Why High Functioning Teams Fail with Dr. Joan Johnston

All right, hello everyone, and thanks for tuning in this week! Welcome to our guest, Dr. Joan Johnston. Joan, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

You're welcome. I'm really excited about this.

Yeah, we're excited to have you on here, Greg and I both are. Today, obviously, the topic is why high-functioning teams fail—what occurs in different situations. You can have really highly trained folks who have a lot of experience, and then you put them together, and they're in a real situation, and things can go catastrophically wrong. So that's kind of the big picture of what we're going to get into. I'm going to give everyone a background on the actual incident we're going to talk about, but I'd like you, Joan, first, can you give all of our listeners—and Greg's fans, as I call them—a little background about yourself and your work?

Sure. I received my Master's and PhD from the University of South Florida in Tampa. After that, I started my career immediately with the U.S. Navy at the Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division, as it's called today. I was always interested in stress research, and I based my dissertation on the study of stress. When I got to the Navy, it turns out that there was this incident that occurred in the Persian (Arabian) Gulf—what we'll describe a little bit later, we call the Vincennes Incident—that was really the reason for hiring me. This problem that we studied was to address stress and training.

Up until that point, I hadn't really thought about working for the military or having a military research psychologist job, but many of my friends had come to work at NavAir at NAWC TSD (Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division), as we call it now, and had really exciting opportunities for doing applied research, which is really what the focus of my education was about: being a scientist practitioner, doing science but also doing it in the real world and having an impact on people in a really important way.

Yeah, and that's one of the things I talk about with a lot of folks: a lot of people don't realize just how much research the Department of Defense does and how much money it spends on it. It's like you said, there's the academic side and there's the application side, and both are needed in a sense. But what happens in a lab and in theory, at a university, is one thing, and what you're talking about here is, "Okay, this is an actual application of this stuff. How does this play out in the real world, in real situations?" Because that's the most important part.

We'll kind of jump in, and I'll give the background on the incident that you're talking about, because it really led to—it seems like you were kind of coming in at the right time, right place with your background and talking about stress—to go into these big programs that came out of this.

For those who don't know, back in 1988, an Iran Air Flight 655 was mistakenly shot down by a United States Navy guided-missile cruiser, the USS Vincennes. This is late '80s, the middle of the Iran-Iraq War was going on. There's a lot of disrupted air travel in the region. There's increased military presence by a bunch of nations, including us, not unlike what consistently happens in that area.

The Vincennes was a guided-missile cruiser, part of the Navy surface fleet operating in that area. What happened on this day was, this Iran Air Flight 655 was a scheduled commercial flight from Tehran to Dubai via this place called Bandar Abbas, which is right in the Strait of Hormuz. It's geographically significant area, linking the Strait of Hormuz, linking the Persian Gulf with the Arabian Sea, and it comes out at this point of Dubai, right by Iran. So it's an area prone to potential situations.

Basically, this flight is approaching the airspace by the USS Vincennes. They detected the aircraft on its radar. There's a lot of heightened tensions in the area, and so the crew mistook the civilian airliner for an attacking Iranian F-14. They believed it was engaged in some sort of hostile activity, so they thought they were under threat. They issued their warnings; the aircraft did not respond under what they were supposed to do, and then their communication attempts were unsuccessful. So they concluded, "All right, this is a hostile target. Let's shoot it down." They launched two surface-to-air missiles, and they struck the airliner. All 290 people onboard—innocent people, passengers and crew—died.

This is obviously a huge international incident, a huge embarrassment, heightening tensions at the time in the area, all that stuff. But we're not getting into the geopolitical aspect of this and what that led to. What I want to get into is what this led to within the Navy and the DOD as a whole, because that's kind of what you're talking about. There's a whole bunch of programs stood up from there that kind of set out to define and determine and look at it, just like any incident where there's going to be major investigation. It's not just about what happened, it's, "Okay, let's identify everything, and let's figure out how to mitigate this from ever happening again." So I'll pass to you, Joan, to give the background and understanding of what the research that evolved from that incident was.

Sure. I was working with some really outstanding scientists at the time who wanted to do right by this particular problem and do some really important research. The congressional investigation into the shootdown led to a directive to the Office of Naval Research to fund a six-year program of research that would focus on improving the human factor design of combat systems for these kinds of ships, as well as improving the training and human performance of the sailors that were involved in the shootdown.

In the Combat Information Center (CIC) in these combat ships, there are at least 40 personnel who are working extremely hard to manage the day-to-day understanding of the common operational picture of what's happening outside around their battle group. Even today, you can see that these battleships are extremely important to defending freedom around the world. It took a lot of work between the human factor scientists and the training research scientists on our end, in a collaborative effort, to identify what the research questions were, because at the time in 1990—today we've built on all of that research and have some great programs—but back then, we didn't have much to go on. There was some significant work that the Army had done on decision-making under stress and teamwork, but in terms of studying it in a situation where you have all these technology interfaces that the warfighters were using in the ship, there really weren't any studies of that.

So we embarked on a very large program of research that ONR (Office of Naval Research) oversaw, and our specific piece of it was for training and decision-making and developing performance under stress, specifically focusing on team performance. We had Dr. J. Kenna Bowers and Dr. Eduardo Salis, who were the architects of this research program. We had many academic scientists and small businesses who had been working on these problems for a number of years, and it coalesced into a program and research design where we worked eventually to have combat teams that were in training facilities, like at Surface Warfare Officer School in Rhode Island, to help us run scenarios similar to the kinds that were encountered in the Vincennes Incident with shooting down a potential airliner or possibly a threat. We studied their performance, developed training strategies to improve performance, to improve leadership, and really focused on decision-making under stress for teams and improving team performance. There was a huge effort going on in the 1990s to establish principles and guidelines for understanding human behavior at the time and making changes to that.

Yeah, and this is, like you said, there was some research there, but nothing comprehensive. This became a multi-year, I think you said six-year, study to figure all this stuff out. I want you to jump into some of the stuff that was found with this incident—what you guys found. But before that, can you quickly define what you mean when you say "stress"? You're studying stress, but what does that mean in the context of what we're talking about? Because it's a term—"I feel stressed" or "this is stressful"—then there's decision-making under stress. So let's get a clear operational definition, if you can, of what you mean by stress.

Stress is a combination of information overload, time pressure, the demand to perform at a very high level. In this particular instance, we focused on the time pressure that the warfighters are under—the sailors—because when you detect an air threat or a surface threat, an air threat, it's only a matter of less than a minute to respond if it becomes a threat to your battle group. So we had to really focus on that kind of a problem, and we talked to Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) about their experiences with it, how they reacted to it.

The reaction to stress is typically, you become a funnel; your attention becomes overly focused on what you're doing. You kind of lose track of time and what other people are doing. In particular, when you're working as a team, it's one of a number of really important team activities: monitoring your team members, understanding what they're doing in relation to what you're doing, and the critical timing of taking action against a threat, whether you're in a ship or you're in a ground patrol. You have to know where and what everybody in your team is really doing so you can anticipate what they need, provide backup, correct errors, and do those really good teamwork behaviors. If you're not able to do that because you're under stress, you're distracted, and you're not focused, all that breaks down. Your good teamwork breaks down, good decision-making breaks down. It kind of freezes, and people don't know what to do. So that's what it is.

Yeah. So you're talking about a lot of influences and contributing factors. You're bringing in everything. Obviously, time is always huge. When you say "60 seconds," I don't care what it is, if you only have 60 seconds to make a decision, it's just not a lot of time, especially when the stakes are this high. But then you've got your level of experience, your roles and responsibilities, you've got the communication issues just generally that all humans have. Then you've got all these things.

What I see happen—because you guys obviously didn't come into this saying, "Hey, we're the scientists, this is how things work." You went to the SMEs, the people with the actual knowledge, who've been doing this, and tried to unpack it. I see that done well sometimes, sometimes done poorly, where it's like, "We've got to unpack this expertise." Because what happens is, part of what you're talking about is my cognitive load when I'm in that situation—how much I can process at a time, how much I can attend to. It's actually a lot more finite and smaller than most humans think it is.

But for example, driving is a perfect example. We've all been driving our whole life, so we think that we're operating at a level that we know what's going on, because we kind of do, the more experience we have, the more time I have to understand things. But if I'm doing that and talking on the phone or sending a text message or something, all that goes out the window. Even on a completely sunny day, I'm driving the speed limit, I'm actually now outrunning my headlights. I'm outrunning what the human brain can technically process in its environment, and I don't even recognize that part. So one of the things I notice is that we're already starting at a point because people go, "Yeah, well, this is my job, I was trained to do it." I was like, "Yes, you were trained to do this and apply this skill set and whatever you have to do." However, you are already operating, even under normal circumstances, past the point of human cognition a little bit. Does that make sense, or is that accurate?

Yeah, one of the things that I had firsthand experience with is when the Combat Information Center (CIC) Operators are sitting at their consoles and doing their work, they have headsets and they communicate through those, and they also use chat and other forms of communication, at this point, I think. But there are channels of communication that are different in your right ear than in your left ear. You have to monitor them because people are talking to you, and you have to communicate to other people through your different channels. This channel switching, and this requirement to listen to two things at the same—everybody knows you cannot really pay attention to two voices at the same time and what they're saying differently to you. So you either hear one thing or you're going to hear the other. But these guys and women have developed a skill to be able to manage that. But with more time pressure and stress, it becomes even more difficult to monitor those channels. So just that one thing alone, I put those headsets on, and I would listen to the voice traffic in the real ship, onboard the real ships, and I could only take it for maybe five or ten minutes. It's just overwhelming. So you have to build up this skill over time so that can be a real challenge and quite stressful.

So with this overarching theme of today, of why high-functioning teams fail, what are the behavioral problems that are typical? Coming out of this research and everything you've done, what are the typical things that you saw in this specific incident and then over time? What always seems to be top of mind going into something? It's going to be a few of these things.

Well, we divided our study into looking at decision-making, teamwork, and then stress management. Those are the three legs of the stool that we eventually focused on—those are the categories of competency areas. When I talk about decision-making, that involves the team. You've got the leaders making decisions, and really good teams will have a tempo to them. They understand the task, how they have to perform it, the information that they're required to do their job, and the information they have to pass. They call it the "detect to engage" sequence in combat.

So there's this process of identifying a threat, prioritizing your threat, determining what you're going to do, making a plan, and then executing a plan. Poor performance ends up being a lot of chatter. People really aren't talking about the problem; they're just sort of chitchatting or not really focused on it. They're not passing the right information, or they're not even detecting that something is wrong. That's this part that you guys really focus on, which is this advanced situational awareness. You have to have an awareness among your team members, or what we call Team Situational Awareness (Team SA), where you are observing your environment, you're looking for problems, you're identifying anomalies, you're passing that information onto the proper chain of command so they can build a better operational picture. If you don't do that, the very first thing is people—they might over-chatter, but sometimes nothing is being said. Sometimes I'll be listening to a novice team, and I'll think to myself, "Oh, they're not talking to each other!" If you don't talk to each other, nothing's going to happen. So that's a really big problem: passing information. If you don't pass information at the right time to the proper people, the information is going to get lost, and your time window continues to shrink. So that's a really big one: the communications around the decision-making process.

There's also a planning process where you prioritize what you're going to do, and then you're planning what you're going to do. There's this advanced planning process that really good teams can do, and it means anticipating what might happen and making the right assumptions about what could happen. There are a lot of alternative explanations for why there might be a threat or whether it's even a threat. This is where it came in with the Vincennes. There were people who just had this bias toward saying it was a threat because there were certain pieces of information they were looking at, but they weren't putting the picture together. The leadership on the USS Vincennes wasn't really in a position to take it in and build the operational picture. Ships outside of that, in the battle group, were communicating with the Vincennes, and they were saying, "Hey, that's just an airliner. That's not a threat. That's not a fighter plane that you think it is. So shut this down!" This process of making the wrong assumptions can really create a problem for decision-making. Assuming that "this is the way this is," people see the picture a certain way, and they're not taking in the information from other knowledgeable, expert team members and questioning whether they should really be doing something that could be life-threatening to civilians. So that's another piece of the problem.

Finally, just making a decision and actually taking action, and not giving yourself enough time to be able to make the right decision. So your timing and the way in which you execute decisions—making priorities, giving orders, and making recommendations—those kinds of things don't happen in a poor team. They simply sort of let things pass by, and they don't think it's important. So those are some of them.

And you're bringing up that these are things that happen in all kinds of different situations. That one's powerful. So, someone had the right answer in this bigger overarching team: "No, hey, this is a passenger jet." That's no different than, say, two or three police officers on an intense scene where something's happening, and someone's going, "Oh, this guy is fine, he doesn't have a weapon," or something, but then from my perspective, I'm already in thinking this. And so that can play out in a number of different ways.

There are certain—because you're talking about this, the military uses the OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) a lot, for John Boyd's OODA Loop. It's kind of like this oversimplified thing. It's just become a tagline. But John Boyd is a genius, and he was thinking on levels that I don't think most humans can think at. But it's sort of become this oversimplified thing, because you're talking about individual performance restrictions that I have, cognitive barriers, whether that's the information or my level of training or experience. But then that can become exponentially worse as there's a team involved, because now there's everyone suffering from those same things individually. And now, if we're not communicating across from each other, there's a big one. Like you said, you've seen some novice teams where there are no communications, and then there are some higher-functioning teams where they've got really good communications. I've seen even some of the Tier One military units doing specific things where they almost never talk, because they've trained and rehearsed so much together that they can look at the other teammate and know what he's thinking.

So that's an elite level, but it's only—they're still limited by what they can and cannot do. They're still limited by information processing. They're still limited by their channel capacity and what they do. They just for this specific thing, they've done it so many times and worked together that they don't need as much of that communication. There's less noise in the environment because there are only a few things that they need to focus on. So it's not really like they're superpower brains. It's like they've just reduced all this cognitive load and gotten rid of so much noise over time that they're allowed to focus on those things. But that's really difficult to do. It takes a lot of time and a lot of resources and energy to get there.

So this stress and these different cognitive factors and these behavioral-based factors then affect my coordination and communication across those teams. It affects how I'm not just individually operating, but operating as a team. You kind of said something right there: "It's going to lead to a wrong assumption." That's the biggest thing that I've seen. Can you elaborate on your experience in that, or what you've seen? What happens? How does it get to the point of failure? What are typical things I see and how people make those wrong assumptions?

People are really pre-programmed to see things a certain way. That's how our brains work, and there are different kinds of biases that people adhere to. There's the confirmation bias, where you think that if it's something you're thinking it is, and you see something that confirms your bias, then you're likely to move in that direction and think that's how you would explain something or make a decision. In some cases, you could blame confirmation bias on what happened with the Vincennes. There were threats in the vicinity of the ship every day, and they were coming from a certain country. They thought it was very easy to fall into this assumption that when they looked at the information on their radar screens, they mistook it for being a fighter jet instead of an airliner.

It was as simple as, "Well, the actual aircraft is ascending. It's leaving an airport and it's going up to a high altitude, just like any jetliner would." But in this case, they had accidentally honed in on an aircraft that looked like it was at an Iranian military base, and they thought this aircraft was descending and coming toward them. That was old information; they hadn't really updated it. But the thing is, that information spread and became the focus. So there's the bias, and it was immune to people who were saying, "That's not what it is! That's not what it is! We're telling you that's something completely different! Don't do what you're doing!" And that information was ignored. So that's a really problematic—it happens to all of us. Sometimes you'll be looking at something, and you think you see something, and it's not really that thing. Later you're like, "What was I thinking?" So it's very hard to break that, especially when you're in a group of people who are confirming that bias, providing information; you look for information to confirm the bias.

Yeah, and then, like you said, that spreads throughout the team and it spreads throughout the operation. I'm thinking of so many different law enforcement examples in this where it's so prevalent. Even what you're saying, it's like, "Well, we ended up shooting and killing this guy because he was going to attack us." And it's like, "But he was running from you for the last half an hour. He was trying to get away, and then the situation changed, and then we've created this inevitability and forced it into this binary situation." Sometimes—and it's all because everything you're talking about, these are the contributing factors that led to this incident. You can talk about the geopolitical climate and what was going on, and the threatened environment, and how things work there—that's complex enough. But these are the ones, in a sense, that we're adding to it and sometimes needlessly complicating a situation. But they're also, I look at it as, these are also the things that we can control in some ways. I think that was the big part of this research, if I'm not mistaken.

Yes, we had a very large program focused on what we were calling "critical thinking" to counter these cognitive biases, which were, in some way, forced on the sailors because you're looking at equipment, you're looking at radar displays, and you have to make inferences about that information. They're not perfectly clear what it is. But when we watched really talented and skilled teams, listened to them talk, it's a common practice for really good teams to speak their critical thinking. They'd see a problem, there would be an aircraft on radar, and immediately it would be reported, and the potential level of threat would be reported. Another team member would pick that up and confirm that information, or they would come back and say, "There's not enough information about it. What do you think it is?" And all the other team members would contribute to building a clear picture of what that potential threat or non-threat might be. Because everybody can bring information to the table that's valid, that is drawn from their own radar systems, from their own experience, because they've been in that particular place for months at a time. So many of the same things are happening that they get very accustomed to recognizing and validating and making sure that they've got the right information about it, and then making sure that information gets sent up the chain of command. So it's really wonderful hearing the best teams simply being—team members have to be assertive. You have to be assertive with the information that you have. It has to be heard. You have to know that it's been heard. So there's a lot of acknowledgment among the team members that they've heard it, they agree or maybe they disagree, but it's a very fluid and easy process to do once you allow that to happen in a high-performing team.

Yeah, and that just reminded me of an experience working when I was a young Lance Corporal (LCpl) in the Marine Corps, my first deployment, working with a specialized unit in the military. We were working together on a raid that was happening, and we obviously had a smaller element and responsibility level about security and stuff like this. They were going over the plan, and then I'm like, "Hey, hey, what about this?" And they kind of hear me talking to someone, and they stopped like, "Wait, what?" And I was like, "Oh, well, I know this about that area." And because they knew they had the best stuff, the best training, the best assets, but they knew that there was mutual respect like, "You know the ground truth better than we do. We're not walking these streets every single day." And it was really powerful to me to see that as a young Marine, because normally it's like, "Hey, shut up, do what you're told," or, "Hey, don't worry about that." And these guys were like immediately, "Hang on, what is that?" Because they're looking for—they're actively looking for that little piece of pocket lint or piece of information that could completely—because they understand it could completely change the outcome of the situation or the trajectory. The information's there, they just didn't know it.

And so I see that a lot. Now you're talking about different team dynamics about, "Am I creating this culture where we can talk about this stuff and open it?" But there are so many different, like we said, contributing factors to this. Can you elaborate on critical thinking? That term is used a lot, and you gave some examples of what that meant, but what does it mean in these situations where it's decision-making in extremis? Lives are on the line, there are minutes or seconds to make decisions. What is critical thinking in that moment? Because I've heard that all the time: "Hey, you've got to think critically." People just say, "Hey, you've got to think critically," and I'm like, "What do I just furl my brow and think harder?" What does that mean? What does it mean by critical thinking in these situations?

It's interesting. There's a research scientist that we had on our team, Dr. Marvin Cohen, who is just so brilliant. He and his colleagues set about doing what they called a cognitive task analysis to understand what expert decision-makers in these kinds of situations do in terms of their critical thinking. In other words, it's time-critical; you have maybe a minute to make a decision. How does your critical thinking process work? They studied airline pilots and they studied battle commanders in the Army. Human beings have to use shortcuts. There's no way you can make a decision without having some kind of shortcut from your experience.

But experienced decision-makers actually, if they have a little bit of time, and they know they have a little bit of time, they can extract more information about the problem to get a more accurate understanding of what the conditions are, what the context is that would be driving a threat towards them. So they look at the geopolitical situation, they take good, validated information from their environment, from their teams, from what they're looking at, to build an accurate picture of what would be driving a threat. If anything comes up that's what they call a "basis for assessment," the basis for assessment is all of this information versus this information. There are things that would run against an assumption that maybe it's a threat. So what are those things? The weaker the argument is against the threat and the stronger the argument is for a threat is how they weigh or use that information to make their decision. And certainly, if you're doing this under pressure, you have to be pretty quick at it, and these experts do get pretty quick at it. So that's a really important factor: they actually, in their minds—this isn't something they have on a computer screen, and we worked on designing computer interfaces for the basis for assessment, and I think the Navy has adopted some of those ideas—but it's really the inner workings of your brain trying to be more balanced and have a balanced perspective as opposed to just jumping to one of those biases that would make it so much easier to make a decision.

And that's the biggest—the easier to make a decision—that's kind of it right there, because that's kind of, in a sense, how we're wired. Our brain is constantly anticipating; it wants to anticipate, it doesn't want to be surprised. So it's anticipating likely outcomes that I'm in as I'm going through my environment, especially in these situations. And you brought up this, what I look at it as, is if I'm trying to make a decision on this stuff, I have to be able to conceptualize everything that I know, given this context that I'm in right now. I have to say, "Given what I know right now," and you even said it, "a basis for assessment." We call that a baseline, "What are we starting with?"

We had a great—we had a law enforcement officer in one of our courses, and he does a lot of interdiction work, so he's out there with this very specific role of what he's looking for and what he's doing. He came up, and it was the second day of training or something like that, and he had this great comment. He's like, "I've been training my newer folks all wrong." And I'm like, "What do you mean?" He goes, "I've been teaching them everything that I know and what to look for and all of these indicators that I've seen before in my past, and I'm really trying to get these different examples, just like you guys give examples and tell stories, and this is what I saw and this is what keyed into." He goes, "I'm realizing now, I think that's the exact wrong way to do it. What I should be doing is teaching them to get really, really good at identifying what's normal, what's typical, what should I expect to see in a number of different environments, in a number of different domains, in a number of different situations? How do I get really, really good at normal? Because then once I perfect that baseline, that basis for comparison, the incongruent signals, those anomalies, those indicators, whatever it is, they'll almost pop out automatically. I won't have to look for them. They will appear to me, because it's going to be different than what I was taught or trained." Now, it's going to be similar in a lot of ways, but I can't take a photo and memorize a photo and then say, "Go find that out there," because it's going to be different. Or I can't just know, I can't just study the USS Vincennes and everything that went wrong and all the different factors, then go, "Okay, I got this, I understand it. I can go into my next situation," because it's going to lay out, or it's going to evolve a little bit differently, and so my brain might not always make those connections.

So that's kind of the way I look at it when you bring up this basis for assessment. Is that typically something you see in these situations and in all this research? Is that where things go wrong? Is it like we're starting with this because of the role? I'm already looking for threats, I'm looking for this, I'm looking for things to go wrong.

Yes, I think it's ignoring things that are important and focusing on things that aren't necessarily important, or are a minor player in the actual overall picture. This is where being part of a team and having an expert team really comes into play, because it's nearly impossible to do anything like that by yourself. You really have to surround yourself with people who are providing you with accurate information. You can't see everything yourself, and you can't always parse out what the right information is and what's wrong. I mean, sometimes you're on your own, like if you're a police officer, yes, you could be on your own. I'm talking about a military situation where a lot of combat is going on around you, and you really do need more people to help you figure out what's going on. So you can really get lost in the minutiae and not really bring yourself out looking at the big picture because of the level of stress that you're under. Unfortunately, I think I've seen more examples of poor team performance than I have seen really good team performance, but when you see really good team performance, it's impossible to not recognize it.

The thing about critical thinking, the basis for assessment, is that with time pressure, good decision-makers will be able to, as I said before, take a little bit of time. If you can free up enough time to make a better decision, everything's going to work out a lot better all along. Taking your time actually means having team members anticipate what information is needed to make a good decision. So everybody's trained to look out for the right information and to challenge the poor information, and they filter that for you as a decision-maker. They send that up to you in the chain of command, and that information's been filtered in a way that is not going to throw you off or put you on the back foot. What can really mess up that communication, that flow from the lower level up to the higher level, is if the decision-maker, the leader, is basically trying to drag information out of people. Like, "Tell me what you're seeing. What does that look like?" You've got to let your team do their job, and you have to provide them with priorities and guidance. But the worst thing that you can do as a team leader is to just push information out, to pull information from your team members, and prevent them from doing their work in getting information up to you. So the flow needs to be from the lower to the higher levels, and team leaders can't really be the bottleneck preventing that information from getting to them. You have to trust your team. That's the whole issue of trust. Trust means, "I trust that you're going to give me good information because I've been training you how to do that, and I'm not going to push that information away. I'm going to let you give that information to me."

Yeah, and that's a big one. What we like to call high-functioning teams operate at the "Speed of Trust." It's just, "I know I'm taking you at your word that what you're saying is true and what you believe, and I can listen to you." And I still have to put my own filters on things, but I'm not going to sit here, "Well, why is that?" What you're getting into, Greg, I do want to throw to you because this is, I think, the longest we've gone on a podcast without you talking. I know that's only because it's Joan. But what you're really talking about is almost not focusing on what I need to look for or what these certain things are; it's asking the right questions. Because when it gets to taking this from—we'll get into it in a minute here—taking what we've learned, what we know, and putting that into some sort of training, what are the takeaways and how do I get better at those things? But everyone wants to know what the answers are. Everyone wants to know the checklist or what do I need to do? It's kind of like we always approach it: you've got to know what questions to ask. You have to know what the right questions are to get you to a more reasonable assumption or conclusion so that you can make a better decision. Because if I ask the right questions, then I get a better feel for what the actual problem is, which may be different than how humans communicate. This communication issue—we talk forever just on that about how humans communicate, and maybe even especially in this, what they say and how they say it, and the language you use—it all frames how we process that. There's a bunch of complexity in there that we haven't even really addressed, but it's extremely powerful. But I do want to throw to you, Greg, because you've been quiet, and I get nervous when Greg gets quiet, so I don't know.

The reason I'm quiet is if I had a microphone, I would body slam it and drop the mic because you guys have epitomized exactly what my comments would have been. Everybody that knows me knows that I'm fascinated with Joan's brain and the way that she thinks and the research that she's done. So when you have an expert on, you let the expert talk. I'll limit my remarks; I'll make them real fast. Joan, I love you. The reason you're hearing similarities is because in the late '70s and early '80s, I was inspired in my work by Dr. Marty Seligman, and Seligman led me into the world of Eduardo Salis, who led me to Bowers, Bar, Tannen, and Cohen. All of these were at the forefront of their decision-making under stress research. The problem was, there was nobody in combat work that was doing that.

I say tie this directly back to The Human Behavior Podcast we just finished on the 21-foot rule, because you'll say, "Oh my gosh, that's what he meant by that!" That's exactly what it is. It takes a catastrophic incident for us all to look down and in, and then to conduct the research. So you're talking about stress in extremis, ambiguity. And I'm saying for the street-level people that are still listening—and I know you are, Joan's fascinating to listen to—we're talking about playing Jeopardy with the timer counting down loud, and in addition to that, instead of having two other opponents, you have 40. And in addition to that, you're riding a unicycle in a minefield. And in addition to that, you're trying to sing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" with the audience. Now, that's the level of complexity that's in police work, that's being a school resource officer, that's being on a hostage scenario, whether you're HR or whether you're a cop on the scene. These things happen, and space-time is different. You train for those situations, but now you're in the situation, and it's just not exactly the same.

What happens is, I want people to remember on the Vincennes why it's such an important study and why Joan's such an important guest. The Vincennes is no different than what happened in Oxford. It's no different than what happened at Robb Elementary. You had high-functioning people. There was nobody on the Vincennes that didn't care. There was nobody on the Vincennes that was drunk at their duty station. There was nobody that just said, "Today I'm going to make an arbitrary rule and stick by it." What happened is you had high-functioning, experienced veterans that were put into a situation, and one or two of them saw it slightly differently and stood down and didn't comment. And then what happened is that starts adding—that's like carburetor icing, it's like the thing that brings down an airplane, a little bit of frozen area now manifests itself greater and greater, and now you don't have lift and thrust anymore. And it did that in a minute. When you see police shootings, when you see a school shooting, when you see these situations that we have the highest level of risk in, this is the type of critical decision that needs to be had. So going backwards, taking this giant step backwards to take a look at this situation, I think, is uniquely important.

If I can just say one more thing, Brian, and I'll shut up and get back to Joan because I absolutely love listening to her. I was in a situation, I sent you a video, Joan, you might not have seen the video. I was in a Southern airport; it's a huge airport. There were many people around, and the fire alarm went off. I started videoing as I was heading for the fire exit. I was the only one heading for a fire exit, and what happened is right in front of me, that I got on the video, the jet bridge, because of the fire alarm, locked where the people get into the jet bridge, and it stopped all the people from getting on the plane. So you had a dozen people trapped in the jet bridge with this fire alarm that was going. And who is trapped there? The first people to get on the plane, which are those that need more time: with the Global Entry, frequent flyers. So you had the highest-level trained people that fly all the time that were jammed in with the wheelchair person and the old person and everything else. And all I saw was fear and indecision. Why? Because nobody had anticipated, "This is a likely outcome." Nobody looked at that and had planned for it: "What types of things may we encounter?" And it's exactly like the Vincennes. The stakes were different, not as many people died, but by the same token, the lessons learned are cogent and as important then as they are important today. Would you agree with that?

Absolutely. Yes, the translation of the findings from all of this research are tremendous. They are generalizable to many other situations that we see today. I just think there are really good training solutions for dealing with this. One of the things that we focused on was something we called an "event-based approach to training," where we created realistic scenarios to train with, and those scenarios made sure that they had events in them that would elicit the behaviors that we wanted people to practice and train to. We created these scenarios so they addressed these "black swan" problems or situations that don't occur very often, but when they do, it's do or die. So we didn't pick scenarios that would only happen in a hundred years, but the Vincennes was never anticipated to be something that would ever happen. It was important to focus on those kinds of problems, and we learned that those kinds of encounters were a lot more common, actually. There were other incidents in the Persian Gulf that occurred with an American ship getting hit with a mine that had been set. There was the USS Stark incident, I think that one had been fired on, and we see that today, ships are being fired on in the Red Sea. So there are really good solutions for training that can be used. There are existing training strategies that can be used to improve teamwork, to improve decision-making.

So that's kind of the "so what" I want to get out of all of this. I mean, there's a lot you would cover in your career, but it's kind of what can we do with this information? You just talked about this event-based approach because I want—how can I use this stuff in training? These limits of cognitive performance have been studied and been shown. The DOD has so much research in all these different areas, whether it's individual and team performance and in different domains. So what can I do? How do I use it? How can I mitigate barriers? What are some of the indicators I need to look out for? Knowing, from your experience, what are those things? How do I use this?

One of the most important things about training for mitigating these problems is to have a really effective After Action Review (AAR). It's a diagnostic process that teams use to go through what they did during a particular training scenario, whether it's a simulation in a computer system or if it's a live exercise. That After Action Review has to have a number of things happen for people to learn how to improve their performance. One of them is when you have this event-based approach to training, you use that as your After Action Review baseline. You work your team through what happened, what they remembered happened, and how it related to their decision-making and their teamwork so they can focus on what the consequences of poor performance are and set goals to improve their performance on those specific types of behavior.

So, for training teams, if you're really focusing on team training, there are four dimensions of teamwork: information exchange, supporting behavior, communication, and what we call initiative leadership. Each of those dimensions has specific team behaviors that are critical to good performance. In the context of a scenario, whether it's a military scenario or a school shooting scenario, those critical incidents that occurred in those scenarios become the center of discussion among the team members to talk about what they thought happened, what did happen that went well, what didn't go well, and what they could improve on in terms of those four dimensions of teamwork. That instantaneously improves your tactical performance. We know from research that teamwork processes improve; tactical performance improves. At the end of the AAR, the idea is to set goals and continue running through critical incident scenarios with these event-based situations. It's important to be able to observe what the teams are doing during their training exercises. It's important to observe the kinds of behaviors that you're looking for, and those behaviors are collected by trainers who can run through the After Action Review and provide feedback to the team members while they're having these important discussions about what they want to improve on. So it's a nice back-and-forth dialogue between instructors and trainees, all because they're really focused on learning to do a better job. It's a proven process, and I would like to see it implemented more often. The military does use this approach, and they have for many years improved on their approaches based on research. So there's research-based science that informs the way the military does training, and I think it's just something that should be leveraged in other places.

Yeah, I agree with that. A lot of times, the process for that isn't as formalized as it should be. In a lot of situations, it's just, "Okay, let's sit around and talk about what happened." A lot of times, we focus on the wrong things in those AARs, especially when you're talking about law enforcement work or any investigations into these big major incidents like the school shootings. It's basically like, "All right, who's to blame?" This is not helpful. This does not help going forward. We're just assigning blame that makes us feel better, and we can point to this person and say they screwed it all up. It's like, no, no, no, there were a lot of organizational issues, policy issues, legal issues, communication issues, issues of resources and resource management. There's so much, and we don't want to get into the complexity of it because it's hard, and it's really hard. But everything you just talked about, especially with that model and having those discussions, that's actually very easy to do at a very low level. It's not—I mean, I do that with my family. "Okay, here's why you freaked out over this." "All right, and then you can be mad, that's fine, but you're not allowed to be mean to Mommy." No, that part was where you went wrong. Being upset, I don't care if you're upset, that's fine. You're not in control of your emotions, so that's going to happen to you. But this part's acceptable, this part isn't. It seems that it's informal, but it's really not, and that's where the learning occurs.

You're talking about things that any team anywhere can control and get better at. You don't need to have a million-dollar training budget to ask the right questions and modify your policies and procedures and your tactics. Doing those and asking the questions, like you just said, it's proven that you're actually going to get better tactically. You're going to make better decisions. You're going to utilize the training that you already have at a higher level than you did before, because you're getting rid of a lot of the potential barriers to success. You're addressing the foundational issues that affect all humans in every situation, whether it's something as extreme as, "I have 60 seconds to decide whether or not this is an aircraft that's going to blow up my ship," or, "I've got to figure out which kid I need to focus my resources on in the school because he's having the most difficulty." It doesn't matter what those situations are.

I'm wondering, in all of your experience, are there certain things, are there certain times when you've walked in or you've seen something, and you already know right off the bat, "Here's what likely happened," or, "Here's what the breakdowns were," because those are the consistent breakdowns? And then what are those key takeaways out of this? What are those topical things if you can think of those top three? I hate doing that; everyone's like, "Give me the one thing, give the three things," and it's really difficult to do. But I know, like, I'll give you an example: when I go into work with a team, a unit, whatever law enforcement agency, private sector, whatever, I have a feeling right off the bat, sometimes even before we get there, just how they communicate, whether or not this is going to be a tough one, or, "Hey, this is a high-functioning team, they're on the same page." My own indicators. But I'm curious what yours are or what you've seen.

Well, one thing is, this was discovered in the study of pilots and co-pilots, which kind of predated the Vincennes Incident but pretty much has been a parallel area of research for many years. That is, really good teams, whether they're just two people or more, they take advantage of the downtime to plan and to provide guidance for what they're expecting to do. So plan, plan, plan. There's a lot of communication for good teams. They're always talking about what needs to be done and how they're going to manage that, what roles and responsibilities are going to be. That's really critical to see. If you don't see them talking to each other, if they just kind of hang out and not do anything, look at their cell phones or something, and they're not really doing any kind of critical planning, then that's a sign. It could just be a sign of being a novice team.

Sometimes there's the problem of leaders thinking that they're all-knowing and all-seeing and not really encouraging the people who report to them to be more open and honest and assertive, and reinforcing assertiveness in their team members, because that's where you build trust, and you're willing to trust what people are saying to you. So that's part of it too, is building that trust. So leaders are always good. Really good leaders are great at providing guidance and setting priorities, whether they're going into a scenario or even, of course, during training. Sometimes they'll be like, "All right, stop, stop, stop, stop. This is what I need you to do. I want you to do this. I want you to do that," even if it's like positioning yourself in a certain place. When we were working with infantry squads, they would be making their way through a training village, and you'd be seeing and hearing the squad leaders say, "Okay, I want you right over there," or, "I want you to go around that building." Physical placement to get the best picture of what's going on. So guidance is really important in that.

Another really important one is teams to look for—that supporting behavior. People who are willing to take over doing something when it's not necessarily their primary job because another team member can't do it. So even in the planning phases, good teams will say, "Well, if I can't get to this place by this time, I know that you can. So if you get there before me, that's okay." This planning process means being able to figure out where team members agree that, "I can help you doing this," "You can help me doing that," and accepting support, accepting backup from somebody without getting upset about it. That's another one. And then just using really good—

Yeah, that goes right to what we talk about all the time: educating for certainty and training for the uncertainty. I mean, that speaks volumes. I want to interject, only I have to step out, Brian and Joan. It was wonderful being on the call with you. Please don't slow down because of me. Joan, one more thing about what you are talking about is research. I make an admonition again out there: I hear "evidence-based" all the time, but evidence-based can be anecdotal evidence, and then we all are led to believe it. That's a form of bias. Research is the tool because then you sometimes uncover stuff you didn't expect or didn't want to know. Then you can truly, like to Brian's point, asking the right questions, then you conduct the research, now you have a clear path or at least a way ahead. It might not be the most clear path, but at least it's a way ahead to confirm your suspicions. So, thanks, Joan. I'll see you again. Thanks, Brian, for allowing me to jump out.

Yeah, I know you've got to jump out, but yeah, I've got a couple more things I want to run past you, Joan. But thank you, Greg.

Honored to be on the show, you guys. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Greg. Joan, we have—I try to put myself for those folks that really enjoy learning about this stuff and wanting to implement some of these things—I'm listening to this podcast episode, we're listening to this conversation, it's, "How do I really do this at my level? What are some of those important things?" You're giving planning and prioritizing tasks, and roles and responsibilities, and obviously there's a huge leadership component. Are there any other general takeaways that you try to get across to any of the folks that you've worked with or done research on before that continue to pop up every single time in these situations that are like these low-calorie things that don't take a lot to fix? I'm trying to get some more because this has been incredible. I've got a page of notes here, and I want to get some of this stuff into our Patreon subscribers. I'll have some of this summarized as well as some of the takeaways.

But the complexity of decision-making is huge. There's so much there. Then you've got different ways of looking at it, especially now with this rapid adoption of technology and different technological solutions. Everyone wants the mathematical formula for arriving at really good conclusions and getting the best answer by inputting and analyzing all of this data. And there are folks even within the decision science community that differ on this, which is one of the things where I like a lot of what Gary Klein does because he's a big proponent of expertise, meaning you've got to go to the experts in these fields. In a sense, they build up this intuitive decision-making process over time, and you've got to unpack that. You're never going to build some sort of statistical model on what the best answer is just by putting in all this information because it's just that—it's a model, it's not the real thing. Unless you're at the real thing, it's hard to do.

Because of all that technological stuff and the newest data science that's trying to come up with these things, I see it a lot in healthcare too, where they're trying to just take all the information and have the computer go, "Hey, test for this. It might be this, it might be that." And the really good doctors are still beating those machines, but sometimes they can go wrong, right? The expert can go wrong. So it's like, I have this level of expertise, but I can still get it wrong sometimes, but it's still really important to unpack what I have. I see it as it gets confusing for someone at the user end to go, "Hey, big-brain scientist, just tell me what I need to do and I'll do it." Like, I have no problem adopting some new strategy if you're telling me, but it's kind of not that simple. So what can I do, listening to this episode, to operationalize this information, contextualize it in my domain? That was a really hard question; there's a lot in there.

Well, I know Gary talks about you have to go to the experts to unpack it, but I don't think you have to go to—those people are rare. But I think that my experience is you go to people who do the training, who've been in the job for a while, and we call it a critical incident assessment. I think you can ask people who've been in the job for maybe three or four years, "What problems have you encountered that are hard? It's hard to make a decision, and you're working in a team, and you've got a lot of different things going on that are creating problems? It's a stressful situation. Tell me the top most important problems that you have to address with this kind of a job." And the picture pretty much pops out.

The reason why I focus on teamwork behavior so much is that what you can do with the four teamwork dimensions is ask people, "Tell me incidents or situations that are important to you." So, for example, with leadership, "Can you give me examples that are situations that are difficult to maintain leadership?" And you can build some training around that. So you can say, "Well, if we had—give me a scenario." You can use a tabletop situation, you can just create a tabletop scenario where people sit around the table, and you have that scenario set up so you can work through it and say, "Okay, at this point in time, this is what's happening. This is where people are. They're not communicating with each other, or they're not providing backup or support. People aren't prioritizing or providing guidance from a leadership perspective." "What can we do with this kind of an incident or critical situation to improve on that?" And it really just means people sitting around a table and discussing the pros and cons and the problems that they encounter, and ways in which that can get them back on track.

So I don't think you have to—people have to be open to each other and be willing to take criticism because there are opportunities for people to fail at what they're doing. They have to open up. A really easy thing for a leader to do is to start by saying, "Hey, here's where I made a mistake." We found that with the Navy teams and with our Army and Marine Corps teams when we set up the discussion to where the leader kicks off by saying, "Hey, I feel like I made a mistake by not providing information or not providing guidance at this particular point in time, and this is what I should have done or what this is what I can do." Even that kicks it off, and people are so much more willing to join in the discussion than if the team leader just points at people and says, "What did you think went wrong? What did you think went wrong?" It just creates this barrier to discussion. So breaking down the barriers and being more open to admitting mistakes is a really big deal.

Yeah, and that alone is a whole podcast episode on how to do that. But there are so many—it instantly reminded me of this training event out at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms when I was in the Marine Corps. I had my sniper team, and it was a big company-size infantry company maneuver exercise with indirect fire, so there are mortars and then there are heavy machine guns. We're up in this position, and we provide some, with the Barrett .50 caliber rifle, some long-distance stuff. We don't really have a big role in it, but we're part of the observation to help call them. But what happens is, you have to plan all of that stuff out. So the company Executive Officer (EXO), this First Lieutenant, put all this time and effort into creating this very complex, highly organized fires plan. I had to go in there and sit on the brief, and he made sure he walked me through everything they're doing, all the plan, just your normal pre-operational stuff. So he gives me the packet of information, everything that I need. I'm like, "Cool, got it."

He did a ton of work, all that planning, all that preparation, the briefing—everything's phenomenal. But then he decides that he didn't want to carry a full-size radio on his bag and only brought the smaller one. The problem was where he was during that operation, where he was going to be calling all that stuff in, he couldn't talk to anyone. He couldn't talk to the people he needed to. And because of our elevated position where we were, I was the only one who could coordinate all that stuff. So I'm sitting there with my team, and I'm getting my guys their practice. I'm like, "All right, here's where the set is. You see this, call it in." Because they knew how to do it; they just hadn't done it before. So I was like, "Go for it." We're calling in all the stuff that he's supposed to be doing, listening. But we're at such an advantage because we're not in the situation. We're not walking through this field where they just blew up this massive Bangalore mine to clear it, and they're coming through. We're not down in there; we're up, literally chilling. So we have this bird's-eye view.

Obviously, it was successful, and it went well, but that Marine was defeated after that. He felt so stupid. The company commander was super pissed about it, the battalion commander was upset like, "Hey, you did all this, and you couldn't even get this because of communications? This is—he should have known better!" So I ended up going during this debrief beforehand, talking to them, because they were talking me up and being like, "Hey, that was incredible, Sergeant Marren! You were able to do this, and if we hadn't been able to do this, this whole massive exercise would have been a waste." So they're kind of giving me the "attaboy," which naturally I want to take, but I was like, "Hey, look, if it hadn't been for the planning and the preparation and the briefing that that person did, and what they gave me, I never—I wouldn't have been able to do that. I'm happy to take credit for it, but I deserve zero credit. I was sitting up there, leaned up against my pack, comfortable, getting some sun, and having my guys call this in over the radio. I had the easiest job out of anyone here. And because they had planned and briefed me so well on it, I literally just had to follow a script. You could have put anyone there."

It goes to show you with all that stuff that went into that one: it was a great example of how you can have this single point of failure where you can have the greatest plan ever, and it goes wrong because you choose the wrong radio to use or something. But it's also an example of how everything goes right with the right planning and preparation and rehearsal. Absolutely, that's the key: being able to adapt because you've done that planning. That was a huge takeaway for me where I was like, "Oh man, this is how stupid mistakes can really come and get you." So I know he still got hammered for that, but he was hopefully able to resurrect some of the damage that he had to take or bear some of that hate and discontent they had for that guy for doing that. But it was just an example.

I really appreciate you coming on and talking about this stuff. Do you have any favorite resources or favorite things that people can check out or read up on or look into other than—because I'll put links to some of the TADMs and the Tactical Decision-Making Under Stress and the Small Unit Decision-Making, but those are scientific papers and research stuff, and so sometimes it gets pretty dry. But do you have any other resources that you recommend for trainers, for people that are folks that are like, "Hey, I love this stuff. I want to learn more. I want to learn how to implement this stuff. What can I do? Where else can I go for something like this?"

So, I think one of the best online websites—the agency that has a lot of this information is actually in the medical training domain. It's the United States Health Research Agency. I'll have to give you more information about it, but there's a program of training; it's called TeamSTEPPS (Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety), which is a version of what I was talking about today. It's not just—it's a generic kind of a team training program, but everything that I've talked about is really encapsulated on this website. It's TeamSTEPPS. You can Google it, and the website has videos, they have checklist tools, they have information, PowerPoint slides, a lot of background material on how to conduct this type of team training. It's not just—you don't have to just focus on medical teams, it's basically something that you can use on any kind of domain. So I would—that's one part. It's easy to get to; it's easy to understand and get to the right links for that. But I'll have to share any other written materials; I'll have to look them up and give you the links to those as well.

Yeah, please. And for those listening, I'll include those links in the episode details so folks have it if you're listening to this now. And then I'll also have a summary and some of the breakdown of what we talked about in printed form as well for our Patreon subscribers to get on and take a look at. But these are all great resources, and I really appreciate you coming on and sharing the knowledge and experience. I always want people to know that the science and the research is out there. We know what goes wrong. It's using it to your advantage to train for that. So train for those things that we know are going to hit in every situation in life that you're in, whether it's an argument with your family or a high-stakes hostage rescue situation, a pursuit. There are things that are going to affect you that you don't even really recognize that it's happening, and it's influencing the environment so much. So if I really get better even at the recognition of it, even at understanding how this stuff affects me, I can plan and train for it to mitigate some of it. You can't mitigate everything. There's never going to be a perfect thing where everything goes exactly to plan, but you can certainly strive towards that and get better at it.

So I really, really appreciate it, Joan. Do you have any final words for our listeners?

Well, thanks for having me on. It's really been a real pleasure, and I hope maybe to do it again sometime soon.

Yeah, we'll get some feedback from everyone, and if there's some specific stuff we want to talk to you about, we'd love to have you back on. But I thank you for coming on. Everyone for listening, again, there's more on the Patreon site. Reach out to us with any other questions, and don't forget that training changes behavior.