white population has got to be at least, 60 or 70%, but the honest answer is that's not true either. When I come back to people being really bad at math, um, a lot of times when you added people's numbers up and you're trying to get them to 100 percent and they come in at like 137 percent
Yoyo:because they just,
Chris:you know, don't, uh, they don't have that. So I helped on that project for about a year and a half, I think in my undergrad days.
Yoyo:I was drawn to it because the same perception still occurs nowadays, I believe, because I read something recently, produced something statistical and from an ethical and sound source. I think we have to use that phrase a lot, based on perceptions and realities. And there's no doubt about it. The figures are equally as skew whiff. As they were back then in terms of perception is you've only got to go into a, an inner city area where portion of maybe visible ethnic minorities is greater, but it's only representative of that area, that community, and it isn't representative of the whole country. And the perception is, you know people come away thinking, Oh, there's so many foreigners around. And this is it. We have a huge, we have a huge issue with this type of perception.
Chris:So, I grew up in Cleveland Heights, Ohio and Cleveland Heights, suburb of the city of Cleveland Heights, because it's on the hill overlooking Cleveland. Um that was a very, very diverse community to grow up in. And I really take a lot of, appreciation, especially since I have moved to places that don't have those levels of diversity. in my school, we were about probably, 60 percent white, 40 percent african american. Actually, probably 60 percent white, 35 percent African American. you had some, uh, Asian and other ethnicities built in there as well. But even within the white population, there was a very large Jewish population.
Yoyo:You
Chris:know, there was a very large populate. There were populations of, you know, other immigrant nationalities. That are kind of lumped in as white, but they were either, you know, some of them were first generation, second generation. So there was a lot of that blend of the different, you know, cultures, races, and things like that, um, that I had growing up. And again, I'll throw that back to one of the reasons I was probably interested in living in the International Residence Hall at Ohio University. Because, you know, of that, you know, kind of upbringing.
Yoyo:Would you like to hazard a guess? On the number of people in England and Wales being white.
Chris:Ooh,
Yoyo:I know everyone right now is going, um,
Chris:you know, I would guess because you, you know, look, kind of looking across the spectrum a little bit at the, diversity and the immigration and things like that. Especially from, former British colonies and et cetera. I would guess somewhere around. 55%. Get
Yoyo:off the motorway. Seriously. Now, when you think about the media rhetoric, I'm going to tell you, when you think about the media rhetoric and the increase in narrative around right wing extremism, and how, whites of a certain age and, gender and proportion are definitely think their country's being overrun with immigration, all this kind of stuff. It's actually 82 percent and the figure is dated 2021. It's so interesting about your perception. Yeah. Because if I only ever went to Florida. In America, and that's the only place I've ever visited, then my perception could be very different of the whole of the United States. I think the fact that you tapped into perception around this, media, of, perception of race, I think it's a phenomenal subject. Chris, I really enjoyed going down that rabbit hole with you.
Chris:If I can just take it a little bit further. So one of the things that I'm doing now is I'm working with, risk to solution and the Institute of Presilience,
Yoyo:um,
Chris:you know, Gav Schneider, absolutely brilliant, uh, as he's put together this, this, you know, concept of Presilience. I know you, I think you've talked to him before. Many
Yoyo:times. Yeah.
Chris:I don't know if you've had him on the security circle or not, but
Yoyo:twice, twice. Yes. And he's booked to come in. Yeah.
Chris:Perfect. You know, he, in fact, his new book on Presilience is coming out,
Yoyo:but
Chris:you know, one of the things that we talk about in critical thinking decision making, is the concept of biases and heuristics, and Daniel Kahneman system one and system two thinking and how those things affect you know, your critical thinking and, and, your decision making. I think I just gave, you know, a fantastic example of relying on some, you know, biases and heuristics, to come up with an answer that turned out to be wrong.
Yoyo:Alongside all of that, the reports of discriminatory behavior against nationality, religion, or UK are at the highest. Just goes to show, doesn't it? That it feels like something's you know, poking the fire of dissent. we all know from a risk and resilience perspective, when you consider geopolitical factors, there is a bit of game play at play. In fact, I think, Chris, the older I get, the more I just go like, Oh God, we've got no hope. our humanity, because if we're still scrabbling for land, or we're still scrabbling for hegemony, and we're doing it by dirt and filth and whatever trick, and we have been doing it for a long, long time, centuries, I don't know what hope we've got.,
Chris:it's interesting because I actually looked into some statistics, uh, several months ago, and I was looking at. The comparison of the height of immigration in the United States, in like the 1870s through, early 1900s,
Yoyo:compared
Chris:to immigration to the United States during Um, you know, the last decade or even, you know, the last four years, the Biden administration.
Yoyo:And
Chris:one of the things that I came across was, yes, the number of immigrants coming in over the last couple of years was higher. Okay. But as a proportion of the population, the number of immigrants. That were coming in was actually the same and a little bit lower than it was at the height of, you know, for lack of a better term, the Ellis Island period where, you had so many immigrants coming in back then. I don't remember the exact statistics off the top of my head. but, again, it's that perception versus., some of the real hard data.
Yoyo:I'm English, as you know, and I'm going to ask, I'm going to ask you a question and I don't expect you to answer on behalf of your whole nation. Cause some of them are a little bit batshit crazy at the moment. Chris, don't get me wrong. We've got a fair few. But we know, obviously from our old. century of settlement that America has been built on immigration. It's, you know, nations upon nations upon nations built the land, you know, sped off the land, grown the land. It's
Chris:critical for the economy. Yeah.
Yoyo:Right. We find it a little bit weird. I think that, and again, you don't have to answer for the whole nation, but we find it a little bit weird that you've, you're kind of like going, no, that's it now. And it's a bit like, you know, the Titanic sinking and everyone trying to get on a lifeboat. As long as you're on a lifeboat, that's fine, but good forbid, you know, you're the one that says, sorry, we've got enough now you're potentially at risk of dying. I think at what point. Do we look at this more prosaically and say, why should we say no? Why should we turn down what our forefathers and foremothers did, you know, for centuries?
Chris:This comes back to what I was just mentioning with the statistics, you know, as a share of the population, the number of immigrants coming in right now, um, or in this, you know, in the last four or five year period, right, was Actually lower than the same as or lower than the share of the population that was coming in, you know, um, back at the height of the Ellis Island era. So, and, you know, I personally also have some, some issues with, um, kind of what is the American ethos? What is, you know, what are the words on the, you know, Statue of Liberty? You know, yes. People with criminal records, especially crimes of violence,
Yoyo:you
Chris:know, should not be invited to stay, should not be invited to enter. They're even redefining again. And I've, I've gone through this swing myself throughout my life and my career, right? Illegal versus undocumented versus, you know, whatever else. Right.
Yoyo:Yep.
Chris:Part of the narrative that's going on right now is. In an effort to expel as many people as possible, the administration has replaced the word undocumented with illegal. If you have come here in an undocumented fashion, and you have not gone through the process to be admitted to the country,
Yoyo:you are
Chris:here illegally, and that is a crime, and for that, you can be expelled. I understand the problem a lot of people have, but the bigger problem still is our immigration system itself and its capacity to process all of the people that would like to come here, in a documented legal way. The other problem I have is there are a lot of people who fled very, very bad situations. Who've arrived here under what is called temporary protected status and without looking at has the situation they change face changed without examining what are the, things going on and what are the risks to them? Should they go back? The answer is simply temporary protected status is over. You're no longer welcome. Here's the door.
Yoyo:That's no way to live, is it? Not even, you know, waiting for that type of decision. And we have the same issue in the UK, where people come here, and there's no doubt about it. However you look at it, whatever, however discriminatory one is, there's a scale of it. You, you, anyone who comes through eight countries to come to our country is definitely fleeing a worse situation than what we can offer here. if it was bad here, people wouldn't come here. I can't blame them for wanting to have a better life. It's just that what life do they have when they come here and they're not allowed to work. They can't claim benefits, so what do they do?
Chris:So the flip side is this, early in my career. my first overseas position was in Guatemala.
Yoyo:Oh, wow.
Chris:We regularly had people come to the embassy who were seeking asylum in the United States because of their poor economic conditions, because of their poor family conditions, because of conditions of crime. So you're talking, this is 99 to 01, okay? 1999 to 2001. And Our answer at the time, frankly, was always no, and then we would send them over to UNHCR, Catholic Relief Services, some of the other aid organizations, and even people who had come up through Central America and were arriving at our embassy as third country nationals, you know the answer was always no. The United States is the option of last resort, not first resort, and are you being persecuted? You know, Hi, I'm here from XYZ country. I was being persecuted there. I'm now here in Guatemala, I need asylum in the United States. And the question was, are you being persecuted here in Guatemala?
Yoyo:Same here. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep.
Chris:If the answer to that is no, then you need to talk to the Guatemalan migration authorities about seeking asylum here.
Yoyo:First country of safety.
Chris:Over time, that concept changed. It seems as though, more and more often with the temporary protected status and other things like that, instead of trying to encourage people to migrate. More closely to home, stay internally where they were. It became much more common for them to come all the way up to the United States. And then on the, you know, a good example is like the Cuban population. There's the concept of feet wet, feet dry. You know, feet wet. Nope, you are not in the United States yet. You can be returned to Cuba or sent somewhere else. Feet dry. Yeah. You've got temporary protected status and you're in. Again, part of that comes back to how are they arriving, and are they documented, undocumented, do they fall into some of the categories that can be, you know, protected or not, and, you know, what then, and for how long? Because another part of the problem is some of these countries are wicked problems. They're not easily solved.
Yoyo:You were working undercover with a narcotics task force. how many factors were at play here politically that made that job really hard?
Chris:You know, honestly, back then, especially because I was young and excited to be doing this, it wasn't something that I paid attention to, some quasi political factors were, you know, we had nine counties in our, task force jurisdiction, within that we had several community colleges and universities and things like that. The politics of, drug use on colleges versus out in the community is a little bit was a little bit different., one of the things that I was also, focused on was diversion of prescribed drugs prescription diversion. People who would go around and doctor shop and get three or four prescriptions for, high level painkillers or even doctors who would blithely or not even blithely, but criminally, you know, be willing to sell their prescriptions. So that people get, could get the drugs and then they would themselves distribute them, et cetera.
Yoyo:That's a slippery slope, isn't it? That Yeah., because you never get out of that loop. You if you agree to go into it. Yeah. You said that you worked at Capitol Hill. I used to go into the City of London and work, and I used to feel this. Tremendous sense of proud pride, you know, I'm working in London, all the skyscrapers, you know, and, and I mean, that soon died, but what sort of pride did you have working at Capitol Hill?
Chris:I absolutely loved working for U. S. Capitol Police. like I said, it was my first entry into federal law enforcement. I really loved working at the Capitol Building. my particular assignment was inside the Capitol Building. What we call C3, capital, capital building, third relief. So I was there, you know, from 3 to 3 p. m. to 11 p. m., was my typical shift. Sometimes I'd work a double and work overnight, especially when we had the Christmas tree out and we wanted to make sure that people weren't stealing the ornaments off the Christmas tree. Or when we had the construction zone, for the inauguration and we want to make sure that nobody was, compromising, you know, the security of that and, planting bombs or, anything else like that. I loved the history of the Capitol, the, for lack of a better term, majesty. Of the building. I liked, especially being young and things like that. being close to power like that and seeing, not necessarily in the room where the decisions are made, but seeing on a, on a daily basis, the decision makers. Um, and you had some serious statesman. You know, Bob Dole, you know, was the, uh, Senate Majority Leader when I was there. He was then also a presidential candidate. you had other senators and members of Congress that, um, you know, were really trying to work to, figure out in a bipartisan way, how to solve many of the country's problems. You know, um, some of it. Worked better than others, right? Um, but I really enjoyed my time there. I learned a lot, both from a history perspective, from a law enforcement perspective, and from a security perspective,
Yoyo:did you ever get anywhere near Clinton?
Chris:So funny story. Um, after his thing was after the state of the union. I was positioned in one location. that gave access to, to the, to above the ceiling where the house chamber was. And I was told to go to move to another position. So I'm dodging through people and I'm cutting through a back hallway and trying to get past this group that's in front of me. and all of a sudden I look up and I realized that I am literally this far away from The back of President Clinton, and I looked around and I looked at the other people there and I went, oh, and make sure to backtracking and get the heck out of there. President Bush, when I was with diplomatic security, 1 of the things we did was, work dignitaries coming to the UN, foreign ministers, et cetera. And so I was a couple of years on. Protective details where I was, the shift leader or the advance agent for, those protective details and, had the, you know, honor of being just inside the U. N. Chamber. Watching, these people deliver their speeches to the United Nations, uh, their addresses to the United Nations, and, also, just having President Bush walk by, again, this far away. it was interesting. And then, of course, Other places that I was, either that the president or the vice president or the secretary of state would come visit, or, in Iraq, we ended up having 24 high level visits in 11 months, including, you know, the king of Spain, came and, the governor general of Australia, governor general of Canada, some prime ministers. that was pretty, Interesting as well
Yoyo:makes you wonder, doesn't it? How many young folk that could be working at Capitol Hill now who will be the future of the next generation of security in the United States?
Chris:Absolutely. One of the things it's not even that are there now, one of the things that I do also is I teach at George Mason University... I've been doing that for about five years. Teaching is one of those things that I always wanted to get into. I had the opportunity. I ran into a friend of mine, in the parking lot where we were working, who I knew was teaching. And I'm like, man, I would really love to get into that someday. I'd love to have coffee with you and find out how you did it. We, had coffee and he's like, well, I'm teaching a class now. I'm going to be traveling in a couple of weeks. Would you be willing to come as the guest lecturer? And I said, I'd love to, but I would love to also appreciate the opportunity to kind of sit through a class or two ahead of time so I can understand the flow and things like that. Dr. Mike Baer, thank you very much for introducing me to teaching as an adjunct faculty member. And, uh, you know, that just worked. at the end of that semester, as he's getting ready for the next one, he said, Hey, I'm going to be traveling a lot the next semester. Um, would you be willing to just co teach this with me and we can split the stipend? Not much of a stipend, but I became a professional adjunct faculty member. At the time we were teaching, law enforcement and Homeland Security and, he did not end up traveling a whole lot because that was that, semester started January of 2020 and we suddenly went from in person. To online synchronous and, had to reconfigure the whole class to make it go. And I was able to help him do that. He's taught that and the theory and politics of terrorism and I was asked to help, to teach that sometimes and sometimes introduction to Homeland Security. For those who do not know, setting up a class is a lot of
Yoyo:work. Why?
Chris:I was given a Um, course description from the course catalog and they have some resources out there. And of course, I had a copy of a syllabus that Mike had used. I had copies of a syllabus that other people who were teaching the class used. But it's really on you to figure out what are the goals of this course. And then how am I going to accomplish those goals. And then what are the resources that the students need to accomplish those goals, and what is the mechanism and flow that I'm going to present the information and so that it can be useful to those students. tell me about the students. What are you discovering about this generation coming through? What is it that maybe excites you and what is it that makes you a little worried? George Mason is interesting because it has a pretty blended population of, People who are coming in, straight out of high school, other people that may have done two years at the local community college, a good percentage of people that are coming in, who have spent time in the military or working and they're older students, right? More, you know, an additional cadre of people that are transfer students from other universities for various reasons. it's always yesterday I spent time, reading through, discussion board posts,, and it was really interesting. I always enjoy doing that because it's fun to see the learning happen. It's fun to see how they react and respond to different things. And then one of the things I asked them to do is draw in what you've learned from class, your own thoughts and personal experience. And at least one outside source. Not all of them do all of that. But, it's always interesting to see the interest sparked. To see them, actively go out and look up more information about something that has grabbed their attention. Yep, there are a couple of students out there that flat out ask ChatGPT to write them the answer. And one of the things that I do in my class is I'm trying to teach them,, appropriate use of AI. If you're going to use AI, A, you got to cite it. Otherwise you get a zero on the assignment. B, Use AI maybe to help you get started and figure out a direction and find some resources. But then make sure that you go through and put some thought into writing it yourself and make sure those resources are not hallucinations.
Yoyo:That's like saying don't drive that new car on your driveway. walk. Uh. And people are just not going to choose to walk, even though they know it's better for them. It's better for their health. and the thing is we're the lucky generation, Chris, really, because we lived without it for a long, long, long time. And we can see the benefits having had the training, the discipline and the hard work and the sweat and tears, we can now see the benefits and people will be leaping straight into that. It's like. But shouldn't we be adopting an attitude of, well, we should be making it easier for the generations that come up behind us. Why should they have to struggle like we did?
Chris:So I don't know that we should be making it easier for them. I think that they are going to struggle in different ways. And by that, I mean, like I said, there is an appropriate use of AI. As a research assistant, research tool, writing tool, you know, you're not quite giving the impact of the statement you're trying to make. You ask Copilot, make this more concise. You know, et cetera. Um, and that quite frankly, in of, of itself, I think is going to be a struggle of the new, of, of this new generation of how do they appropriately use all these tools, kind of like we did. Right? I remember going through my master's degree, so I got a master's from the, what is now the National Intelligence University in Strategic Intelligence. Well done
Yoyo:and
Chris:you know. One of the points there was, Wikipedia is not a primary source.
Yoyo:Really?
Chris:You could not, you, you could not cite Wikipedia in your papers. You know what Wikipedia was great for though?
Yoyo:If I wanted to look up how many husbands Betty Davis had, I'd go to Wikipedia.
Chris:Okay, but, especially being crowdsourced, can you trust that information? No, you can't. What Wikipedia was great for was Getting that answer and then looking down in the bottom to see the reference where somebody had pulled that answer and going to that reference directly, and it's very similar now with AI. Right? If I am writing something that I am using AI to help me research, one of the things I always ask for is, give me the citations. Then I go to check to see if those citations are real. I'm writing a series of articles right now. I'm going to jump real quick sideways here into use of technology. Because, for those that know me, might understand, I'm kind of a geek. So I was looking for ways to streamline a lot of my efforts. And, one of the things I was really interested in was, I've got notepads everywhere, and I never know which notepad I took notes on for which thing. I started thinking about,, can I get a stylus for my iPad, something else like that. What I ended up with was a smart notebook, and a smart pen. So, it's, you know, little pen, kind of, okay, looks like a pen. Has ink and everything, but it's also got a camera in there. And as I take notes in the smart notebook, which has a, whoops, don't look at all my notes, sorry, which has, you can't even see it. A micro grid, by the way, for those of you who hadn't noticed, this is actually a photo of my actual office. But as it does that, it then pops up in the app. So then I can take those handwritten notes, convert them into typed text, I can send them to myself and utilize Copilot to say, write me this section of the article incorporating these notes. Now, recently I put out four different articles, a series of four articles on, um, the intersection of mid market companies and U. S. critical infrastructure and security support that's available for them. And what I've done for each of the four of those is I've, you know, taken some notes during research. I've interviewed some people, taking notes from those, things like that, right? And then dropped into a large language model and say, Write me this section on, you know, this paper using these notes. Um, what I've found is that It has a lot of repetition. It has a lot of, you know, stuff that isn't quite phrased how I need it phrased, things like that, right? But it's much easier to go through and edit that than it is to write it all from scratch. I think that is going to be one of the key things for this next generation, is what are the tools that are going to empower them to work smarter, work harder, work faster, but also what are the things they're going to have to keep in mind to work effectively and work efficiently. Soapbox. Bam.
Yoyo:You wrote an article about it, but what were the key discoveries around how mid market companies fit into critical national infrastructure? Because my understanding is that they are, um, they form a key pillar that sustains and advances critical infrastructure. So why are they a key pillar?
Chris:So, you know, when you think about critical infrastructure. You know, you think exactly as you're saying about pillars, and we think about pillars that hold up the United States, you know, you kind of have this mental bias that well this must be the ones that are too big to fail. These must be the ones that are, you know, your fortune 100 companies, um, your, massive institutions, right? Because without them, that's, that's critical to the operation of the United States. But the truth is, critical infrastructure is defined in 16 different categories. And small businesses and mid market companies make up the majority of the economy. In most of those 16 pillars or categories. And it's been really interesting to explore that. Because mid market companies are defined pretty broadly. So, uh, a couple of the things that I found, basically categorize them as 10 million to 1 billion. That's a pretty wide swath. Right. I'd love to have a 10 million company. And someday with your help, maybe I will, but,, 10 million to 1 billion is a pretty wide, you know, pretty wide margin, but the bottom line is, I'm trying to remember, I actually put it in my first article, the percentage of the U. S. economy that falls in, into that, uh, range, um, You know, and I can look it up again in a minute, but I want to say it was somewhere in the neighborhood of like 60 percent of the U. S. Economy falls into that range. And when you take that aggregate together, you can really see where, that comes together to, form that pillar of critical infrastructure and. It may well be especially when you look at things like critical manufacturing or energy, that, that small to mid sized mid market company, if they are producing something that nobody else produces or very few other people produce, Or companies produce, then if they are suddenly taken offline through a ransomware attack, through a physical attack against their facilities, through a supply chain disruption, through a natural disaster, that can have a serious impact on a lot of other things. That's where, my experience in continuity management also gives me a different kind of insight to this as well. several years ago, I, I got into emergency management, throughout my career with Demag security and somebody clued me in and said, Hey, if you can do what you're doing for emergency management in the government as continuity management in the private sector, you know, it would be really worthwhile. So I went through and I became a master continuity practitioner certified by FEMA. And. Learning the continuity aspects of things and learning, you know, what are the critical dependencies that things work on, not just what are your essential services that you're trying to provide, but what are the critical dependencies that all of those rely on. And then when you apply that to this context of mid market, critical infrastructure, and you look at those critical dependencies, it really comes full circle.
Yoyo:Christopher. you've got a masterclass coming out. I want you to tell us how you are bringing the gospel of Presilience to the United States through training, consulting, and coaching.
Chris:The master class is actually being, run by, Gav Schneider, but we've got a great partnership with, uh, Rochester Institute of Technology, their, RIT certified program, headed by Dr. Jen Schneider, no relation to Gav Schneider, funny how that works though, um that is going to be, in the U. S. on, I believe, March 19th, and it's a three hour masterclass. You can find it through my profile on LinkedIn, Gav's profile on LinkedIn, Institute of Resilience. We have actually worked to gather a number of co sponsors of this, different organizations that believe in the concept of resilience, that are lending their branding to us. And helping, to get the word out of this masterclass. If anybody is interested, please, you can reach out, you know, directly to me. I'm happy to send you the registration information. But,, as I said before, um, you know, I really like the concept of resilience. I really like the focus on the human side of resilience. I like the idea of Incorporating some risk intelligence by which we don't mean, reading the risk intelligence papers. We mean like emotional intelligence. How do you deal with risk? How does your organization deal with risk? How does your team deal with risk? How much? maturity do you have in how you handle risk and can you find the dynamic risk, equilibrium to balance so that you can shift and reposition what you're doing, in order to, really, be ready for the potential disruptions so that you can not only have the resilience to get through them and get back to business as usual, but really have that ability to seek out. And latch on to the opportunities that are in there to springboard yourself ahead. the focus on critical thinking, as I mentioned earlier, and having that balance between people and process, to really make it all go.
Yoyo:I wish they taught critical thinking in schools, you know. I really do.
Chris:It is funny. I've been talking to somebody recently. Sol Vega about misinformation, disinformation. We're looking at the possibility of putting together a pro proposal to speak at a conference. there's a lot of information out there on misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, and it. how it really affects society. There are some great tools out there to help you navigate it. One is called the News Literacy Project that actually helps you understand regular media, social media, videos, TV, etc. Are they trying to inform me or influence me? Are they coming with this bias or that bias? It's got some really great little quizzes that you can take to see how good you are at spotting misinformation, disinformation, malinformation. There's other ones out there as well. The Adventist news bias media chart, I think is really useful for media bias chart. is really useful to understand what you're consuming and kind of, are they fact based or opinion based? Are they left or right? You know, so that you can make better choices about the information that you're consuming.
Yoyo:I heard this phrase the other day around misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, and, there's no doubt about it. I think I get frustrated that there are so many people that think they're an expert. We know that there are some unhealthy minds out there, but there is this phrase, it is very relevant to the times that we live in, pertains specifically to the media, lie to the public enough, and they won't trust you enough to tell them the sun is rising.
Chris:No, very, very, very true. it's amazing to see what's going on right now. and things like, when people have like a very brief amount of time to say something like a tweet or an X or whatever that is now, and, now you have more than 140 characters, but you're truncating your message so much that the nuance is lost. People use that to their advantage to put out a cherry picked. Fact or idea that does not represent the totality of what they are talking about and presented as this is truth when actually the opposite is truth.
Yoyo:It's like they've completely reversed Occam's razor for those that don't know Occam's razor. It's where you rule out everything it can't be because it can only be what the obvious solution is yeah, and that's it's a very realistic thing, especially in policing and investigations and things like that But what seems to be happening is we just ignore what it's highly likely to be and we're just going to consider all of the other reasons
Chris:A lot of,, television media, especially the 24 hour news channels that have slid away from news and into opinion that they need ratings to survive. It's a money game. there was something I was reading, you know, a couple of years ago that, not to pick on any particular organization, but there was an organization out there that wasn't just looking at the Nielsen ratings of the show or of the night. Right. Or of the hour they were looking at the Nielsen ratings minute to minute. So they could determine which thing they said or article they covered or slant. They gave drew in the most people. In an effort to make it more outrageous in the next minute, in the next segment, in order to bring more market share.
Yoyo:They've realized that in the same context, to your point exactly, that anger releases the same or more intensity if endorphins in the brain. Therefore that's why people, feel like almost addicted to this kind of, clickbait lifestyle, outrageous,, never seen before.
Chris:Clickbait headlines that show up in my newsfeed that have no real relationship to the content of the story drives me crazy.
Yoyo:I don't look at them now. I think you go through a few too many. It's a bit like when you buy something off Instagram seller or you buy something off a Facebook seller, you get stung and so you don't do it again. And then ultimately,
Chris:Yeah, there's a reason why scrolling through your news feed, your Facebook feed, your other social media feeds is referred to as doom scrolling.
Yoyo:Right, because you're going to spend money.
Chris:Well, not just that, but you're also going to, get in this cycle, especially you click on something, the algorithm thinks that's what you're interested in. It's going to give you more of that. It's going to put you in an echo chamber that it thinks that you want to be in. It reshapes your worldview.
Yoyo:I don't know if you've noticed, but we do have somebody joining us in this podcast. I saw
Chris:that. I'm a little surprised my hunter didn't show up and claw at my door long enough for me to be forced to let him in.
Yoyo:He wants feeding. So one last question.
Chris:Yes,
Yoyo:you do an awful lot of amazing work volunteering, and I know that you are, what I would call a Go-Giver. Why is voluntary work so important to have alongside your normal, paid work? What does it do for you?
Chris:So, part of my ethos is explore, collaborate, teach, so explore, new concepts, new ideas. New information, collaborate, find communities of purpose around those things in order to, broaden my own, information to help other people broaden theirs, and then teach, those that want to learn. I think that that really kind of drives me. Then the other part of it is another part of my ethos is my goal is to help people unlock and achieve. It's funny. I was talking about this with Lee Otten a little earlier today and I'm going through a process right now, again, of, some self coaching and using a book, Rhett Powers, Entrepreneur's Book of Daily Actions. it's a great process, but one of the things that it started off with was, rediscovering what it is I want to do and what it is I want to accomplish and what impact I want to have on the world. I'm using PowerPoint as a sketchpad and At the center of it, inside the circle, is helping people unlock and achieve. And then the box that goes around that is the coaching, the consulting, the mentoring, the training, right? Then across the top is an arc that is collaboration. It's helping people find their vision, helping people, go where they want to go and things like that. But when I look at the finished diagram, it looks like a rotary dial telephone. And that wasn't purposeful. But when I look at it, that's my call, my calling. Right. And through that process, one of the things I did was I changed, the purpose of my company crisis lead. It's now helping you or helping people in organizations navigate risk and prepare for what's next. And I do this through coaching, consulting, training and more. that comes back to, again, why it's important to me to do some of this. pro bono work, some of this volunteer work, to, again, I guess, help as many people as I can.
Yoyo:Good luck with the masterclass. It's certainly a great alignment. Again, Gav's
Chris:masterclass, not mine. I'm just helping with the coordination and advertising.
Yoyo:you've aligned yourself to a very respectable professional in our community. Thank you for your service and for that service that you continue to provide now as a dedicated volunteer, certainly for ASIS and all of your other projects. Christopher Stitt, thank you so much for joining us on the Security Circle Podcast.
Chris:Thank you so much, Yolanda. It's been truly a pleasure having the conversation with you and, again, I hope that it helps and reaches people
Yoyo:it sure does.
Chris:Excellent. I look forward to our next talk, either, you know, this or just, you know, this. Individually.
Yoyo:Hell yes!