De-Mystifying the IED

November 6, 2012 in Applying The Observations

Why did no one tell me about this? Who had this information and why didn’t my Marines and I get it? This could have saved some of my friends. These are some of the things that were going through my head when I first received my Combat Profiling training, and that broken record still plays in my head today.

Too often Marines have a missing or corrupt file folder on the manufacturing and employment of IEDs.  It surrounds the IED with a cloak of secrecy. If we can demystify the IED we can open our eyes to the clues around us.  This post is going to give you one of the many tools to analyze the threats in your area. It costs nothing and weights nothing, but it can make us more efficient on the battlefield.

I recall a conversation during one of my tours in Iraq when I was seeking knowledge about one of the biggest threats in our AO (Area of Operations.) My Marines were well versed in the basic structure of the IEDs, having dealt with more than a few, but we wanted some more in depth knowledge of how they were actually manufactured. The person that we sought out definitely rated the title of subject matter expert, seeing as his job was to deal with IEDs on a daily basis. We asked the explosives tech questions that ranged from how they were initiated to how the explosives were actually made themselves.

To make a long story short, I started getting into subjects that where apparently above my classification.  Really? Apparently I have enough classification to step on, or drive over said IED’s, but not enough to learn how they’re made. Continue reading »

Closing The Deal In The Boardroom, On The Battlefield, Or In The Bar

November 1, 2012 in Applying The Observations, Assessing Individuals

We’ve all been there before.  We thought we had done enough to get the “yes,” whether it was for a new contract, an agreement with a village elder in a foreign country over the placement of a new well, or the number for the girl you’ve been talking to at the bar.  In fact, we were probably so confident in our presentation that a “no” was no longer even a real possibility in our mind.  Because of this, we probably stopped looking for the cues that could have alerted us to the impending and humiliating rejection that was around the next corner.  It might not always be an outright no either.  At first it could even be a “yes” just to get us to stop talking which also provides them the time for the “buyers remorse” to set in and have the deal breakdown later on.  Where did we go wrong?  It started by failing to Continue reading »

From Science to the Streets – Motivating a Prospect to Buy

October 23, 2012 in Applying The Observations

I posted an article last week that highlighted Abraham Maslow’s theory of motivation. The problem with theory is that it isn’t always clear how that translates to real world application.  Lately, I’ve been following the Presidential debate and listening to the candidate’s plans to secure our energy independence, so let’s use the example of a company providing green energy as an example of how this theory can be applied to real life interactions.  How could a sales consultant use an understanding of motivation to improve their ability to sell?  By talking to prospects about what interests them. Continue reading »

The Foundation of Motivation

October 8, 2012 in Applying The Observations

I was reading an article this morning on socialmediatoday.com talking about how to market blog posts or Facebook updates to the needs of the reader to make them keep reading.  The author’s point was that by identifying the psychological motivations of their reader and writing the headlines to target those motivations, an author can convert a higher percentage of blog grazers into actual readers.

Why should you care about blog readership and headline writing as a reader here on this site?  Because the same concepts that he talks about in his article apply to behavioral analysis and more importantly how to better understand the people that we need to collect information from.  Continue reading »

This Is Why We Don’t Teach Racial Profiling

September 10, 2012 in Applying The Observations

I’ve mentioned it here on the site that we do not teach or condone racial profiling, and we never will.  A presentation I saw today reinforced and put that fact into a different perspective for me.  Whenever the topic comes up, I always unwaveringly state that pre-determined facts such as race, gender, and age are in no way a pre-event indicator for violence.  Even in areas where a person has a choice, such as religion or cultural ideological beliefs, those facts are not pre-event indicators for violence by themselves.  Even though I think that people who would rely on these traits are foolish or naïve, normally when I comment on racial profiling in a post, I do it because of some recent incident or recent claim.  I do it to clearly separate myself from the outrage around the concept.

I was listening today to a presentation given by Michael Rozin at the ASIS International Conference in Philadelphia, I heard him refute a race-based approached more concisely than I ever have. Continue reading »

Profiling In Action – Behavior Detection Officers Stop “Kidnapping”

August 10, 2012 in Applying The Observations

Last month, a TSA Behavior Detection Officer (BDO) helped rescue a kidnapped woman as she was trying to pass through a TSA checkpoint at Miami International Airport.  (Take a look at the CNN article of the incident here.)  I completely understand that this story sounds a little bit like a Jerry Springer episode, but for the sake of explaining how Kinesic clusters build on each other, I am going to write about it as if it was a legit kidnapping.

What the officers picked up on was her body language that we would put into the “Uncomfortable Cluster” and even though we can assume that many people demonstrate some degree of discomfort as they make their way through the airport checkpoints, the high intensity of these cues made her standout from the baseline, get contacted, and ultimately got her rescued. Continue reading »

Reacting To Dominance – Finding Submissiveness and Discomfort

July 29, 2012 in Applying The Observations, Assessing Groups, Assessing Individuals

(Note** The original video referenced in this blog post is no longer available for view.  We believe the content of the post remains relevant, but do apologize for any confusion.)

It is not uncommon for a group of people to have one person that fills a dominant role in the group. Whether this be a respected and acknowledged of elected leader or a person that wants to be seen as the leader and attempts to assert their authority over the other people through force of will.

Identifying this relationship can provide a great deal of insight into the group because we can observe how the other group members respond to the blatant attempts at dominance.  Do they recognize the threat and respond with dominance right back (fight the threat)?  Do they recognize the threat and become clearly uncomfortable (flight from the threat)?  Or do they recognize the threat and simply submit, letting the dominant person do whatever they want?  Identifying the pre-set patterns that the members of the group execute in the face of dominance can help Marines predict the future actions of people.

Watch this video clip taken from A&E’s Beyond Scared Straight series (NOTE – not every swear word is bleeped out, so this might not be appropriate for the office).  The Dominance that the two prison inmates are showing is pretty clear, so I’m not going to waste your time and discuss those, but the file folders that we do want to build on are those that show how people respond to that clear and obvious threat.  Continue reading »

Want To Get Him Talking? Play To His Strengths

July 5, 2012 in Applying The Observations

The concept is indisputable – if you want to make better decisions, you need to have better information.  I hate clichés, but information really is power, and if you want to make smarter decisions, you must develop good sources of intel.  This means that once you have found the people that possess the knowledge you need, you then have to set the conditions for them to willingly offer it to you.  Since water boarding is not an option, you have to start by establishing a good rapport with the person so that they don’t feel threatened.  There is no better way to make that person feel comfortable than to do things that play to his strengths.

The same way that we can identify the patterns that people set regarding their behavior, we can also establish patterns to better understand what makes people feel comfortable talking.  This way we can keep them talking and get all of the information we need to make a better-informed decision.

I thought of this today while talking with Chris Dessi, the CEO of Silverback Social. Chris is the prototypical “teacher” type, which is one of the main personality types I look for when I need to get someone talking.

The “teacher” is a person who Continue reading »

Creating Proxemic Pulls – Getting the Conversation Started

July 3, 2012 in Applying The Observations, Assessing Groups

I made a lazy mistake on the subway a few weeks ago; I made eye contact with the homeless guy walking through the train car asking for money.  I was watching him and waiting to see how people responded to his requests and how they reacted to his advances.  I was looking for Proxemic Pushes but as I got caught up watching, I also wasn’t disguising my interest.   Inevitably, eye contact was made and the situation changed from Proxemic Pushes to a Proxemic Pull.  I was watching him be Proxemically Pulled to me.

It all started with the eye contact, he took that as permission to approach, a sign that I invited him to move from the social space to the personal space.  You can see the same thing happening outside Madison Square Garden before a NY Rangers game (or any other sporting event) as the people scalping tickets are trying to make eye contact with people going to the game so the scalper can approach and try to sell their tickets.  It isn’t always just eye contact that creates the Proxemic Pull; it might be an eyebrow flash, where you raise your eyebrows up, a common sign of acknowledgement or recognition between people.  It might be a head nod, a similar gesture.  Whether you are trying to pick someone up in a bar, or are a con man trying to find an easy target, it starts by finding a reason to approach the person. Continue reading »

Are the Critiques of the TSA SPOT Program Justified?

May 16, 2012 in Applying The Observations

Recently there has been a great deal of criticism and critique about the Transportation Security Administration’s SPOT program, which trains TSA agents in behavioral analysis.  If you read the blog posts and comments on the topic, much of which has been courageously posted by anonymous people without any legitimate suggestions for finding terrorists or criminals, you will find that most of it is ridiculous and baseless, but there have been a few concerns raised that do deserve a response to people who want to know more.

Before I address a few of the critiques that I think are valid questions, I’ll just say that I don’t know all of the details about the training that the agents go through and am responding more to the critiques of behavioral analysis as a means to identify threats.  But the material on this site and the training that we provide, combined with what I have heard about the training, I’ll say that no one pretends that this is the be-all-end-all way to provide security to the country or does it produce mind-readers.  It is simply one piece to identifying those that intend to do harm to us.

Critique #1: Known terrorists have moved through airports and have not been detected by the BDOs (Behavior Detection Officers). Continue reading »

Analyzing Behavior – For Medics and Corpsmen

April 22, 2012 in Applying The Observations

Many Marines and soldiers have gotten the call to respond to an IED strike while they were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.  This call isn’t always to help out other Americans. Sometimes the call comes to treat and evacuate the casualties from the local military or police forces from those countries that were the victims of an attack.

Interpreter support?  Only if you are lucky.  This makes triage and identifying the most severe casualties increasingly difficult.  A medic can quickly observe visual wounds such as bleeding or broken bones and make a determination of what type of care if required based on what they see, but understanding pain is a different case because you can’t “see” pain.  To learn that a person is experiencing pain requires communication between the victim and the responder.  If you are operating in a foreign country where people are not speaking in English, your ability to understand what the victim is communicating is going to be limited. Continue reading »

Who Is Aware Of Their Surroundings – Uncovering Good Guys And Bad Guys

April 6, 2012 in Applying The Observations, Assessing Individuals

There are three types of people in the world: good guys, bad guys, and the clueless.  The working assumption is that most people in our society are clueless.  They are the people driving the speed limit in the left lane on the highway and unaware that there is a line of cars behind them wanting to pass.  They are the people walking down the middle of the sidewalk or through the mall with their face buried in their cell phone as they send text messages, unaware that they are walking slowly, swerving and making it difficult for people to get around them.  They are the people on the sidewalk who just stop walking to look at something without moving to the side and getting out of everyone else’s way.  This is most of the population.  Most people are comfortably condition white.  This is the baseline.

Good guys and bad guys are a little different.  Actually they are a lot different.  Continue reading »

Finding Dominant Behavior

March 30, 2012 in Applying The Observations, Assessing Individuals

 

As we look at our environment and all of the people surrounding us, we need to be capable of quickly and accurately classifying their behavior into at least one of our 6 primary clusters.

In this video, the punk kid is doing everything he can to posture and hopefully intimidate the guy in the black shirt into submission.  Posturing falls into the Dominance Cluster and can be identified by making yourself look larger, taking up more space around you, and demonstrating ownership (or territoriality) over nearby objects.

The kid in this video shows a number of Dominant characteristics: Continue reading »

Finding Valid Information – How Profiling Can Assist Census Operations

March 13, 2012 in Applying The Observations, Assessing Individuals

I was reading a blog post on the Marine Corps Gazette site last week (the link to the post is embedded in the image) that was written about the difficulty Marines have while gathering census data while deployed.  The challenge is simple to understand because there can be a significant financial reward to local villagers who can successfully convince Marines that funding their cause is in our best interest.

“A single consistency I could draw from the book was that any Afghan in a position of power saw the international community as a source of income for their own patronage networks. Village chiefs, businessmen, and ambitious young men all told different stories to various aid agencies and organizations to direct the flow of aid money.”  – Joe Davidoski (author of blog post) (blog link)

So how can understanding profiling and understanding human behavior help Marines who are responsible for gathering information from local villagers? Continue reading »

From Science to the Streets – When Your Confidence Is The Problem

March 12, 2012 in Applying The Observations

After having a conversation with another Combat Hunter instructor about the how confident students should be making decisions immediately following our course, I wanted to find some more information about people’s confidence in reading nonverbal cues.  We want our students to be confident after the course, because without confidence in the accuracy of their observations, they may not take action to prevent a crime or an attack from occurring.  But, at the same time, we know that confidence is certainly not an indicator of capability when it comes to any skill, and we have all seen those people who are so overconfident in their assessments that no one takes them seriously.

So we want to instill a level of humble confidence in your students, humble enough to keep learning and being realistic about your capabilities, but confident enough to take action when you see something. You should also have confidence communicating why you did what you did.  Think about a police officer who has to take the stand to discuss specifically what they observed before they arrested the person, or a Marine whose actions have been called into question as to why they chose to shoot a suspected insurgent.  Your ability to confidently recall what you observed and why that information is valid as an indicator of threats can greatly influence the credibility of your actions. Continue reading »