This post is about conflict management | personal safety | dynamis training.
When we look at personal safety, people tend to put it into categories: the physical aspects and the non-physical aspects. We could break down the non-physical side of personal safety training into two parts:
- The ability to detect a danger or a threat (threat detection).
- The ability to prevent it from becoming physical.
We talk about the detect, the defuse and the de-escalation aspects of personal safety on our lone working course — we cover all three. We give a whole rounded experience, understanding and learning on all three areas. But if we had to choose what the most important aspect would be, and what would be the easiest to learn, I’d say it’s the first one: detect.
The good news is, however many years people have been living their lives quite successfully before they come on our course, they observe human behaviour every single day. They might actually be quite good at it, but it is a bit hit and miss. We have to give some framework to it and empower it.
The Baseline is the norm, and it is always relevant to the context.
The main principle is to address a concept called baseline versus anomalies. There’s quite a well-known book on this called Left of Bang.
Ger was fortunate enough to train with a specialist from U.S. Military R&D on this topic. They spent millions of dollars on it, and he gleaned from the expert the key points that came out of that material and knowledge.
You can use it every single day, and “baselines and anomalies” applies to many different things, not just personal safety.
The Tsunami Story: A Threat Detection Lesson
Ger shares the threat detection story he often tells on personal safety training. (We do a lot of storytelling, just because it tends to get the point across in a more powerful way.)
He talks about the tsunami that hit Japan in 2011, which occurred after a huge earthquake. We talk about what happened that day in a tiny village on the east coast of Japan.
When the big earthquake hit, as you probably know, earthquakes in Japan are very frequent — that’s part of their norm. That’s part of their baseline.
However, this huge earthquake — the biggest one they’d had for years and years — was out of the norm. In this little village, they had alarms, and when the ground shook, the alarms went off, and people took cover until the earthquake had passed.
And of course, they got on with the normal activities after an earthquake, such as clearing up the mess. However, this is where it gets interesting: some time later, the tsunami alarms went off, which sound like the old-fashioned WWII alarms but have a different tone.
⚠️ The Great Big Obvious Anomaly: In all those generations of the village, no one had heard this particular alarm go off before. That is our fundamental threat detection problem — and it ties in with how we detect personal safety threats in lone working and personal safety. Our number one enemy is being in denial.
People observe human behaviour every day, but are we really conscious about interpersonal threats or not? The truth is, it really is a bit hit and miss.
Anyway, the tsunami alarm went off, and a lot of people ignored it. And it gets more interesting when you look at what happened on the beach.
At this point Ger normally asks the group: “Do you believe that you could predict a tsunami is coming before you can physically see it if you were on that beach?” Because if you wait until you physically see it, you’ve got a time issue with getting away from it and getting to somewhere safe.
This is an action-reaction problem. Some people say no, they don’t think we can predict a tsunami. Some say yes, they think we can. And some people even have the answers — they are aware of the cues or indicators. So it gets interesting to explore what happened on that beach.
One of the indicators of a tsunami is an anomaly to the baseline. The baseline is the norm: the pressure of water in the sea produces a high tide and low tide twice a day. That’s the norm.
However, when a tsunami is approaching, as you may well know, the tide goes really far out. The main difference is the speed. It goes out super quick. It went out so quickly that people observed fish flapping around on the beach. That’s how fast the water went out.
People had never seen that before. This huge anomaly happened right in front of them. You get various reactions to that, where some people just ignored it.
Some people realised “that’s not right.” And incredibly, some people walked towards the fish, out of curiosity. And unfortunately, what they didn’t realise is they were walking towards the threat.
Threat Detection and Interpersonal Conflict
💡 Files and folders: When teaching people to do interpersonal threat detection, or to work alone safely, we talk of files and folders. If in our brains, in our head-computers, we don’t have the correct files and folders — the indicators of what threats look like — it’s going to slow us down. When we work alone we are going to hesitate, we are going to be confused, and we’re going to have huge denial hitting us. It’s going to be a difficult challenge getting through denial, and therefore quickly getting into action.
But here’s the good news. If you could fill these files and folders with useful, quick-to-learn information, then when your computer does that hard drive search, the search is going to find cues and indicators. Now it’s just an emotion which you have. Am I going to get to action? What am I going to choose to do now?
Here’s the other side of this threat detection story.
On that beach that day there was a UK student of geology. So she knew all about earthquakes — she had the files and folders in her head. She knew what the indicators of a tsunami are. And she knew when she was on that beach, when she saw all those fish and that the tide had gone right out, that a tsunami was coming, even though she couldn’t see it.
And the amazing thing is, she went and saved lots of lives. She grabbed as many people off that beach as she could.
That’s the difference, just quite simply — having that information. Threat detection for a tsunami is really quick and easy to learn. Just put it in your files and folders for later. However, with human behaviour, sometimes the threat detection files and folders we already have might be corrupted.
We might expect a psychopath or some predator to look a certain way, or be a certain age, race or gender. And I’d call that a corrupted file.
Ger shares the earthquake and tsunami story with the group just to demonstrate the power of establishing a baseline, and what a baseline is in any given context — and then you can start being aware of the anomalies.
Learning to Spot Indicators in Threat Detection
There are general and specific indicators that you can share, that are real threat indicators. Regardless of the context, we do a lot of video analysis of real situations. We get people to establish what the baseline is, and then just narrate and consciously spot the anomalies. We can play those videos again and again, and just help people become more aware of what those anomalies are.
In conflict or violence threat detection, the connection between your subconscious brain and your conscious brain is a really important pathway to safety. Intuition is trying to do that for you. It’s trying to make that connection. It’s giving you that feeling or that persistent thought, whatever way it communicates.
Our brain is amazing. It is taking in so many pieces of information every second. It can’t possibly share all of that information with you consciously, every single second. Otherwise, you’d be a mess. You just couldn’t process it. But when there is a significant threat, there will definitely be a powerful intuition signal sent.
But I think then you consciously need to ask: well, is this a threat? And that’s another important point.
When you can become conscious of those threats, that’s what really combats denial and makes you better at threat detection.
It’s similar to when Ger was doing his advanced driving during part of his bodyguard, close protection training. When you’re doing advanced driving, you narrate all the hazards. That process of narration brings a subconscious observation. Because when you’re driving, you are normally hopefully aware of those hazards, but you aren’t conscious, necessarily — not when you drive and you think, “I can’t remember that journey for the last five minutes. I was on autopilot.”
That’s fine. But if you are in a situation where you work alone, where you’re going to try to combat denial, you might need to outwardly narrate what you’re experiencing and have that open questioning, for example: what am I observing here? Why am I feeling this way?
And then if you’ve got those files and folders in your head, they will very quickly pop up in your search. Especially when you know those cues — hopefully they never occur. But if the people we train do have one of those really unlucky moments, they are rare.
But again, that’s the other issue, isn’t it? It doesn’t happen every day. The social worker, or parking enforcement officer, or community nurse’s alertness might drop and they get a bit complacent when they work alone.
The Naive Debutante and the Complacent Veteran
💡 Human beings love learning the hard way. Sometimes we have to realise that. And that’s why we have the whole Health and Safety Executive nowadays. Many bad things happen, and they may have been foreseeable, and so we are making this whole process more conscious now through regulation, enforcement action and the courts.
Ger uses the seatbelt analogy sometimes. How many years did we drive cars before it became law that we had to wear a seatbelt? How many deaths did it take for us to realise that seatbelts save lives?
These realisations come in hindsight. So, for example, with a new social worker, their threat detection history, their hindsight, is not good. They need foresight.
That all ties in with the value of threat detection training amongst the other topics we cover on our lone working training course. It’s giving people the ability to have the foresight rather than hindsight.
Because sometimes, hindsight is too late.
This conversation between Ger O’Dea and Zeb Glover at Dynamis happened on 19 February 2019, right after Zeb got back from a very successful training engagement with a large Local Authority in England, teaching a mix of Social Workers, Enforcement Officers and Community Workers who carry out Lone Working.
This guide on conflict management | personal safety | dynamis training is part of our ongoing work with schools and academies.