[ted id=1255]
In his second time giving a talk at a TED Conference, Malcolm Gladwell brings up a point in the speech that mirrors one of the purposes of The CP Journal. After weaving a story that talks about all of the work and research the government put into building and developing the Norden Bombsight in the Second World War, he reaches his thesis: being able to drop a bomb onto your target is important, but if you can’t find the enemy you want to target, your multi-million dollar bombsight is worthless.
For Marines, you know that the mission of the Marine rifle squad is to “locate, close with, and destroy” the enemy they are facing. And when it comes to “closing with and destroying,” the capability of U.S. Marines is unparalleled in their skill in doing this. The biggest problems our military faces overseas and the problem our police officers face here in the states is in the difficulty of “locating” the enemy.
We don’t have any interest in telling you the best way to deal with your enemy once you have found him, and we only offer in very general terms some things to consider. If you are in the Air Force, your decision to kill may include 1,000-pound bombs from the sky. If you are a police officer, you may only be able to fire your weapon in self-defense. Every situation will be different. All we want to do is help you find the enemy and then trust your instincts and training to deal with it appropriately.
So how can you find the enemy? One method is to understand human behavior. This is the foundation for this site. The first step to separating your enemy from the population they hide amongst is to establish baselines for people, objects, and areas that you are interacting with. Having the ability to quantify and communicate what that baseline is what will allow you to quickly identify those people that don’t fit in.
The people that don’t fit in with our baseline are what we refer to as anomalies. Anomalies are any deviation from the baseline, and finding an anomaly is the key step in identifying threats that are around you. The 6 Domains of observable behavior are the areas that we want you to focus your observation on. By communicating human behavior in terms of the 6 Domains, we simplify and standardize the observations we make when we establish the baseline as well as when we identify anomalies.
One of the elements of heuristic decision-making strategies is to have a “search principle,” which teaches us to not look at every thing around us, because that would result in information overload and not guarantee we were any closer to making an accurate decision, but to focus on specific areas. As profilers, the search principle that we employ is using the 6 domains. By focusing on specific elements of human behavior we can accurately and quickly locate our enemy.
Learning to do this process rapidly and confidently takes time but can easily be done by those people who want to get ahead of their peers. It will take deliberate practice, effort, and a continuous drive to improve as a professional people watcher.
This site exists for those people. By providing articles and videos for you to use to train yourself, anyone who wants to become more survivable and more lethal on the battlefield that you fight on can find the resources they need here.