The Human Behavior Podcast
Do you ever wonder why people act the way that they do? Join human behavior experts Brian Marren and Greg Williams as they discuss all things human behavior related. Their goal is to increase your Advanced Critical Thinking ability through a better understanding of HBPR&A (Human Behavior Pattern Recognition & Analysis.) What is HBPR&A? It's a scientific (and fun) way to understand and articulate human behavior cues so that you can predict likely outcomes and it works regardless of your race, religion, political ideology or culture!
The Human Behavior Podcast
Recognition Primed Decision Making: Dr. Gary Klein
Gary Klein, renowned cognitive psychologist and pioneer of the Recognition-Primed Decision Model, takes us deep into the minds of experts operating under the most demanding conditions. Drawing from decades studying firefighters, law enforcement officers, and military personnel, Klein reveals the surprising truth about expertise - it's not about comparing options or following procedures, but rather recognizing patterns developed through years of experience.
What makes this conversation exceptional is Klein's ability to demystify the seemingly magical "gut instincts" of experts. He explains how professionals don't simply follow intuition blindly but engage in rapid mental simulations to test their responses before acting. This blend of pattern recognition and analysis enables split-second decisions in life-or-death situations where traditional analytical methods would take far too long.
Klein's insights challenge conventional thinking about bias and expertise. While academia often emphasizes the flaws in intuitive thinking, Klein's research demonstrates how heuristics and expertise-driven pattern matching serve as powerful tools in real-world settings. His Shadowbox training method, which allows novices to see through expert eyes, offers a revolutionary approach to accelerating expertise development.
The conversation explores fascinating concepts like tacit knowledge (expertise that can't be easily articulated), the importance of curiosity in developing expertise, and why voluntary compliance techniques are crucial for law enforcement. Klein also discusses his ongoing work on developing more effective training methods and his continued fascination with the phenomenon of insight.
For anyone who makes decisions under pressure, works in high-stakes environments, or simply wants to understand how expertise truly functions, this episode provides invaluable wisdom from one of the field's most influential thinkers. Listen, share with colleagues, and discover how training your cognitive skills might be more important than any checklist or procedure.
More information about Gary Klein:
https://www.shadowboxtraining.com/courses/masterclass-in-practical-decision-making/
https://www.shadowboxtraining.com/courses/the-cognitive-dimension/
Naturalistic Decision Making
https://naturalisticdecisionmaking.org/
Website: https://thehumanbehaviorpodcast.buzzsprout.com/share
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Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ArcadiaCognerati
More about Greg and Brian: https://arcadiacognerati.com/arcadia-cognerati-leadership-team/
Hello everyone and welcome to the Human Behavior Podcast. In today's episode, greg and I have the distinct pleasure of sitting down with Dr Gary Klein, one of the most influential figures in the world of decision-making research. Dr Klein pioneered the Recognition Prime Decision Model, or RPD, a groundbreaking approach to understanding how experienced professionals, from firefighters to law enforcement and military leaders, make critical decisions under extreme stress and uncertainty. In this conversation, we unpack how intuitive expertise truly works, how high-stakes decisions are shaped by deep pattern recognition and why training your cognitive skills might be more important than mastering any checklist. We'll explore Dr Klein's insights on why real-world experience matters, the practical ways you can train your mind to think like an expert, and how to recognize and navigate complex situations faster and more effectively.
Speaker 1:Whether you're in a profession that operates in uncertain and chaotic environments or you're simply fascinated by how humans perform under pressure, this conversation is something powerful for you. Thank you so much for tuning in. We hope you enjoyed the episode. Don't forget to check out our Patreon channel for additional content and subscriber-only episodes. If you enjoyed the podcast, please consider leaving us a review and, more importantly, sharing it with a friend. Thank you for your time and remember training changes behavior. Dr Gary Klein, thank you so much for joining us here on the Human Behavior Podcast. We're excited to talk to you. We've got some mutual friends and mutual people we've worked with before in the past, so I just want to start by saying thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 1:Thank you for inviting me, I appreciate it, yeah, so we're going to jump right into it. For those of our listeners who you know, I gave a little intro on Dr Klein, but he's got a huge body of work and kind of really kind of came up a while ago in terms of a greater kind of area of study of naturalistic decision-making, and then you kind of develop this what you call the recognition prime decision, and you've been studying subject matter experts. You've been studying intuitive decision-making your whole career and you kind of started with this RPD model and I know some of our listeners are definitely familiar with it. But for those who aren't, could you give us just a background on what it is, how you came about it and kind of what this came from?
Speaker 2:how you came about it and kind of what this came from. Okay, so this all started in the mid-1980s, 1985. And we got a contract from the Army to try to understand how people can make tough decisions under time pressure and uncertainty. And it was a competitive contract and I imagine most of the people who were sending in proposals said time pressure, uncertainty, we'll just take a laboratory task, we'll vary the time pressure, we'll vary the uncertainty and see what the relationship is. But we didn't want to do that because it seemed like an important question and to run a standard laboratory task with college sophomores seemed fraught, seemed questionable, and we said we don't know how people can make tough decisions under those circumstances. Let's study some people who do it and see what we can learn from them.
Speaker 2:And we decided to study firefighters. We had other possible groups we could examine but we picked firefighters. We figured they're a helpful community and when they're not fighting fires we can talk to them back in the fire station, in the firehouse and they'll have time for us and they were a great population to work with. I still have a number of good friends who are firefighters. So we didn't think under time pressure that you could generate a large set of options and evaluate them on a standard set of dimensions. We didn't think there was time for that. I mean, the fire is growing exponentially. So we thought that maybe they only looked at two options one and they compared one to the other. One was sort of a favorite, the other was a contrast. And that's how they made their decision.
Speaker 2:And I'll never forget the first time, the first firefighter I talked to before we even started collecting actual data this was just background. And I said I'm here to study how you make tough decisions under time pressure and uncertainty. And he looked at me with a certain amount of contempt I get a lot of those kinds of looks in the work that I do, with a certain amount of contempt. I get a lot of those kinds of looks in the work that I do. And he said you know, I've been a firefighter for 16 years, I've been a captain for 12 of those years and all that time I don't think I've ever made a single decision.
Speaker 2:That's interesting that's interesting real back in my chair, because we had just gotten, we had won the contract, we got it awarded, we had six months to to try to figure it out and here, right off the bat, he's telling me he doesn't make decisions. And I thought this is going to be a total failure. So I said oh, you don't. And he said I said what do you do? And he said it's just procedures, you just follow the procedures. Oh, not good, not good. I said before I leave, can I see the procedure manual? I figured maybe there's something in the manual I could learn from. And he said he looked at me with contempt again, I get a lot of that. And he said, oh, it's not written down, you just know. And I thought well, maybe there's something else going on here, something else is happening that I need to investigate. And so we interviewed several dozen firefighters and we heard the same thing that they never, when they talk about making decisions. They thought what we meant was comparing one option to others to see which was the best, and they never did that. But instead what happened is they had expertise over five, six, 10, 12 years, sometimes 20 years. They just built up a whole set of patterns of how things look, and the patterns were telling them. And the patterns were telling them. Here are the important cues to notice, to pay attention to. Here's what you can expect, and if the expectancy is violated, that means maybe you're misidentifying the situation, you got the wrong pattern. Here's the kind of goals you can expect to accomplish and here are the kinds of actions that should work for you. And so, within a short period of time seconds because of this pattern matching, they already had an idea of what to do. That's what their expertise was buying them. However, that led to another mystery how do you evaluate a single option? Because the only way we knew of to evaluate options is to compare two or more, to see which comes out on top. And if you only have one option, how do you do that? You can't do that.
Speaker 2:So we looked through all the interview notes. We had to see what they were telling us. What they were telling us was they evaluated the option by imagining it, by running it through their mind. We call that mental simulation. They played it through and if it worked, then they could carry out the option. If it almost worked, but there was some flaws, some glitches, they could modify the option so that it could do a good job. And if they couldn't figure out a way to overcome the problems, then they said forget that option. What else do I have? What else is the pattern match telling me is a possibility here, like they had a repertoire and they were just going down the repertoire until they found one that would work. So that explained why they never compared options, because they just wanted the first one that would work. They weren't trying to come up with the best, because in their situation who knew what was the best and who cared? They wanted to get the job done.
Speaker 2:And how do you evaluate an option? You imagine it, and this imagining is done deliberately. The pattern matching is sort of unconscious. The pattern just pops in their mind because of their experience. This mental simulation, imagining part is done consciously and deliberately. So this isn't just going with your gut, going with your intuition. It's a blend of your intuition giving you the pattern and an analysis. But the analysis is not setting up a matrix. The analysis is doing the imagining part. And then there's a third part of trying to sort out what's going on in a complicated situation where you don't have any obvious patterns, where you're trying to build a story of what's going on, and that's also done consciously and deliberately, and it's a story building activity to come up with a plausible explanation for what you're seeing in front of you. So we call that a recognition primed decision, because it's primed by your pattern, matching by your recognition. But it's not just intuition, it's not just going with your gut how this?
Speaker 1:and that was sort of my first sort of comment on their follow-up question, I guess. So you know what you're doing with these folks. Obviously I've. I've seen that before. Someone's like what are you talking about? I just I don't make decisions, I just do what I'm trained to do and it's like, well, no, there's a whole bunch of stuff going on unconsciously that you're unaware of. So is what you're what you had to do with that? You know, kind of at the beginning, there is, take some of that unconscious, tacit knowledge and then map that out in a meaningful way to give it a process for them. Is that kind of what, what the? What you came up with then?
Speaker 2:well, what we came up with was was a model, a recognition prime decision model. But then we were stuck because what do you do with the model? If I were to train you, I'm not going to waste your time by saying here's a model, follow this model, because the model simply describes what you do. And I can try to do cognitive interviewing and these were all in-depth cognitive interviewing to identify what you were noticing, and all of that but every situation is different, so that's not going to help. So for a long time we didn't know where to go with this, how to follow it up. And then, in 2010, I was at a conference in New York City and I met a guy named Neil Hines who was with the New York Fire Department. He was a battalion chief and he had just finished doing a study for a mattress project on how to train people to handle unexpected, one-off, challenging situations in the aftermath of 9-11. And so Neil and I collaborated and I really liked his method and developed something we call a shadowbox method for training people. And the shadowbox method is not to teach people. Here's a model of decision-making or here's cues that you might attend to. Instead, I come up with, following Neil's lead a bunch of scenarios, tough cases, and I can present the scenarios to you in person. I can present it in a booklet. We have online versions so we can do the training online.
Speaker 2:And you run through the scenario and then we stop the action and we say at this point Brian, here's four different options of things you can do Rank, order them, which are you the most likely to do to the least and write down your reason. And then we continue the scenario and then we'll stop it again. And this time we might ask you here's three goals you might pursue at this point in the situation Rank, order them and write down your reasons why you rank, ordered and rank them that way. And then we continue, and then we might stop it a third time or a fourth. We could ask you here's five different pieces of information you could pursue, rank whatever, you write down your ranking and you write down your reason. But we've had a small group of people who have more expertise, people who are highly respected we might call them experts, but that's sometimes a loaded term Through the same scenario you have, and Well, through the same scenario you have, and they've done the same ranking you did and they've written down their reasons.
Speaker 2:So when you come to the first decision point and you rank them and write down your reason, then we show you here's what these subject matter experts, how they ranked them, and you really want your ranking to match theirs, but more I mean, that's the game part of it. You want to align with them to the extent you can, but the real learning comes in looking at their rationale. Here's what they were noticing. Here are the inferences they were drawing. Here are the things that worried them. Here's what they liked about each option. Here's what they were noticing. Here are the inferences they were drawing. Here are the things that worried them. Here's what they liked about each option. Here's what they didn't. And now you're seeing the world through the eyes of experts. But the experts aren't there because experts are bottleneck in training. Now the experts have already made their input and everybody else can benefit their input and everybody else can benefit. And so we will have maybe, say, three experts and we'll just synthesize their ranking and show you how they came out.
Speaker 1:So that's. I hope that, especially for our law enforcement listeners who are trainers, just go back and just listen to the last five or six minutes on how you set up a training scenario, because I think you could pull a lot away from that. There's a lot of issues we see with training. Where it's really well-intentioned, you've got experts that know what they're doing. But when it comes to setting up things like that with decision-making involved, everyone's sort of looking for this binary. It's like in law enforcement, is it a shoot or don't shoot? It's like, well, that's not how the world is, right that this you can't.
Speaker 1:If it was that simple, we wouldn't be talking, we wouldn't be having this conversation, right, we wouldn't need to go into the detail about that. And part of you know what I like and was interested in one. You said right off the bat, with everything with with that, it to the streets, right, you got to take to the streets, see what people are doing and see and unpack how they do that. But one of the things is like there's this sort of pattern recognition versus pattern creation almost right. So if recognition prime decision making emphasizes like how these experts match a situation to a known pattern or prototype in their minds. You know, the problem is, like you said, like in these complex environments, maybe new patterns can appear or or new novel threats or something. And if I don't have as much of that experience right to draw on, like what? What sort sort of can I do? Or does that same sort of process still work for me versus?
Speaker 1:You know, I got Greg here. Who's the expert? Greg can walk in and go. It's Colonel Mustard in the study with the pipe wrench, you know. But I'm sitting here going like you know, something doesn't seem right. You know, why is there a pipe wrench there and why that guy seems important. What's he's he doing? I haven't put it together yet, but there's still some sort of recognition that there's incongruence in the situation or there's some pattern here. I just can't put my finger on it yet. Does that work? You see? Does that work? From how do I go? From that subject matter expert doing that and taking what they know and unpack it so that I can, the new guy walking in, taking?
Speaker 2:what they know and unpack it so that I can the new guy walking in. Okay, so when we prepare people like Greg to provide inputs as subject matter experts, we don't just want to come up with Colonel Mustard in the study with the pipe wrench. We want to probe Greg and his comments and provide that material. What are you noticing? What is it about Colonel Mustard? What was it about the pipe wrench and where it was located? So we are trying to extract the expertise that Greg has and make it more visible for the trainee.
Speaker 2:So what we're trying to do we call our method a shadow box method. What we're trying to do is have the trainee shadow the experts and learn from them and build an experience base. So we're not trying to teach you what's the right answer. We're trying to give you an opportunity to build a stronger mental model as you go from one scenario to the other, to the next one. All of a sudden we think and what we find? After a half hour, people are matching the experts, usually about 25% more accurately than they were at the beginning. And just that, what did I say? A half day of training. We see that kind of an impact and we've demonstrated this in a number of areas and it's very exciting to us.
Speaker 3:Well, let me go back.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was going to say Greg, I want to go ahead and let you jump in here.
Speaker 3:No, no, it's fine, I want to give some historical perspective and first of all, feel free to to say, greg, I want to go ahead and let you jump in here. No, no, it's fine, I want to give some historical perspective and first of all, feel free to keep talking about Greg. There's nothing better than hearing that repeated over and over during the podcast. I love it. Look. So in the 80s I was training law enforcement in the Detroit metropolitan area Wayne Oakland, macomb Police Academies, and I have read absolutely everything that Gary's written. I wrote to people like Carol Ross and said tell me more.
Speaker 3:You know, marty Seligman, the thing was that there wasn't anything written on psychology, sociology and physiology for law enforcement that was outside of how to kill somebody, how to shoot, how to maim, how to use you know, use less than lethal force, and those things were very definitive because they had to fit the law. So there was already an architecture that they had to make sure that their decision metric and matrix fit into, and so I said there's got to be something outside of that. So you know, looking at Bernoulli and Kahneman and Pascal and Bayes and thinking about the Pareto optimality and the game theory and all those other things. When I would go into the leadership of the police agency and the prosecutor's office and start talking about that, they'd laugh right in my face. They'd go we have no idea what you're talking about and that's too big and cops will never need to know any of that stuff. And I knew there was something hidden there. And I knew that when I was reading about the recognition, prime decision making.
Speaker 3:The one link that screamed out to me from a lot of the work that you were doing at the time was heuristics. There's heuristic template matches and heuristic prototype matches. And when you talk about expert thinking, those people can assimilate much more quickly in an environment. Hey, when these things coalesce, when these patterns repeat, something is up. And that's all I tried to do at the very beginning is get them to see that. And I feel that you probably I don't want to presuppose I think that maybe in academia you had a little bit easier time convincing people than I did in police work, because nobody was listening at that time. It was a vast wasteland Over.
Speaker 2:Just the reverse, greg, I have a much easier time convincing practitioners, people who are out on the street, than the academics. The academics that I've encountered are fairly well captured by the notion of biases and captured by the notion of decision analysis and are surprisingly contemptuous of experts and of expertise. And they think experts are just as biased as the rest of the people and they don't have much patience for it, because how do they do their studies? They do their studies with college sophomores and they don't develop much expertise. I once gave a presentation to a mixed audience where a lot of academics and I said and the basis of the recognition, prime decision model is expertise. That's what the people have developed, that's what they're using to do the pattern matching so effectively.
Speaker 2:And one guy raises his hand and said I do laboratory studies. I really disagree with you. I do laboratory studies and I give my subjects lots of experience. And I said how much? And he said we give them I'll give them 10 hours of training before we start collecting. And I'm thinking 10 hours, 20 years, right? I don't even know what the difference is here, plus the fact that the laboratory studies are all done in controlled environments with minimal context, minimal ambiguity, don't get me started.
Speaker 3:Oh, no, no.
Speaker 2:I'd love to get me started.
Speaker 3:Oh, no, no, I'd love to get you started based on the fact that I think look on the shoulders of giants. If it wasn't for your work, there was no way for my work to proliferate. Because when I went in and talked to Jim Mattis, the call sign for Jim Mattis was chaos, actual, and chaos came from how we were thinking at the time. We didn't fully understand the war that we were involved in. We didn't fully understand how the culture was context in Iraq. We didn't understand that it was a different playing field in Afghanistan, even though there were both insurgent-based terrorist activities that were going on. And so what happened is they were trying to draw expertise from Vietnam or draw expertise from Korea, and you know what Round peg square hole.
Speaker 3:It wasn't fitting and there was a lot of body bags getting filled. So, had it not been for and it wasn't me, it was people like me in a lot of different places, pushing your work up in front and saying, hey look, these guys are onto something. And that's why, like Office of Naval Research, people like Joan Johnson, that's why people like Leah DiBello, those type of people when those leaders that were so single-minded to purpose and had the blinders on when they started reading those studies and reading the work that you were doing. That, I think, was Saul on the road to Damascus, scales falling from the eyes when they said we have to embrace a different way.
Speaker 2:Right, thank you, thank you. So I think we're in agreement here that the operational community was hungry for a better way. Yes, yeah, absolutely. They were open, whereas the academic community doesn't really care about a better way because they're not trying to accomplish anything that really is going to make a significant difference out on the streets.
Speaker 3:Yep, yep. And just briefly, brian. I think the fire department look the angle is. Fires are highly complex, rapidly evolving situations where no two are the same, but the methodology and the tools and the mannerisms of police agencies are very similar worldwide, and that's why, when you take a look at police work and military, it's the same thing. There's a very regimented system, there's rank structures, there's rules that go along with things, and then, when it comes down to it, it's physics and math. Sorry about that, brian.
Speaker 3:I wanted to make sure that the people listening to us right now that are trainers, understand that when it comes down to it, at the end of the day, this is science.
Speaker 1:And that's why it works every time and you did bring it up, gary, about especially in academia and people talking about the different cognitive traps you can fall into confirmation bias and recency bias and all that and how it can disrupt sense making, can disrupt recognition, and it can. But but I, what you know, this is no different than I got my, my brother. Now he's a project manager, big construction company that does commercial construction and you know big dollar stuff. You know all the latest software and tech that they have and all the experience and all this and they'll plan something out. And then it's one guy walks up who's been pouring concrete for 25 years and goes, yeah, it ain't going to work. And they're like what he's like that's not going to work. And let me tell you why. And so all of that planning and stuff they try to do beforehand, this one guy walked up and said I know that's not going to work, and here's why I know that's not going to work and here's why I saw that. You know, back in 1989, someone tried doing that and this is what happened to the bill. You know they can draw on that.
Speaker 1:So those biases are, can be incredibly powerful, incredibly good. But you know what have you found when it comes to sort of the practitioner versus the academia side of it and how? You know what, what's the relevance and how effective are these cognition biases? Like, how much do they really affect decision-making at that matter?
Speaker 1:Cause remember this is and for people listening like we're talking about complex, potentially volatile, deadly situations with the, with the, with the temporal element, there's a time element in there which increases the level of stress, increases the level of complexity and it kind of narrows the bandwidth of the potential possibilities in a sense, but it really forces that decision that has to happen right now. So you don't have the time and the luxury of doing the construction planning right. You're just boom, the 911 call comes in. Here's what you got. You're going on a little information. So do those really affect us as much you think when you're in those elements, when you're going on a little information? So do those really affect us as much you think when you're in those elements, when you're in your area of expertise? Do these biases really play as big of a role that people think that they do?
Speaker 2:Okay. So I know in many communities, especially academic ones, there is a high degree of risk aversion that you don't want people to take actions that might be incorrect. So people are worried about using your intuition, using the patterns you have, you might get it wrong. However, in these situations, with the confusion, the ambiguity, the complexity and the time pressure, you don't have time to set up a decision tree. You don't have time to set up a multi-attribute utility analysis. A friend of mine, danny Zakai. Many years ago, zakai and Willer said how long does it take to set up one of these decision analyses? And they found it takes about 30 minutes to set up one of these kinds of matrices. Well, out on the street, if you're a firefighter, a police officer, a military leader, you don't have 30 minutes. So let's not pretend otherwise.
Speaker 2:So should we be worried about decision biases? Many people are, and I say for the most part, this is the dominant view that we should worry. I don't want to mislead your listeners. I happen to think that it's overblown and not something to worry about, because what they call biases are essentially heuristics. Because what they call biases are essentially heuristics and heuristics are rules of thumb that are generally right but not always right, and so they're not perfect. But that's why what we learned with the recognition prime decision model if you call it wrong at the beginning, you still have this mental simulation, this imagining part to be like the guy in construction who comes in and says this doesn't feel right. I have some worries about it, based on what I saw in the 1990s. So you're not simply going with your gut, you're starting with your gut instinct, because it's of tremendous value.
Speaker 2:I have made this offer to decision researchers who think that emotion and biases are a problem. We know the part of the brain where the emotions affect the decision-making brain, where the emotions affect the decision-making. We know it because of the work of Damasio where he studied people with brain lesions, and I think it's the ventromedial frontal cortex. I may have that garbled, I probably but he knows. And then it is written down. It's knowable because people who have a lesion in this area it's not very often, very infrequent but very rare condition If they have a lesion all of a sudden their decision-making is disconnected from their emotions.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:This would be nirvana. This is perfect. Yeah, purely rational decisions, unaffected by your emotions. Now you're Mr Spock and you're cruising, but Damasio found these people. Even though their IQ wasn't affected, their lives were destroyed because it took them forever to reason out what to do, what restaurant to go to. I mean, everything had to be reasoned out because they had no emotional basis for helping them along. So I've offered people in the community I said I'll pay for it myself. If you're worried about your emotions and biases clouding your decision making, your emotions and biases clouding your decision-making, we can artificially lesion this area in your brain using lasers, converging beams, and just burn out this area and you'll be perfectly rational. And you know something no one has ever taken up my offer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it sounds like you wouldn't be able to get through your day if that were the case.
Speaker 3:It's similar to the old Phineas Gage studies. It's not unlike that. See, here's a conundrum. So you've got police trainers, law enforcement trainers, courts, corrections, that are trying to do the right thing, and they still default to the lowest common denominator, which is force. Default to the lowest common denominator, which is force.
Speaker 3:When I'm faced with a decision, I'm not sure of all of the principles that are going into it. What I'm going to do is escalate force, raise my voice and use commands, and so I have to be the voice of reason on the ground. It's my decision, my way or the highway, and you know, sometimes that paints us into a corner. So what Brian and I teach? What we do at Arcadia, what I've been doing my entire career, is called the gift of time and distance, because we make much better decisions.
Speaker 3:You know when we're behind cover and we're observing and we're testing our feedback loops as we're solving problems, and what happens sometimes is we get into a trap at the police academy that, look, you've got the badge, you understand the law, you have to go in there and fix things. We've even given you red lights and a siren to get there more quickly. But what happens then is I have to make tough choices with less time and less information, and that's when heuristics can be horribly wrong. And that's when heuristics can be horribly wrong and that's when you know the cell phone in the pocket turns into a gun and when my default is to increase force to gain compliance. Then that can again get me into a legal or an ethical or a moral quandary.
Speaker 3:So what I'm hoping is that, with all the work that Brian and I have been doing, with all the work that's out there now, with the incredible work that you've been doing I think you just got back from, like Australia or New Zealand where you were teaching down there. So your stuff is global, our stuff is international. What I'm hoping is that the group of people responsible for training up-and-coming law enforcement will embrace the idea that we have to lower the cognitive load, we have to increase the ability of perception and pattern match, and if we don't do that, then we're going to keep. It's going to be inevitable that we keep running into the things that we see on the news all the time, with cops getting into the trick bag Over.
Speaker 2:Okay, but there's another approach is to build the repertoire of the police officers, and this is something that my colleague, john Schmidt.
Speaker 2:My friend and colleague John Schmidt and I have been working on.
Speaker 2:We were involved in a program from DARPA, defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and it was called the Good Stranger Project and it started during the time of American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan and the realization that you have all these soldiers who are highly efficient at fighting an adversary, at conducting warfare, but not all that good at interacting with civilians, and their approach to getting compliance was force, intimidation and that was making enemies and that was making things worse and that was making things worse. So our part of the project was to interview people we had identified as good strangers, people who could gain compliance voluntarily and learn from them and see what their tricks were. And we heard amazing ideas and the kinds of repertoire they had were just really staggering and it's captured in some places in police circles. There's a book, verbal Judo and things like that, but these guys were going beyond verbal judo. So I think what we had and John and I put together a workshop on training voluntary compliance so that police officers have other techniques than other than simply trying to gain compliance through intimidation.
Speaker 3:Right, right. And you see, the problem is that good ideas like that don't immediately get embraced because of the historical perspective of law enforcement. And when you give an aluminum flashlight and extra magazines and a bullet-resistant vest, then there's this warrior mentality that sneaks in and we forget that we work for the people, that the laws are to help the people. And so I'm in absolute violent agreement. Violent, there we go with your commentary.
Speaker 3:But the problem is like to get certified in Michigan, michigan Law Enforcement Officer Training Council. They didn't have the book Verbal Judo. But to get my credentials accepted in Colorado I had to go through Colorado Police Officer Standards and Training and they made you read Verbal Judo. But you know what? There's no part of the academy where they do that. And when we look at AI and VR and we look at interacting with a computer screen, it's more about the hey, the guy's got a gun. Hey, how fast did you shoot and how accurately. And I think that cognition plays a huge role in that pattern recognition and analysis and extremis. And if we focus more there, we would see that we would get a better quality officer on the street that would want to remain longer and is closer to the community.
Speaker 2:Right, and where does the expertise come in into the environment? I mean, you can look at the last inch shoot, no shoot. But you can dial back a minute or two, even just a minute or two earlier about what's happening. What do I see? What's the context? And you find that people who are the good strangers, who are the ones who are ready to manage situations they don't want to put themselves in danger, certainly, but they're putting up signs that this may not be as threatening an environment or there may be ways of diffusing this environment other than shooting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. Because then you're forcing that this is training that. Because now we've sort of gone from like all right, we know what the science is, we've done the analysis, we've talked to these people, here's what it is. Now putting that into a training program is another sort of hurdle on its own. It's another process on its own and in some ways it's more complex than people realize, but in other ways it's actually a lot simpler. It's you just described all right, stop, what are you seeing what? What do you? What would you likely do next and tell me why? And then now I'm working in building those file folders, building those mental models to go.
Speaker 1:I can correct back there and, just like you had said, we try to get these folks like well, if it turns into a shooting situation, we we've lost like that's you know, just recognizing and seeing a gun faster. You know, hey, I'm a half a second faster on my pistol. Draw Like, okay, there's an entire world. That happened before. You got that to that decision. And and so I think people almost focus on the wrong part of recognition, where, where it's not recognizing this is a threat or not a threat, it's, it's no. Wind the tape back. And we got to get some understanding right and some comprehension of the context of the scene in order to recognize the potential likely outcomes of what's going to happen.
Speaker 1:Then I have a better sort of intervention strategy and that's been sort of our biggest or the hardest thing to kind of get across to folks, of our biggest or the hardest thing to kind of get across to folks, because we all default to this Well, everyone's got guns. It's like, yeah, I get that we're in the United States, right, there's more guns than people here, but so do you and so does your partner and so do these other people. Like we get hyper-focused because it becomes very primal and it becomes very, you know, survival oriented that we don't see this entire world. So I'm curious if you've had that experience maybe not with, maybe not seeing that with practitioners, like you said, the guy came up and goes. I've never made a decision, but but getting them to recognize all that stuff sooner rather than at the, at the very end where a decision is forced upon them rather than them making a more clear decision, I don't know if you, if you've seen that like where it comes to that recognition and what that means to people.
Speaker 2:And that's one of the things we try to do in the shadow box is picking up the early signs and reading the situation early, when it hasn't escalated, and noticing the subtle cues and putting them in our scenarios so that people who were training goes right past them and then they see that the experts picked it up right away. We even have a visual version of shadow box and expert eyes where we have a video version where people can zero in on what they think is an important cue. Then they see what the experts picked up and how much sooner the experts noticed it. So a lot of this is really picking up on the early sign. But I want to go back to the issue about voluntary compliance. This isn't just a nice idea that we came up with that. It would be good if police officers can get voluntary compliance. This is something we learned from our interviews with the police officers who had that skill and the military personnel who had that skill.
Speaker 2:I remember one interview I did with this police officer. He was pretty massive and it was a small office barely squeeze in and his arms were bigger than than my thighs. And and and and he and he said he wanted to. He became a policeman because he liked the action and he liked the idea of of of taking down bad guys and getting into fights and that was part of the excitement. But after about three, four, five years he said I won most of the fights I was in, but it was taking a toll. I was starting to get a little bit of physically beaten down.
Speaker 1:This sounds like probably 1990s, Greg right here 1980s.
Speaker 3:Greg, exactly, we're back to that, aren't we? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then he looked at some of his colleagues who were able to get people to do what they wanted without fighting them, and he began to listen to them and he listened to what language they used and he tried to collect what their phrases were and I called them. You know the golden words. So he's building his repertoire of being able to get voluntary compliance. But he also changed his mindset Right and he had a mindset that he evolved by himself, where anytime he was in an encounter with a civilian or even with a criminal, he wanted that person to trust him more at the end of the encounter than at the beginning. And that's how he carried himself.
Speaker 2:And that struck me as such a powerful mindset shift that even if I'm dealing with a criminal, I'm going to do it in a careful and respectful way. The person has broken the law, needs to be arrested, but that doesn't mean that I can be contemptuous of the person or I can humiliate the person. It's still a person and he just wanted the trust level to go up because of the way he harried himself. And this is a tough police officer who got into it because he wanted fights. So we heard these things from the police officers, we didn't just make it up.
Speaker 3:Right no and that's exactly right.
Speaker 3:There's a point of time that comes in every soldier or Marine's life and every copper's life. Where they go, I just can't punch another bad guy. I just can't tackle somebody else. I just can't ram another car. There's got to be a better way, and the idea is there is a better way, but the ideas of embracing that is still really hard because there's so much pressure pushing back from a much larger community that thinks there's only one way of doing things. And I would throw this at you, because you've dealt with a lot of fire departments. We cultivate curiosity. One of the greatest gifts that you can be given is being curious with your environment, because there's cues abound within your environment that are going to tell you what's likely to occur next. And so, for example, with firefighters. A firefighter is going to answer alarm, go down the pole, get in the truck and go to the scene. Firefighters don't normally patrol an area looking for early signs of fire.
Speaker 3:So what we do is we tell them hey, listen, you really do. Because when you go and check a building and you talk about the alarms and the fire exits and the capacity of how many people that are in there, what you're doing is you're saying, hey, I can operate left of the event, I can operate before the critical event, and if you pick up on those cues early enough, there won't be a fire. So we do that same thing with law enforcement and say, hey, if you're curious with your environment and you play with it, you drop the rock in the pond, you take a look at how entropy is acting on the people in the community and you can feel when things are right and you can feel when things are wrong and therefore you have a better chance of not going kinetic. Like in the military. They have a term that's called a permissive environment. Well, every city in America should be a permissive environment. It shouldn't be semi or non-permissive, but we can make it that way with uniforms that look paramilitary and graphics packages and those types of things that give this element of control and force.
Speaker 3:And we're past that now. We've learned so many great lessons If we would just embrace the fact that people look a person wants to talk it out rather than fight it out. When you get that rare person that does want to fight it out, there may be mental health issues, there may be something that's going on that you don't know, and then we got to call in another expert. But you can't do it all. And when a copper is being trained that, you have the trick bag, you have the bat belt and you have to solve all the problems. I think that puts a an undue stress on them to perform at a level that we're not training them to meet. Does that make sense?
Speaker 2:Makes total sense, I agree.
Speaker 1:Does that make sense? Decision making and you've got a course about the cognitive dimension. So I've seen a lot now of folks coming out with even cognitive divisions in their training program and cognitive this and cognitive that, and it's like, okay, is this the new word we're using right now? But could you help define that for what that is? What is cognitive training and what does it really mean to you? Because obviously you're focused on decision-making, the outcomes of what's happening, which is where people should be focused on. But what do you mean by cognitive training or the cognitive dimension?
Speaker 2:Okay, what I mean is the ability to use your experience and your expertise in order to handle tough situations and to understand them, to appreciate the implications, to anticipate the risks and to be able to identify reasonable ways forward. And one way to think of the cognitive dimension is to contrast it with a procedural approach. Mention is to contrast it with a procedural approach which says here's a checklist and you got to follow all these steps and here's a playbook, and you just want to have a playbook for every situation and just follow all that, which is kind of mindless because there are no playbooks that can handle the kinds of complexity that law enforcement gets into and you've got to be able to read situations and to use concerns. That here's the standard play, but I'm worried about it, like your construction worker was able to push back. So the problem with the cognitive dimension is that it's invisible. If I give you a procedural checklist, I can determine did you follow all the steps? And that's visible.
Speaker 2:The cognitive dimension is not visible. It involves something we call tacit knowledge, knowledge that isn't readily described. Your ability to make perceptual discriminations that might be invisible to somebody else. The mental model. The sophistication of your mental model about how things work is probably different now than it was five or 10 years ago, and the patterns that you've acquired through your experience is part of the cognitive dimension, your sense of typicality, which is so important. You go into a situation and things look fairly standard, fairly typical, except, hmm, you notice something that isn't all that typical. So our ability to recognize typicality, which only develops through experience, is essential for us to notice anomalies that is not typical. Something happened that I did not expect and I better pay attention to it. So all of those are parts of tacit knowledge and parts of expertise that feed into the cognitive dimension. When you start to learn to exercise this cognitive dimension, the world becomes different. You're seeing things, you're noticing things you haven't noticed before, and that's tremendously powerful and tremendously exciting.
Speaker 1:It is and especially in some of these fields, like you know, you're talking about a lot of the firefighters you work with and law enforcement's the same thing. You know we train a lot of law enforcement and you know it's like I. You's like I was never a law enforcement officer. I had time in the military and worked for the government for a while, but doing other things and the same thing.
Speaker 1:I was like you guys have more tacit knowledge than you realize and I don't care how many call-outs you've been on or chases you've been in interactions you have with people, have built up this Rolodex of information and potential. You know pre-event indications and potential anomalies and things that are incongruent, signals that you're not even really aware of it. Like those are the things that really matter. If I can get good at focusing on, like you just said, like what's normal, what's typical, like get really really good at defining this is what normal should be in this context, then all the things that aren't normal, that are incongruent, the situation, like you said, they just pop out at you like there's a whole world there and it's laying out in front of you and then those patterns sort of emerge on their own, in a sense based on your experience, if that makes sense, kind of it's how I try to tell people right, it makes perfect sense.
Speaker 2:the only thing I want to add to that is that there's a common belief that you're going to be developing all of this as you have more experience, and experience doesn't automatically translate into expertise, right. Somebody who's Okay, go ahead.
Speaker 3:No, doc. Let's go just one step deeper on that and make sure that we define that for our audience. So there are coppers out there with 35 or 38 years of experience that have never been involved in a situation yet they're the training officer. They've never made a felony arrest or been involved in a high speed pursuit. There are people that are in the business that have one combat deployment or no combat deployments, that call themselves a subject matter expert on school shootings because they wore a uniform. We have to be really careful of how we gauge expertise, really careful of how we gauge expertise and when we allow those people to raise to a level where now they're not peer-reviewed and they use the fake terms like evidence-based studies rather than actually having been studied. You know, I think you're onto something there, sir, because just your time in rank and time in grade doesn't mean that you've got the experience necessary Over.
Speaker 2:Right. I remember when I did the first study I ever did with firefighters, we went to the city of Dayton, talked to the head of the fire service there and I said we want to interview some of your firefighters and he said fine, who do you want to talk to? I said your most effective, you're most skilled firefighters. He said the ones with the most experience or the ones who are the most skilled, because they're not the same thing.
Speaker 2:If it's your house on fire, who do you want to be in charge of the crew that's going to be called out to douse the flames? And he said okay, we have some five or six years who can outperform some of these 20-year experience? So simple years of experience isn't enough. It's how many tough cases have you handled and also how many mistakes have you made? We learn from mistakes, but we only learn about mistakes if we have a chance to get feedback, and we can only learn from feedback if we have a chance to make sense of it and to figure out what it's telling us. So you see, this is a much more complex situation than simply years of experience.
Speaker 3:Exactly, Brian and I had just this discussion on another podcast and with another client where we were talking about look, when somebody dials 911, it's the luck of the draw.
Speaker 3:You get whoever is in the stack next to come to your call. It doesn't mean you're getting the most experienced person, it doesn't mean that person's ever done that kind of call, they just happen to be next, and that's scary and we can fix those type of things. And then the feedback loop is so essential, brian and I tell our law enforcement clients look, on-duty roll call is a chance before your coppers go out on the street where you can take a knee and you can give them some of this input. You can play the imagination game. You can take some of their stored experience and put them in a conundrum and get them primed to go out on the street so they'll be better critical thinkers and we don't see that happening as often. Better critical thinkers and we don't see that happening as often. Well, after they take our training, of course, or if somebody's reading your work, of course, but it's not industry standard yet.
Speaker 2:Right. It kills me that there are so many great opportunities that go floating by. One of them is when you have these kinds of team situations you can set up a story circle where people tell about any tough cases they had. In the last two or three days we ran a story circle in a petrochemical plant with a bunch of experienced panel operators and one newer operator, and the newer operator at the end said everybody in our unit should have been in this session because I learned so much from you guys just listening to your experiences and what you did.
Speaker 2:Another thing that really grates on me tremendously is the squandered use use of on-the-job training. We all know that most of the important things people learn. Many of them, maybe most, they learn on the job, not in the academy. But how are they learning? For the first year they ride with an FTO and after that they're on their own. But even the field training officer who trains the field training officer right on the job training to say look at that, you know. Here's what I'm seeing. We're asking the person how are you sizing up this problem and why do you think that you know? Why are you making that inference? And to create a dialogue where the trainee can ask oh, what are you picking up here, right, what am I missing?
Speaker 3:Right, right, what am I missing? Exactly, exactly. It's such an important standard. Look, there's some people out there working in FTO now. The San Jose model is dated in age, but it was a great initial shot over the bow and it's been getting better in many agencies and you've got critical thinkers like Mike Warren and Brian Willis and Dr John Black, who you know John Black, john Peters those guys are doing their best to improve that level of training with the FTO.
Speaker 3:I remember I won't attribute a name, but I had a few years on and I had a midnight supervisor jump in the car with me and say by the way, I'm going to ride with you for the first hour. And I said, oh, this is amazing, I absolutely love it. I got three or four years on, I'm drawing longevity checks and now the cops are finally going to check on my work. And the first thing he said is drive over here, drive over there. And what we did is we went and picked up his lunch for midnight shift and I said why are we doing this? And he said well, I can't drive right now because I had my eye test, my glaucoma test, today and you're going to be driving me around.
Speaker 3:We call this government work and I lost all faith at that point. Here he had set the bar high and I thought this is going to be a great night and then all of a sudden he pulled the rug out from under me. We still repeat errors at large and we have to understand that we don't have repeated chances in law enforcement and corrections and in fire in those domains and extremists in the military. And look, the largest point of contention now is medical malpractice. So these are exactly the people that would benefit most from this type of training and certainly, gary, from the body of work that you spent your entire life refining.
Speaker 2:Thank you I agree.
Speaker 1:So what you know? You've been studying decision-making and experts for decades. Now You've got another book out too, I believe. What's it? I'm sorry I can't remember. I had it written down Snapshots of the Mind. I know that's your latest book. I've read a few of yours before in the past, but one of the things I want to ask you is what don't you know about decision-making? What are you still looking for? What interests Gary Klein about something like what? What you know as you dig deeper and deeper and deeper over the decades and years ago? Matt, we're all looking for that nugget, that piece of wisdom, the drop on the tongue. That's what everyone wants, even though it doesn't really exist. But but what is it that that's still interests you, then, and that you don't know about this?
Speaker 2:Oh, there's so much that I don't know, and that's what makes it all so exciting. So one of the things that I'm trying to learn is how to develop more effective training programs. I'm going to be putting on a couple of workshops in a few weeks and I'm going back through existing training materials I have from five years ago, six years ago and I'm cringing Like why would I have? I can't believe that this is what I was teaching. We can do much more.
Speaker 3:Right, that's so great. That's so great. I love the fact that you're iteratively growing as well, and Brian's question was loaded, but I love that. What are you going to do tomorrow? What's on the horizon, you know? Because there's so much that we all don't know, and I think it's incumbent upon us to create a legacy and leave behind a legacy of thinkers.
Speaker 2:Right, I think we have that opportunity and that obligation, and so I'd like to learn how to develop more effective training programs. I am fascinated I continually fascinated by the topic of insight and where it's come from. I wrote a book about it back in 2013. That's over a decade ago, and the publisher wants me to come up with a new edition. And I'm looking at the book and I'm thinking I don't believe much of it. I mean, I believe most of it, but I can do much better now. So I'm eager to upgrade the book and update the book. Upgrade the book and update the book.
Speaker 2:So that's another area that interests me is the notion of insight and how it applies and how it develops and how to help people work on themselves to become insightful. And both of you mentioned a critical issue here of curiosity, which is really behind developing expertise, is wondering about things. And it's behind insights that the people who we've seen situations where two different people with the same exact information one gets the insight, the other one doesn't the person who gets the insight is a person who had an active mindset, was looking around, wondering about things, but you can't just tell people have an active mindset, right, it takes expertise to notice. What's strange about this, what's unusual? What leverage point has just popped up? So there's a strong connection between expertise and using curiosity effectively. I'm also disturbed by how many situations we put people in where their curiosity is stifled, exactly blindfolded in the training and the instructor is just trying to get through all the PowerPoints, doesn't want to take questions from the class and is oriented towards the notion there's a right answer and you're going to have to find, you know, remember, what the right answer is.
Speaker 2:With our shadowbox approach, we have two or three subject matter experts go through the scenario and you know something they don't always agree and when we present the material to trainees, we don't gloss over that. We say here's the majority position, but there's a minority view. And here's where they're coming from, because you're dealing with situations where there's not a minority view. And here's where they're coming from because you're dealing with situations where there's not a right answer. But let's look at what their thinking is and see what we can take away from their thinking, what we can learn from their thinking. And that's a lesson we have when we I've dealt with police veterans of 25 years and we do a shadow box exercise and they didn't get it exactly the way the experts, the subject matter experts, did, and their first reaction is who are these experts there?
Speaker 3:you go.
Speaker 2:Exactly and I can try to say well, we really picked them fairly carefully, they're well-respected or I can say we're not claiming that they have the right answer, but they are respected. And look at what their rationale is and see what you can learn from it if you want to learn.
Speaker 3:If you want to learn, and that's the key. The key is that you have to have, in addition to a baseline and environmental curiosity, you have to have intellectual curiosity and you have to say I'm in this to advance this field, that I'm in no matter what field that may be, and I think that like-minded folks. That's why look, you have no idea how long we've wanted you on the show and the idea is that you're hard to pin down because you're busy all the time. And the reason you're busy all the time is that you've got some great answers. But I would add that we don't always disagree, and that's healthy. And what's healthy is the discourse that comes out of that, because it's only a fraction. You know a very small margin between that and the expert model. That's where you learn the most, I think.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:When you're kind of looking back at this and you know you talk about finding more effective training and you know you look back at stuff you taught before and I've done the same thing where you're like, oh man, I guess, well, why did I spend so much time on this part? It's really this is the most important. Really, I got to make it simpler and or you know how do I get this more relevant? You know, people are kind of hungry for this stuff and what I've seen change is people are seemingly more informed. They're reading a lot of these different books or reading these theories, but it's just, it's again. It's that the practical application of it is where it's sort of fall short.
Speaker 1:Like especially when we were talking about law enforcement and I've worked with some trainers and different law and they've read every book on psychology and decision-making and human behavior and they're like they just they have this thirst for knowledge and they're not finding. They're like, yeah, it was great, but like how do I, how do I take that and then use that when I go walk up in contact to the person? I'm like that's the difficult part. We can, we can write about this. So we're always trying to simplify it in a sense that how do I get the? What's the minimum effective dose of this content that's going to get in there, which is really difficult.
Speaker 1:Because then there's the debate. Well, we got to train the trainers this way and the people with more experience should get this and the people with less experience should get this. And it's like, well, if you're talking about human behavior or you're talking about decision making, it's like what does it matter? Like they're all going to get something out of it. Maybe the experienced people might get more or might refine their perceptions, or maybe the newer people are going to get more because they had no idea of this. But it should be able to be palatable and be understood by everyone.
Speaker 2:I don't know what your view is on that or how you approach those situations, but I'd be curious to know. That leads perfectly into a video course that we just put online called A Masterclass in Practical Decision Making, and I developed the idea about two, two and a half years ago and I looked at all the standard advice on how to make decisions and I said this isn't really helpful. This is way too academic. This is not connected to the real world. I've been doing this stuff for a couple of decades.
Speaker 2:Have I learned anything useful? I wasn't sure that I had. I mean, I may not have learned anything useful, but if I have, can I boil it down and put it into a video course? And I came up with 15 lessons and I created a video script for each one that's only five minutes long, and so that's the essence of the course. If I've got something useful to say, one tip that people can put into action immediately. Let me describe what's wrong with people's current thinking, why this new approach is better, what it looks like. Give them a story and have them finish the five minutes with something that they can take away and put into practice immediately. And I have 15 lessons and each of them the five minute lessons. It was a tremendous workout for me to see if I can consolidate what I knew. Yeah, there's something that could be useful.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 1:It goes back to yeah, you know, if I had more time I would have written a shorter letter, you know, I mean it's it's that that's always the hardest part is going. What's the key thing? What's this one thing that they can take away? Because one it's. You got to capture everyone's attention and that can be tough. We're so distracted now in general. You know you got to capture that and then it's like I got to give it something that they can go do. The second they walk out this door. That's going to be impactful and meaningful and it'll work. It's that sort of balance and so it's at least. I'm a little relieved hearing that from you, that you're struggling with the same thing. So I guess that's the constant struggle for a lot of folks who have a deep understanding of something and want to get it out to people. But it's also frustrating if you're on the other side of that.
Speaker 1:And I remember I was actually in a course one time and it was a great instructor, and then he said hey, remember, look you guys, at any time you can ask me questions. And there, there, there's no such thing as a stupid question. And you know, half the class raised their hand. Then he looked at how many questions he had and he went but there are stupid people and then so half of it. So a lot of those people then put their hands down like man maybe I don't want to sound stupid and he was like all right, I got it and it was such a great learning moment for me and for that person who's like oh man, I don't have time to get through all these questions, but also I got to keep this atmosphere. So when you're taking, going from theory to practical application to a training program is incredibly complex and sometimes we skip over. We'll get stuff from class.
Speaker 1:What I love getting feedback from people is when they say hey, when you said this or when you talked about this. I went home last night. We had a guy. It was at a college course. Every semester we teach a course at Liberty University and we were doing some other work with them and with their criminal justice program. But they invite other people from within their community with this.
Speaker 1:You know 80 year old guy in there and he came up to me. He's, like you know, sitting there thinking about last night. You know I used to own all these car dealerships and I was in sales and over the years and he's like man, that thing that you guys talked about, with this funnel approach to it and the time and distance and those incongruent like I just realized I could use that for every situation in life and I was like that was the best feedback I'd ever gotten. Here's this 80 year old guy who you know had horse stables, was a car dealer owner, was doing all those things his whole life, and then he just got one concept that we talked about and said I can use that for everything in my life.
Speaker 1:I was like thank you, like yes, and then you had the 18-year-old student who's the first time out of their small town, is at college and they're sitting there in this course going like what is all this? So it's just a different perspective, but it's great to see that and that's always just a struggle to do. So I don't know what you've seen typically works in those situations or what you try to focus on when you're having that problem works in those situations or what you try to focus on when you're having that problem.
Speaker 2:So I go back to a guy that I had a ton of experience as a trainer, a guy named Ike Bracken who owned a ranch in Texas but his day job was petrochemical industry and he was very good and became a trainer. And he told me and he was a trainer for several decades he said early in his training career he knew how to train people because he'd been trained. There's a way to do things, there's a right way, and you watch the trainee and you wait for them to make a mistake and then you slam them so that they'll remember. And that's the job of a trainer is to stamp those lessons in. So that's the way he'd been trained. That's the way he trained people who were assigned to him, signed to him, and after about five, six years he kind of woke up and he thought this really isn't getting me anywhere and this slamming business is fun. I mean, it's emotionally satisfying.
Speaker 2:He didn't want to deny that part. But the people he's training, he said they're motivated. Motivated, they want to do a job and they're smart. If they weren't smart enough they wouldn't have been selected. So if they're making a mistake. Instead of slamming them, you can become curious and that's the word that you mentioned before and work with them and say, when you you did that that's a surprise, what were you thinking about? Why did you do that? And sometimes they might have a good idea. But he switched from this aversive, abusive model into a curious, collaborative model and he said it made all the difference.
Speaker 3:That's so amazing. You know there's a section of expertise out there that people refer to as the natural and I caution people because they're few and far between and they're so remarkable. They make movies about it. So you aren't. You know. So right away. If you think you're natural, you're not. So start buying more books or going to more classes.
Speaker 3:Then you've got the other end of the spectrum, where you've got the expert that wants to wow you with their expertise. So they engage in S2 obfuscation and write just everything and have all these dramatic graphs and have, you know, demystified John Boyd's OODA loop to the point that you point that you can use it in a second. And then right in the middle is that person that you meet that can not dumb it down, but they street it up and they can show you and tell you and point to something and all of a sudden the epiphany moment happens and true learning occurs. So whenever we find that, we embrace it, Brian, and I embrace it, Arcadia embraces that, and it's rare. When we find that, we embrace it, Brian and I embrace it, Arcadia embraces that, and it's rare when you find that.
Speaker 3:But when you do, man, you got to exploit that.
Speaker 3:You got to tell that person you're on the right track and you know, keep going, you know forward and and I also love it because I always learn from those folks as well so, if we can get the charlatans and and we can get the you know, the people that are just on the book tour constantly to take a breath and look around them, I think that together, like you know what a dream for me would be To be able to collaborate in the future with you on something where, jointly, we can make a bigger difference than you've already done in the decades that you've been involved in this, and you know I got a couple of good things that I can point to, that I did, but it's not enough.
Speaker 3:Tomorrow I got to get up again and say what am I going to do this week? That's going to change, that's going to move the dial, and that's why I love working with Brian and our team. I hope that you always stay as motivated and as intrigued by this work as you are right now. To motivated and as intrigued by this work as you are right now.
Speaker 2:To me, this is a bucket list moment being on a podcast with you and being able to share some ideas with you. I feel fantastic about it. Thank you very much for those really kind words and it would be exciting to see if we can find something to collaborate about, I think that could be powerful.
Speaker 3:That is so much.
Speaker 1:So, brian, write that down, yeah, yeah. So I'm going to put the links to those courses and stuff that you have in all the episode details and everyone will get it and they can check it out. I mean, you don't have to do any much more than just Google, gary Klein, and it's going to be all over with everything your work on there. It's really just fascinating stuff. I was always drawn to it because you're one of the people that I appreciate in terms of, hey, we got to go out here and figure this stuff out, not sit here in academia that has its place for everything and do it in a lab and get some students and do some studies. No, let's's take it to the streets and then let's sort of reverse engineer this to see if we can replicate it. And it's hard, it's really hard to do, especially when you're you know you got someone who's like what do you mean? I just, I just know it's like well, you know, for a reason and I'm trying to figure out that reason and I another great one, we had this. You know we did an intro to course. I mean this, this guy come up. It was a mix of, like you know, local, state and federal law enforcement officers. And this guy was, you know, it was a city cop for a while. Then he was at different federal agencies and I was higher up in, like you know, homeland Security investigations, I think it was. But he just came up and he's like hey, where was this my first day on the job? First day on the job. He's like you just took, I can't do that. Like I know what you said, I know all of that stuff, but I can't say it in that way and I can't translate it to another person. And he was like grabbing me by the shirt, like teach me how to do it. I'm like that's what we're here for. That's what we're here for. Like don't worry, we're going to give your folks something, and like it was really cool to see that when it's validating for what you're talking about, it's obviously resonating with the audience.
Speaker 1:But when you get that experience level where people go, you know there's so much that we learn that. You know even in school you look at what you all the different subjects you learn in school, growing up, through high school, college, whatever you go through like how much of that have you actually used? And so I always go back to you know what's you look for. Everyone has a teacher, a mentor, an uncle, a neighbor or someone that, like, talked to them or taught them something and they were just enamored with it, and it's like everyone has that sort of mental model for that person. It's like what? Find out what it was that you love so much about the way that person taught, or they spoke, or they taught you know they, they trained you, and then that's what you can emulate. And we we all have what wrong looks like right, everyone's seen the oh God, I don't want to be, but it's good to have that. You need the comparison, right, you know, or at least you know, what not to do, right, what doesn't work. But but I always try to look back and so you know you, being out there doing this on a on a practical level, is extremely helpful and I love it because I can nerd out on all the science behind it and really get into it, but still have some actual takeaways that I can use. I mean even the HPP, rna and the stuff we teach, like I'm using that to help. It's making me a better father.
Speaker 1:I got a little two-year-old. Now he's almost two years old and I'm teaching him. He's not even speaking full sentences, only knows so many words, and it's like we can still go through and we'll compare this to that. Why is that different? What is it? Oh, and he's seeing differences in things, so he's learning to compare. So now he's going head tilting all the time and I'm like, okay, he's learning, here's this and so it's fun. And I'm like, if I can get through to a two-year-old, I should be able to get through to the toughest sage, gray beard copper, who's been on the road for 30 years and seen and done it all. So that's always my challenge, but I'll give you any last words that you have, gary.
Speaker 2:Okay. So I appreciate these opportunities for dialogue with fellow practitioners, fellow investigators. It's always exciting for me to see what other people have been trying to do and and to create a larger community. I should say that, for folks who are interested in the things that I do, there is a whole association called naturalistic decision making association and we have several hundred people who are part of that and we meet every two years. The last one was in New Zealand and the next one is going to be in June 2026 in Charlottesville, virginia. But there's also a website for the Natural Electric Decision-Making Association. So for people who want to plug into my community, I welcome you to join us as we try to move forward. Yep, and.
Speaker 1:I'll put the links for all that. I'll put the links for your courses for the Naturalistic Decision-Making Association. I'll have that all in the episode details so folks can check that out and go right there. But we always recommend connecting with Gary and reading up on his work. And so, greg. Any final words before I close this out here.
Speaker 3:Quickly thanks to Dr Joan Johnson and Dr Leah DiBello. Both of them reached out to Gary and Gary was so gracious to come on. I hope we didn't bore you. I hope we intrigued you enough that we can have you on the show again in the future, sir.
Speaker 1:We appreciate it. Dr Klein, thank you so much for coming on. Everyone, there's always more on our Patreon site. You can check that out. If you enjoy the episode, share it with someone. That's all we ask. If you can't sign up for Patreon, we get it. Just share it with a friend and send it to them and say hey, check this out. Here's why I think it was good or what was bad. Either way, the numbers still go up higher and we still get more reach, even if you don't like it, but I'll take it, let us know. You guys can always reach out to us at the humanbehaviorpodcast at gmailcom. Thanks everyone for tuning in and don't forget that training changes behavior.
