Rory Miller – Page 3 – Conflict Manager

Normalization of Deviance, Turkey Logic and the Insidiousness of Negative Reinforcement – Rory Miller

There is a golden time when any new organization begins. A time when you make your plans, make your contingency plans and try to anticipate and plan for any possible emergency. When a new jail is built (Corrections is my background) senior officers are called in to try to find ways to escape or make weapons. When an ambulance company writes their medical protocols or a hospital writes policy and procedure they set up redundant systems to make sure that medications and dosages are correct.

In most well-planned organizations, disasters rarely come from one person making a mistake or bad decision. When we were called out for a CERT (Corrections Emergency Response Team) operation and we intended to use less lethal weapons, the shooter, team leader and quartermaster would individually check:

The weapon to make sure it was a designated less lethal platform
The weapon’s chamber to make sure it was not loaded
The box of munitions to ensure the right designation (such as rubber bullets)
The box of munitions to verify the manufacturer’s approved safe range
Each munition to make sure it was actually what the box indicated

That probably seems excessive, but if someone had decided they were short weapons at the range AND had decided to use a designated “less-lethal” 12 ga as a regular weapon AND a shell had been left in the tube AND the weapon had been replaced without being checked, there would be the possibility of an accidental, lethal shooting.

The purpose of our procedures was to prevent this. And as such, it would take no less than seven mistakes for our agency to accidentally shoot someone with 00 buckshot when we intended to use a bean bag.

Normalization of deviance is a very unfortunate name for a very common phenomenon. It does not mean, in this context, behaviors once considered socially deviant moving to the mainstream. Normalization of deviance is when cutting corners becomes normal.

The safety protocols I listed above are onerous. They take time, they’re tedious and generally useless. They would not prevent an accident unless a series of other mistakes had been made to set up that accident, and a series that long is very unlikely. It is very, very easy to stop doing tedious, non-productive work.

Normalization of deviance. You run short of shotguns on range day, so you ignore policy and use one of the yellow-stocked “less lethal” designated weapons. Just this once. Just for the day. It’s a special circumstance. And nothing bad happens. Everything is inspected, no one gets hurt. No harm, no foul. The next time, it’s an easier decision. And soon, the policy is generally ignored. You get one more thing where the training officer says, “That’s what it says in the book, rookie, but this is how it works in the real world.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb did a better job when he called it, “Turkey Logic.” If a butcher buys a turkey on January 1st, the turkey has almost eleven months of stable data that the butcher cares for the turkey and loves the turkey. Every day, right up until butchering the day before Thanksgiving, is solid evidence of a pattern of care.

The difference is that the turkey can’t reasonably predict slaughter is in the offing. But humans can predict. We know there are potentials for carelessness. We know there are bad people who will try to circumvent the rules to harm others or do bad things. We know the world has a plethora of natural disasters in the wings. But they are rare enough it is generally safe to think like a turkey. The west coast of the US will suffer a huge earthquake and tsunami. But not in my lifetime. Probably.

This is not simple laziness. It is conditioned behavior. Behavior is conditioned by reinforcement (reward) and punishment. Reward and punishment each come in two flavors, positive and negative, and normalization of deviance is conditioned by the most insidious— negative reinforcement.

Negative reinforcement IS NOT punishment. Let’s define some terms.
Reinforcement or reward is anything that increases a given behavior.
Punishment is anything that decreases a behavior.
Reward and punishment are the value holders.

In math, negative is the opposite of positive, so negative reward would be the opposite of reward. Not so in psychology. In psychology, positive and negative refer to presence and absence. In psychology, a positive reward means you get something good, a positive punishment means you get something bad. A negative reward means you are saved from something bad, a negative punishment means something good was withheld.

An example: A kid does his homework, so you take him to the movies. That’s positive reward. A kid does her homework so you give her a day off from chores. That’s negative reward. A kid ignores his homework and gets a spanking, that’s positive punishment, pain introduced to the system. A kid ignores her homework and loses TV privileges, that’s negative punishment.

The reward and punishment system is natural and very deeply wired. A classical behavioral psychologist will say that all learning, all changes in behavior, follow this model. We do things that hurt (punishment) less than things we enjoy.

Negative punishment is one of the slowest ways to learn. Behavior influenced in this way tends to drift rather than change. One of the questions in self-defense is “To what extent can intuition be trained?” Defensive intuition is hard to train because it relies solely on negative reinforcement. You get a bad feeling and don’t get into a relationship or go down a dark alley and nothing happens. But maybe nothing bad would have happened if you had made a different choice.

Deviance normalizes when nothing bad happens. It is passively and slowly rewarded— with time saved and tedious procedures avoided.

When your policy is set up to prevent a one in a thousand chance, 99.9% of the times you apply that policy are wasted. It feels inefficient, until the one in a thousand occurs. Then it depends on the cost of failure.

There are generally five ways to avoid normalization of deviance.

The first is to work in a highly dangerous environment with very active threat factors. It’s amazing how good people get at doing things right when doing them wrong gets you injured. Realistically, however, you can’t create this. That said, many of our safety protocols do rely on historical knowledge, not fantasy. We have solid data on how bad things happen.

The second is to ritualize the safety protocols. To have the patterns ingrained as part of the tribal identity of the group. It becomes unthinkable, for instance, to pass a weapon to another team member without the action open and the safety on. It’s not perfect. Any ritual can be done mindlessly and ritualistically looking at a dosage label is not the same as reading it.

The third, one notch away from ritualizing is to make the proper process a mark of elite membership. “I can tell you’re an amateur because you did that the wrong way.” This makes people competitive about being consistently competent. All of this, of course, predicates on the process actually being intelligent.

The fourth is to rely on prophets. Traditionally, prophets were not people who saw the future, but people who warned that if the tribe did not follow the laws, the gods would punish them. Almost every large organization has a handful of people constantly warning of the bad things that will eventually happen due to current practice or policy. The trouble is, because the tragedies are so rare, the prophets are wrong almost all the time and become easy to marginalize or even to punish.

The fifth is to administratively punish, through positive punishment, what nature is slowly rewarding through negative reinforcement. This, I would say, is the common practice but runs into its own unique problem. Punishment almost always requires direct confrontation, and direct confrontation is unpleasant. You guessed it. When the supervisor tasked to confront poor behavior avoids his job, that is negatively reinforced. And when nothing bad happens…

When the axe falls and the turkey finds it is butchering day, very rarely do people look at systemic issues and the normalization of deviance. People like simple explanation with simple solutions and are thus likely to view systemic failures as individual failures. Blaming the shooter and not the three people who were supposed to inspect the ammo, nor the one who stored a loaded weapon, nor the one who failed to inspect the weapon after the range, nor the one who used a designated “less-lethal” weapon in a firearms qualification nor the one who decided to use the “less lethal” in the first place. And certainly not the culture that said cutting corners was allowable.

References

Banja J (2010) The normalization of deviance in healthcare delivery. Bus Horiz 53: 139 10.1016/j.bushor.2009.10.006 [doi] [PMC free article] [PubMed]
Gonzales, Laurence. Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies and Why. WW Norton (2005)

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile: Thing that Gain from Disorder Random House (2014)

The Law of Self-Defense: The Indispensable Guide for the Armed Citizen by Andrew F. Branca – Reviewed by Rory Miller

Recognizing that Conflict Manager has an eclectic readership from many countries and with many interests, a book on the legalities of self-defense focused on firearms and specific to United States law may have limited appeal. That said, most of the board members of CRGI know each other through the personal protection community and self defense is a subject that has touched all of our lives. Also, The Law of Self Defense is a good and important book.

That’s the most salient thing. If you have anything to do with self-defense, either as a student or an instructor, the legalities are important. I’d go so far as to say it is negligent to teach self-defense in any form without a solid grounding in force law.

Let’s dispense with something right away. The old saw, “I’d rather be tried by twelve than carried by six.” For those unfamiliar it means, “I’d rather go on trial than be killed.” In logic, this is what’s called a “False sort.” How about surviving AND not going to prison? Embrace the power of and. There are also a few who will argue that thinking of legalities in a deadly force situation will paralyze you. I disagree. Every thinking person knows that there will likely be legal consequences after a violent encounter. It is my experience that, when a problem is known to exist, ignorance creates a deadlier freeze than knowledge.

The Law of Self-Defense takes an intimidating subject, one that has a long history, with sources written in obscure legal language, and nuanced over many jurisdictions and makes it accessible. Practical. It was actually kind of fun to read. And I never got the feeling it was dumbed down.

The chapters take important concepts like, “What is innocence?” and breaks the concept down into common sense language. And gives actual incidents. And quotes relevant case law. At the end of almost every chapter, there are tables that give the exact wording for the specific aspects of law discussed in the chapter for all fifty states. Well written and concise overviews combined with stories and combined with technical details makes a powerful and simultaneously easy to grasp tome that should be on the required reading list for self-defense instructors, students and anyone who carries a weapon.

Branca gives the legal details of a perfect world, but also gives the gritty details of how the cases sometimes go. It’s not always pretty, and that should keep you cautious. Caution is usually a good thing.

Read the book. For an understanding of the legal principles, for an understanding of the legal process (from arrest to booking to trial and the civil side as well) and for the keys to planning a legal strategy well in advance, read the book. If you intend to teach self-defense and want to answer your student’s questions, I don’t know of anything better available.

Editors note. This review pertains to the second edition published in 2013. The third edition is now available.

Experience and Insight – Rory Miller

How did CRGI come to be? A few years ago, Garry Smith (the man who is now editor of Conflict Manager) asked, “If we were to do a full blown, accredited, bachelor’s degree program in self-defense instruction, what would be in the curriculum?”

I said I didn’t know exactly what would be in it, but I had some definite ideas who I would tap to help design the curriculum. That list, with Garry’s insight and experience, became the board of CRGI.

The members of the board are very different in some ways. Some were bad guys, some very bad. Some were good guys. Some are physical monsters, some were monsters in the day— and a few have physical concerns that affect every decision they make. One has been dead, and many have been close. Most are martial artists, but not all.

The biggest commonality in the group is that I respect their thinking. Every last one of them (except Jayne, I barely know her) at one time or another have told me that I was wrong. Usually the exact wording was “full of shit.” Every last one of them is strong enough to disagree to my face. Every last one of them, when they do disagree, present their facts dispassionately and concisely. Every last one of them can disagree with me and not fall into the trap of labeling someone who disagrees as an enemy. They can disagree honorably. And each and every one has made me better. A better teacher, a better fighter, a better friend and a better man. I love this crew.

In the world of so-called Reality-Based-Self-Defense (so-called as in “Whose reality?”) there is a big divide between the BTDT (“Been There Done That”) crowd and the rest. “What, you’ve never been the member of an elite military force? Never shot a terrorist in the face? How dare you teach…”

Completely aside from the illogic— What does tactical shooting have to do with defensive shooting? What can a heavily armed and armored member of a military team teach about unarmed solo self-defense? What aspects of working a door apply to rape prevention, exactly? And that’s assuming they are even telling the truth about their histories.

Experience is important, no doubt. And the people I envisioned for the board have not just experience, but experience that differs from mine. That’s probably why it is so heavy on ex-criminals. I know enough cops and former cops already. I wanted the experience of the former football (soccer) hooligan and the former enforcer. The former hustler and the former somewhat shady bouncer.

But there are members with very little experience with violence. So why are they here? Because they supply insight. One of the hallmarks of the real BTDT crowd is a profound lack of arrogance. There’s no special threshold or secret initiation that makes you worthy to teach the experienced. I don’t want to die and I am happy to steal any bit of knowledge or refinement of body mechanics that will keep me alive. There are people on the CRGI board who have shot people, and people who have been shot, and one who teaches how to shoot. The person who teaches how to shoot has, as far as I know, neither been shot or shot anyone else… but her grip is better than mine and her draw is smoother than mine and a few hours with her raised my survivability.

And that’s not all. That’s not even close. She is an amazing teacher, and watching how she handles a class has made my teaching better. And she disagrees on fundamental issues in such a way that I have to research and articulate very well just to hold my own. She makes me better. A better fighter, a better thinker and a better man.

Experience is important, absolutely. But insight is at least as important, and not all insight comes from experience.

Reality-based self defense? Screw that. CRGI represents knowledge forged by experience and tempered by insight. It’s an honor to be here.

Self-Defense Failure Zone – Rory Miller

Rory Writes: This was just going to be an example for the last article on reframing, but it grew into an article of it’s own.

One aspect of self-defense that is rarely addressed are low level predators and creeping victimizations. The low-level predators are the ones who keep their victims uncomfortable, but never cross the line into overt, concrete, actionable behaviors. The constant innuendos that never rise to the level of sexual harassment. The colleague who seems to enjoy violating personal space but doesn’t touch, or touches but only “accidentally” and deniably.

Creeping victimization ranges from the charming predator who romances a lonely victim, slowly acquiring access to the victim’s car and house and bank account. They victim may never even believe it was fraud. Or the cult that asks for one tiny favor until it seems normal and ups the level of the favor until a member is living with people he or she was assigned to live with, signing over their paychecks to the cult and getting an allowance…and it happened so gradually it seems normal. See Campfire Tales From Hell Create Space (2012)

Low level predators and creeping victimization are difficult problems to solve from the self-defense mindset. The self-defense mindset too often teaches from a passive beginning, in a reactionary mode and with the assumption the problem is simple.

Passive beginning: “There you are, minding your own business and suddenly the office creep is standing right behind you, setting it up so that you touch him when you turn…”

Reactionary mode: “… so what should you do?” Passive/reactionary puts the bad guy in control. He has the power, he calls the shots, and you are constantly playing catch-up when he is acting, and you are prey to be studied the rest of the time. There is no agency in this.

Simple solutions. “Set clear boundaries.” Excellent advice, but this happens in the real world. When you do set clear boundaries, when you are assertive, there will be a price to pay. Bad guys are very good at punishing good guys for taking a stand. Maybe starting a gossip campaign at work, or using social media to try to get you fired or counter-accusations that you are the one being aggressive.

The self-defense mindset is inefficient for complex problems. For that matter, it’s not that efficient even fro self-defense situations. In the real world, most attacks have antecedents and will have after-effects, win or lose. They happen in a complex world of social interaction ranging from the reaction of your friends to the response of law enforcement. And passive beginnings or reactive timing makes it very difficult to recover and succeed.

The conflict management mindset, on the other hand takes advantage of each aspect.

An active mindset and an active beginning. You are part of this game from before the start. Dealing with low level creepers in the office you learn who they are and how they operate. You create your support system and gather allies from the beginning. In the self-defense mindset you call the police after the fact. In the conflict management mindset, you have been making friendships and alliances from day one and realize that those friendships are part of the world that the creeper must navigate.

Even dealing with the very rare stranger attack, the conflict manager trains beforehand, not out of fear but because life is better when you are stronger and more skilled. You are alert beforehand not out of paranoia but because people are interesting to watch.

Participatory mode. Reacting lets the threat dictate the game and the rules. You are not a pawn. This is your game too. You act, and that forces the threat to react. You have the power to take control of the initiative, the power to change the game and dictate your own set of rules.

In the creeper scenario this is the ability to choose to see the relationship as something other than low-level predator vs. toy. You might also be co-workers. Have a network of friends or business relationships in common. You can even close to be the predator in the relationship.

I hesitate to write that. The simple fact is that your mind and how you see a situation has immense power in how you act and how you are perceived. In the ecology of violence, the low-level creepers are the scavengers. Rats scurry away from lions. I find people are very uncomfortable experimenting with their mental power to change. They either fear they will damage their identity or that it is unnatural.

As to identity, your “self” is a wisp of smoke. Are you the same person before and after your morning coffee? After two days with our sleep? If your “self” was solid enough to be threatened, you wouldn’t have moods. You are not protecting yourself, but your ego.

Unnatural? Then why do all children play at this constantly? How much of your childhood did you spend being a great explorer or a soldier, playing cops and robbers and cowboys and indians? “Let’s pretend” is a universal game among children, and I believe that kids are forced out of it because the ability to go chameleon at that level will make them too powerful for their parents and society to predict and control.

Changing who you choose to be has immense power, if you have the courage to embrace it. Just sayin’.

In the stranger self-defense scenario, participation allows the justified pre-emptive strike. It allows and encourages you to verbally control the situation before the threat does. It gives you active protection from the threat’s use of psychological control.

Complexity. Recognizing that situations happen in an immense network of social interaction, in a physical environment that is cluttered and messy, in a complex swirl of emotion, cognition and social conditioning is a superpower. It may seem complicated, but it is only acknowledging that the level of complexity you know in every other part of your life exists here as well. This is something you deal with every day. You are good at it. Unless you let the other person set the rules of the game.

Each level of that complication is something you can use. You can use the interactions between the levels as well. When you see the world this way the victor in an encounter is rarely the strongest or the most evil. This worldview works for the creative and the smart. And you are smarter and more creative than most creepers, right?

That is why it is so critical to bad guys to keep you in the reactive, self-defense mindset. They control your mind so that you limit your own options.

In stranger self-defense, understanding complexity allows one to recognize when other resources can be used to prevent the danger, like screaming for help before the threat gets you to an isolated place. It encourages one to use verbal skills and physical skills simultaneously both to give a psychological edge over the threat and to groom witnesses. It changes that cluttered and chaotic environment from a set of hazards to a set of tools.

Passive, reactionary and simple mindsets limit your ability to respond. Embracing the complexity and your role as an active participant increases your agency. If you see the world as a fascinating complex game, you can become a master at that game.

The Matrix of Discretionary Power – Rory Miller

In modern Western society, we have delegated the enforcement of social rules to a profession. Controlling behavior is no longer the province of a hereditary caste, or the duty of tribal elders or shaman. We have the police.

Individual police officers decide who will be be pulled over for a traffic infraction and who will not; which crimes will be investigated and which will not. Who, in a dispute, will be believed and who will not. This is discretionary power, the power of personal decision. It is and always has been one aspect of rules enforcement, for that matter an aspect of every human interaction. But when wielded by police, discretion can be a hot-button issue.

On a fundamental ethical level, to enforce only the rules one personally agrees with would be the essence of corruption. We all personally approve of and disapprove of different laws. Some see anti-smoking laws as assaults on personal freedom, others as affirmation of public health…and often the exact same people have the exact opposite attitudes depending on whether tobacco or cannabis are the smokable under discussion. When an officer signs on for the job, he or she signs on to enforce the law, not a personal worldview.

But this cannot be an absolute, either. Because at the other extreme we have the Nuremberg Trials and “I was only following orders.”

On the scale between personal corruption and corruption as the mindless enforcer for the state, we have officer discretion.

But discretion happens in the real world— a world of media and voters and interest groups and complicated, emotional, messy human interaction. Discretion happens in a matrix of human interaction, the perceived and written duties of the job, policy, law, moral conviction and, sometimes, survival stress.

First and foremost, citizens say that they want a fair and impartial police service. In practice, people want the opposite. In actual interactions with police, almost universally, citizens want understanding, compassionate and forgiving officers judging them, and by-the-book robots dealing with others. Don’t believe me? How many times have you hoped the police would ticket someone who you thought was driving poorly? And how many times, when you were pulled over, did you think your excuses should be honored?

People fear the police. They are individuals that theoretically have the power of the state behind them. They have belts full of weapons and access to more. In every state’s quest to have a monopoly on violence, the police are the visible representations of that.

Conversely, the police, in the WEIRD* world are controlled by politicians, by the media and in the end, by the citizens. They live and work, especially in the era of the 24-hour news cycle and social media, under a quickly-shifting and seemingly arbitrary standard of right or wrong behavior.

In the interaction between citizens and police there is another factor that flies in the face of our ideals. We can recognize that every dispute, every interaction between two people is different. We have a much harder time accepting that the people coming to solve those disputes, the officers, are not equal. Not every officer understands psychology to the same degree. They can’t all be expected to be fluent in all languages spoken in their district. Some are great shots, some poor. Some are cool under a crisis, some panic. No two officers are the same and thus expecting “fair and equal treatment” is both a practical and physical impossibility.

This is probably the crux of the issue with officer discretion. Absolute lack of discretion is a totalitarian nightmare, where any child who takes a candy bar from a grocery store is branded for life. Total discretion will have officers enforcing their beliefs, not the laws. And there is no happy medium. No place where one can say, “Discretion for X but not for Y” without bad outcomes.

Example: One jurisdiction removed discretion in domestic violence cases. They wrote a “mandatory arrest” law such that, if a domestic violence complaint is made, somebody must go to jail. The people who drafted the law feared that an officer would decide a domestic violence call wasn’t a big deal and would let the abuser stay and the abuser would kill the victim. Fair enough.

But local burglars started calling in domestic violence complaints: “Sounds like there’s a big fight going on at 3643 Sinclair St. Sounds pretty bad.”

The police would arrive and even though all the residents said nothing had happened, and there was no physical evidence of any crime, the officers were required by law to bring someone to jail. One of the very confused people would be taken to jail. The other would leave trying to get enough cash for bail money. And the house would be left conveniently vacant for the burglars who called in the complaint.

Completely aside from the fact that many criminals are masters at manipulating even the best-intentioned rules, have you ever known micro-management to improve human interaction? Writing policy may remove the prejudices and failings of the officer in the field, but only substitutes the prejudices and failings of a bureaucrat who isn’t even present to see, hear and smell that moment.

I see no satisfactory policy answer. Maximizing the discretion of officers allows the people at the scene to make the best possible choice for all concerned. It also, however, clears the way for the stupid, the vain, the power hungry and the cruel to act with a free hand. To remove discretion entirely would require a good policy for every possible situation— an impossible thing to either write or to memorize.

To complicate matters even more, we cannot define a good decision. In the matrix of human interaction, most call those decisions “good” from which they or someone they identify with benefits. When riots broke out after the grand jury decision in Ferguson we saw United States citizens rioting against their own civil rights.

A vocal enough group with vested interests can create a media storm that retroactively turns a good decision into a bad decision. Perfect officer discretion requires not only good judgment and good information, but also the ability to see the future.

The best option, so far, is to recruit the best men and women available, train them to the ultimate degree, have them apprentice with older officers of proven judgment…

That is the ideal, but there are about 900,000 sworn officers in the US alone. Do we have a million perfect people, eager to apply for a thankless, high-stress job? Training is expensive, and an easy thing to cut from the annual budget. New officers apprentice under older officers, and those older officers are people, some good, some bad, some wise, some completely burned out.

To sum up:
The problems with discretion:
Discretion will be misused in some cases
Will be a lightning rod for people who want to call things misuse
Not all officers will have equivalent judgment or skill
The socratic ideal of “fair and equal” is impossible
Officers will be manipulated (but they can learn)

The problems with removing discretion:
Striving for a socratic ideal becomes heartless in the particular
It is inflexible
People will be punished for using judgment
It is reactive to misplaced public pressure— black swans wind up driving policy
Bad people are very good at manipulating systems, and systems are slow to adapt
*Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic

Nine Basic Strategies – Rory Miller

There are seven natural ways for living creatures to deal with conflict and danger: Freeze or Hide; flight; fight; posture; submit; hunt; and gather intelligence.

Everyone has heard of the “Fight or flight” response. The supposed animal response to immediate danger. Biologists call it fight, flight or freeze. That’s not the natural order, however. Generally animals freeze when confronted by a danger, only flee when freezing fails and only fight when flight fails.

1. Freeze or Hide. One of the best strategies in the natural world is to never be noticed by the things that might want to eat you. Predators key on motion, so freezing is a natural reaction. Freezing is often presented as the bane of self-defense instruction, but it works a large percentage of the time. There is a reason why it is still the first instinct when surprised or overwhelmed.

In the natural world, hunters see motion. And predators, whether human or animal, often have an instinct to chase the things that flee. So, in nature, the tiny spotted fawn relies on stillness and natural camouflage to not be seen by the coyote. In the modern social world, freezing often works. In a social challenge, sometimes one of the participants will freeze. Under the freeze, the person doesn’t say or do anything that would give the other the social excuse to attack. It works. In property crimes, there is rarely a reason to injure a passive victim. Freezing works.

Until it fails, and then it fails catastrophically.

Freezing is often involuntary. Hiding is the conscious corollary. Hiding keeps the predators from finding you. Until they do. Again, hiding works until it fails and then it fails catastrophically. This is one of the dangers of “lock down” policies in schools. If there is an active shooter and all the kids hide in a locked room they are safe. Until the shooter decides to kick down that door. Then, well, there is a reason why “shooting fish in a barrel” is a cliché.

2. Running is the second natural strategy. In prey species it tends to trigger only after freezing has failed. And it can trigger in you as well. When you are stalking people or scouting, it can sometimes take immense will not to break and run when the enemy gets too close or is looking right at you. Sometimes our own instincts make the freeze fail.

In self-defense, if you have no duty to act, getting out of the danger zone is almost always a good idea. Run early and often if that option is available. The biggest inhibitor to this good choice is our own egos. Someone too proud to run will get stuck with the third natural strategy, the fight.

Freezing is a zero-cost option. When it works, there is no downside to it. You are not harmed, you haven’t expended energy. Running is a very low cost strategy. When it works, you’ll be a little out of breath, but there are no other costs– no injuries, no paperwork.

But, like freezing, when running fails it tends to fail catastrophically. When you are caught, you will have your back to the threat and most people, psychologically, can do more damage if they can avoid seeing a face.

3. Fighting. In nature, fighting is the last option. It has the highest cost and is the least certain. Fighting is the worst option in almost every case. It’s losses will be catastrophic, but unlike the previous two, fighting also offers the possibility of a catastrophic win. You may prevail, escape and lose too much blood to survive.

Fighting is a valid option, but a poor choice. If it is all you have left, fight with everything you have. But if you have time to think of another option, take it.

Freeze, flight and fight are the defaults outside our species. If a tiger came in the door right now, you’d freeze. If he advanced anyway, you would run. And when he caught you, you would fight with desperation.

Within our species, we have different strategies– Posture, submit and negotiate. There are some crossovers, in that certain people will run or freeze or fight when presented with a social challenge. And people have used or tried to use posturing, submission and negotiation outside their species.

4. Posture is the attempt to get the threat to back down by looking big or mean or dangerous. In a Monkey Dance you will see both fighters square up and get up on their toes, trying to look as big as possible. The appearance of size may decrease injury by heading off violence and the poor base decreases injury should the encounter turn violent.

For the most part, in any serious conflict, you are trying to break the other person’s will, not their body. Posturing is designed to do that without injury. It is the essence of the “Presence” level of force as described in “Scaling Force.”

Posturing is part of the threat display and usually a sign that there is little immediate danger. It is completely incompatible with hunting and the hunter’s mindset (see below). Even in nature, predators try to NOT be seen.

Occasionally, posturing does work cross-species. Being big and loud, moving, especially rhythmically and in groups, tends to frighten away dangerous animals.

Posturing can be successful, and can fail. When it fails, the consequences can range from mild to catastrophic. I have postured (as a 5-foot, 95 pound sixteen-year-old) on a group…and they responded by laughing and leaving. It is also possible to posture and trigger an epic punishment: beating, rape or murder.

My personal policy is rarely to posture, only when it has a good chance of preventing a force incident, and never to posture without the skills to back it up. Bluffing is dangerous. Getting your bluff called in a violent situation can be deadly.

5. Submission is acquiescence. Sending a signal that you are no threat. It can range from passive to truly groveling. Like fighting, even the wins can be catastrophic. This is hard to write, because our society has so fully indoctrinated people to the idea that violence (fighting or hunting) is evil, that… welll, I’ll just straight up say it:

Fighting may be bad, but submission is worse. There are times. When facing overwhelming force by an honorable enemy who follows the law of land warfare, there is no dishonor in surrendering to save the lives of your men. If you are lucky enough to meet an honorable enemy that follows the rules.

Without that, as a group, slavery is the best of the possible results of submission.

When dealing with predatory crimes, if the man with the gun demands your wallet, that’s a negotiation. A cost/benefit analysis on your part. If the man with the gun demands that you go with him, that would be submission and there is no good outcome.

Understand that sometimes the cost of refusing to submit is death. Don’t ignore that. But sometimes death is the cost of submission as well. And in some cases, death is far from the worst option.

Submission, as a general strategy also has two bad long-term effects. The first is that submission becomes a habit. Some evil people are careful to cultivate the habit of submission in their victims, punishing any attempt to take a stand while rewarding signs of obeisance. Soon, victims become victims down to their core.

The second effect is that submission encourages exploitation. Tactics of non-engagement or appeasement empower the vicious. Man, as Maslow pointed out, is “the perpetually wanting animal.” Giving a bad guy what he wants does not decrease his desire, it merely emboldens his actions.

There are two other strategies that need to be discussed.

6. The first is simply walking away. It is flight without fear and disengagement without submission. Immature and stupid people see walking away and running away as the same thing. Experienced operators walk away from every fight they honorably can. It’s not a game, it’s not fun and there is always the possibility of dire and unpredictable consequences.

7. The second strategy is negotiation. It is the basis of the modern world, whether political discussions or trade. If there is one thing that has increased the possibility of peace, it is the fact that we can get things that used to be won in battle– land and goods– by trade, and do it more safely. And trading partners are more efficient at making our lives better than slaves. Trade, capitalism, commercialism, whatever you want to call it, has done more to make peace possibly that all of the altruism and activism in human history.

Negotiation has become so successful and prevalent that many people assume it is part of the natural order of things. It is not. It is a human innovation and takes will and foresight to work. It works because the alternative is force. If one side of a negotiation has no line where they will be pushed to force, it is not a negotiation but merely a drawn out, formal, act of submission.

If both sides cannot imagine a mutually beneficial outcome, if, for instance, one side’s definition of a win is to see the other side broken, bleeding and begging (or dead) there is no “win-win.” In that case, negotiation is futile, unless you use it as a ploy to buy time to prepare for the inevitable.

There are two other natural strategies for dealing with conflict: Hunting and Gathering Intelligence.

8. Hunting is the most pro-active of the strategies, in my experience the most effective and often the safest. If and only if it is badly bungled will it turn into a fight. What is hunting? In this context it is giving the target absolutely no chance to respond.

You gather your resources, choose your time and place and execute. You give the target as little warning as possible. Slaughtering a steer, hunting a deer, sniping, or putting someone on the ground and cuffing him while he is still deciding to resist are all examples of hunting.

This mindset is very difficult for amateurs. Their default is to think of hunting and fighting as the same. They are not. There is no element of game, sport or contest. You do not fight, you execute. And a hunter will take a fighter almost every time.

9. Gathering Intelligence is unique of all the strategies because it can be combined with any other. Freezing/hiding and gathering intelligence is the essence of scouting. Every second of a fight should be giving you information about your opponent.

Unlike any other strategy, there is no failure, no downside to knowing more about what you face. Learning should be a basic default of life.

Police Use of Force on the Emotionally Disturbed and Mentally Ill Opinion Piece – Rory Miller

Violence is a visceral thing and people tend to respond to it emotionally. There is always an emotional element to an act of force. Simultaneously, people assume a moral aspect to an act of force. One person is assumed to be the good guy, one assumed to be the bad guy. Combined, these make a powerful gut reaction and people tend to look at a force incident through a moral and emotional lens that is almost completely irrational.

I am going to try to explain and explore some basic but uncomfortable truths in this artitle.

In my opinion and experience, people with mental health issues are not more criminal than those without. They are far more likely to be victimized than to be the bad guy. But they are less predictable, and that increases the fear in other people. In mental illness, the person may see the world differently (e.g. hallucinations) and/or may process the world differently (attributing other people’s motivations to conspiracies or spiritual forces; or seeing personal connections that don’t exist.)

When thinking of justice, motive matters. Force is always tied up with ethics, and every rational person only wants force used on bad people. Using force to stop a murderer or rapist is moral. Rapists are bad. Murderers are bad. People with screwed up brain chemistry aren’t bad. We don’t want force used on people who aren’t bad…

That is the source of the disconnect. This is where the moral aspect of the lens confuses people and influences them to write bad policy and to scream against good decisions. “Rapists and murderers are bad, mentally ill people are not” is a completely irrelevant metric. It is not the people, not the rapists nor the murderers that are bad, not in the moment at least. Rape is bad. Murder is bad. Force is used by police officers to stop behavior. The motivation behind that behavior is irrelevant.

For justice, when the courts and the mental health experts have time to find the facts and discern underlying causes, motivation is a big part of determining right or wrong. When it comes to treatment or rehabilitation*, motivation is critical in changing long-term behavioral patterns. But if someone is swinging a hammer at a baby the person needs to be stopped before he or she finishes the hammer swing and motive doesn’t matter at all

Force is used to stop behavior. Force is used to prevent bad outcomes. Those bad outcomes must be stopped regardless of the motivation behind them. If you are going to take my baby, I will stop you. It doesn’t matter whether you are trying to kill my baby to get back for some generational vendetta between our grandfathers or because you think you will get ransom or because you believe my baby has been possessed and must be destroyed to save the world. My choices are the same no matter your motivation.

Screwed-up brain chemistry versus evil intent does not affect my options at all. Motivation is irrelevant and as such, this is a problem completely separated from the concept of “justice.” The only thing that affect my choices are;

how hard you will be to stop

how much time I have to stop

If I have all the time in the world, I will try to talk you down. Doesn’t matter if you are an old enemy or having a psychotic break. If you are in the act of swinging a hammer at the baby, I will shoot you, regardless of your motivation. And if you are small and weak and untrained and unarmed and close enough that I can protect the baby just by pushing you away, I will do that. And if you are big and strong and skilled, I may have to hit you in the back of the head with a brick. None of this is influenced by your emotion or your mental state.

But because we want force tied with justice, many people want a completely different suite of options to use on the mentally ill.

If that hypothetical suite of options, with a lower level of force and ideal outcomes existed, guess what? We’d use them on everybody. Not just the mentally ill. Not just people in altered states. Everybody. Because officers are taught to use the lowest level of force that will safely work.

And since it would be used on everybody, my fear is that advocates would then scream for a special lower level of force to be used when the subject was mentally ill, because they can’t outgrow the idea that force should be tied with motivation. They can’t recognize the irrelevance of their justice filters.

There are some political and practical considerations that aren’t long enough to be separate articles. In the emergency services world, political considerations are important, because they can force changes in policy that severely affect how the work is performed.

Policies that require officers to deal differently with mentally ill or emotionally disturbed persons rather than “regular” bad guys are impractical. Even a trained and experienced clinical psychologist can’t tell the difference between schizophrenia and LSD at a glance; or meth and the manic stage of bi-polar, or suicidal ideation brought on by depressant chemicals versus natural brain chemistry. Expecting a cop to figure it out in a fraction of a second with bad lighting and a huge number of other distractions and concerns (no clinician has to make the diagnosis in busy traffic or with an audience of hundreds, some of whom are potential threats and/or victims) is ludicrous. It is setting an impossible standard that will get more people hurt, not fewer.

As a rule, advocates from the psych professions who say that all it takes is a little training and officers could talk down violent EDPs have never dealt with someone who wasn’t at least stable enough to get to the office. Officers deal with people ranging from the mildly upset to full-blown Excited Delirium; people charging into traffic or chewing up and spitting out their own tongue. Some who are pre-verbal and can’t seem to process words at all.

Physically and verbally, some people in altered mental states are much harder to deal with than criminals. Verbally, some don’t process words at all. Some do not know or remember how to surrender. Many will not recognize an officer tackling them as an attempt to save their lives. Physically, many of the lower level force options fail with EDPs. Pain compliance, a very low level of force frequently fails. In my experience, it is not because they don’t feel the pain, but because they do not understand that the pain is part of a bargain, and the pain stops when the resistance stops. Another low level force option, simply using mass to tire the threat (‘threat’ is the law enforcement euphemism for someone requiring force) often fails. Some people, especially on the excited delirium end of the spectrum, will fight until their heart fails.

This point ties into point 3. High levels of force are rarely required on experienced criminals. An experienced criminal knows how to play the game, knows how to surrender and when to do so. Neurotypical people without extensive criminal histories, if they resist, tend to require more force because they don’t know the rules, they think fighting is like they see on television. The mentally ill and emotionally disturbed, with a combination of naivety and the fact that low levels often fail frequently require extreme levels of force to control. The amount of force necessary to control a person is often inversely proportional to how we would do it if justice or motivation was a factor.

All uses of force look shocking to the uninitiated. In many cases, the force that looks most shocking actually involve very low levels. Using a mass of officers to hold down a single struggling subject is a tactic designed to cause minimum injury. With four officers, you can attempt to have one merely hold each limb until the subject gets tired. A lone officer in a similar situation would likely have to use a baton or a gun. But the social media reaction is often, “Why did it take four officers to beat down one poor, unarmed, mentally disturbed child?” It took four officers because they were trying so hard, at extra risk to themselves, to not injure the threat.

Because the uses of force look shocking and because officers work in a political environment where public outrage fueled by ignorance can change their policies, people can feel good about demanding change that in the end endanger the very lives they intended to protect. In the eighties, after a few incidents of death following the application of choke holds** many agencies banned the use of vascular restraints or reclassified them as deadly force. This removed the one tool most likely to control an EDP with minimal injury. Tasers(tm) are incredibly painful, and they are new and scary and electric and a “weapon” and so people agitate to have them banned or restricted extremely, even though they cause pain with very minimal risk of injury. The only tool that does what a Taser(tm) does, which is give a fairly reliable stop at a distance, is a gun. Wanting to ban Tasers(tm) is effectively saying, “I’m more comfortable with blowing holes in people than in causing five seconds of pain.”

Using force on EDPs causes extreme emotional toll on everyone involved. The officers as well have the concept of justice tied to their need to use force. This is why so often a number of officers and a lower level of force is used even when a higher level of force is justified. And when the subject dies anyway— after a long fight when the officers are trying not to use deadly force— the officers have emotional issues. The public and the victim’s family are extremely upset. Everyone wants something done. Wants a better outcome. Wants their irrelevant instinct for justice satisfied.

To sum up, many of our instinctive filters are irrelevant in an emergency situation that requires force. The “solutions” offered often require officers to have supernatural levels of skill and knowledge that simply don’t exist. If a workable solution with less chance of injury existed, it would be applied universally, not just to special cases. And that has and is being done. The Taser, as one example, is an effective tool that decreases the risk of injury to everyone, when it works.

Public outcry stemming from a naive understanding of force endangers everyone.
*Leaving aside for the moment that metastudies show that involuntary rehabilitation is pretty much a myth.

** Setting aside for now that many of the holds were taught and applied incorrectly, which could and should have been addressed as a training issue instead of a policy issue.

Managing Organizational Conflict – Rory Miller

One of the most frequent and entrenched forms of conflict in a large organization stems from an element of group dynamics that is largely invisible. Usually, the organization is actually composed of two different groups with different languages, cultures, values and social rules.

We’re not talking about obvious divisions within an organization, like Human Resources, Production, Logistics, Public Relations and what-have you. This goes much deeper.

Almost any group can be categorized as either goal-oriented or longevity-oriented.

Goal-oriented (GO) groups exist to accomplish a mission. Your status with the team is based entirely on your contribution to getting the job done. Hard work, intelligence, and creativity are valued and rewarded.

The ultimate goal-oriented groups are task forces or teams of specialists brought together for a single mission. Next up are tactical teams, like SWAT or special-operations groups.

Longevity-oriented (LO) groups exist to perpetuate the group. Status is based on rank and service to the group. Hard work and intelligence may be rewarded, but they are secondary to making others comfortable. Creativity almost always threatens the status quo, and is almost always discouraged in a longevity-oriented group. Social ritual, whether hazing and initiations or policy and protocol are the lifeblood of the LO group.

A pure group type is very rare. Even an extreme GO team, unless they are assembled for a single mission, will have to deal with training, logistics, and the day-to-day issues of work between missions. Even the most bureaucratic LO team still has some kind of job to do, some mission. They will also occasionally have crises that will require at least a few mission-oriented thinkers.

These types of groups can and must exist within the same organization.

Line staff, be they cops on the beat, emergency room staff, or factory workers, have a job to do: areas patrolled, patients triaged and treated, units off the production line. Failure at the job is measured by what didn’t get done. Line staff tends to be a goal-oriented group.

Administration needs to be longevity oriented. It is their responsibility to make sure the organization survives into the future. Getting the basic job (patrols, patients, product) done is important, but other things can do much more damage. Big lawsuits, lack of funding, negative media exposure can all damage the organization quickly and brutally.

The jobs that administrations must do are very much about relationships. Coordinating or making deals with other organizations and businesses, arranging a budget in a government entity or fighting for a piece of the budget in a company, handling company image.

This naturally extends to a relationship-oriented outlook within the organization as well. The policies and procedures, the meetings, the organizational charts are rituals to identify and maintain a group identity.

Most large organizations will find a profound cultural rift between management and line staff.

The two groups have wildly different ideas of what is important, different ways to communicate. Both groups think they are carrying the entire organization. Line staff know they are getting the job done, and the job is the only reason for the organization to even exist. Administrators know they are the ones keeping the big wheel turning, fending off threats the line staff isn’t even aware of.

Have you ever seen someone promoted who was terrible at the job? From the goal oriented perspective, a promotion is a reward and you reward good behavior and effectiveness on the job is how goal oriented groups define good behavior. When an ineffective worker is promoted, his former colleagues see it as a mistake in management, a sign of managements ignorance of who their good people are, or even as a direct insult to the good workers.

But the people who decided on the promotion were likely longevity oriented. In their mind, a promotion is not a reward. Their job is not to reward or punish anyway, but to balance the dynamics, to put people in the positions where they can best benefit and protect the group. They do not promote Helen because they think she was good on the factory line, they promote Helen because they think she will be good supervising the factory line and interacting with other branches of the organization.

Think about it. Many of the people who were poor at the basic job did well when they were promoted. And many of the hard workers floundered.

This is common and causes a lot of missed opportunities and grief in the business world.

There are individuals who are goal oriented and others who are relationship oriented. Though most will be happiest in a group that matches personal preference, there is extreme value in having a mix.

Goal-oriented people tend to ignore feelings and let a lot of basic relationship maintenance slide. They don’t need company picnics or set up parties to mark big transitions, like promotions and retirements. A purely goal-oriented team can feel pretty sterile. Having a few relationship-oriented members can help build relationships and keep things running smoothly during quiet times. Often a goal-oriented group runs best in crisis and can become very aggravating when things are going well.

The relationship-oriented people who run longevity-oriented groups often need a few goal-oriented people. Why? Partially to keep them on track and remind the team of the need to get the basic job done, but primarily because goal-oriented people tend to respond to crises much better. Solving the problem is usually a better strategy for dealing with disaster than maintaining relationships and protocols.

Often longevity- or goal-oriented people in a group of the other orientation do not understand and can be alienated from their own group. It does no good if you are a manager who can communicate with line staff if you have trouble understanding other managers.

It also helps for each group to have some members that can relate to the other group. Having goal-oriented people in your management team helps facilitate communication with goal-oriented teams.

These two types of groups almost always exist in the same organization. They have different values, and so sometimes they work at cross purposes. They interpret language differently— one of the highest compliments to a GO group is simply to tell them they’re doing a good job. According to “Richard Conniff’s The Ape in The Corner Office to senior administrators, “Good job” is a veiled insult, implying the person needs outside validation. The differences are that profound— an insult in one group is a compliment in the other group.

And, because the organization is a single entity, the presence of two very different groups is invisible.

The dynamic between the GO and LO levels within an organization can be extremely positive or toxic. It is a symbiosis and they need each other. Generally, the organization exists for what the line staff, GO people, do—whether that is fighting crime or producing steel. The customers come to the organization for this.

But organizations exist in a complex community of trade, public opinion, politics, reputation, and relationships. In order to thrive and survive, the organization needs specialists to work these dynamics

At their best, the two levels respect each other.

It becomes toxic when the groups become enemies, when they treat each other with contempt. The most toxic I have seen was a law enforcement agency where the line staff universally believed every member of administration had sought promotion because he or she was afraid to do the job . . . and the administration thought no one would stay on line unless the officer was too stupid to take the tests.

The British Army officer William Francis Butler once said, “The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards.” The toxic version of the LO/GO dynamic exemplifies this.

Principles-Based Teaching, Part V – Rory Miller

Recap: the first four articles in this series covered the concepts behind principles-based teaching. Understanding the goals of training in general and your training in particular. Understanding what principles are. Auxiliary skills that every good teacher needs. Basic methods of instruction.

Teaching and learning are not just technical, physical processes but mental and emotional as well. On a psychological and emotional level, you have to prep people for learning. One of the most toxic things we have done in martial arts and in some of the reality-based systems is to make conflict special. People come to us convinced violence is alien to them, it is complicated, it is hard to learn. With new students, part of the teaching (cognitive) process is to explain that violence is natural. The physics are the same as any other physical activity and the mentality is part of our evolutionary heritage. It’s been hammered and brainwashed out of your students, but they are all natural fighters, all survivors.

For the physical aspects of self-defense, the teaching pattern is simply:

Game

Skill build

Return to game

Accelerated game(s)

Scenario training

I like having an over-all game that skills tie back to. The game has to be well designed:

Known safety flaws, minimal bad habits
Contact
A competitive element but not a competitive focus
No winners or losers

Every live training must have safety flaws. In the end, martial arts is about damaging a human being, yet we must not damage our training partners. So there is always an element of artificiality introduced for safety. You and the students must be conscious of the safety flaw.

Life is a contact sport, and fighting and self-defense are even more so. You cannot develop skill without contact any more than you can learn to swim without water. You must design games that work at different levels of contact, but each level of contact will have different safety concessions.

I like the game to have a competitive element to it, but no winner or loser– you are going to strive to be more efficient than me, but if you excel at that, you haven’t beaten me, just given me a more challenging problem to solve. The problem with full active resistance or any form of direct sparring is that only the winner learns that “it works against a resisting opponent.” The loser, who probably needs the skill more, learns that it fails against resisting opponents. Failure is not a lesson you want to teach at the beginning stage. Dealing with failure is an important lesson, but the student must be ready for it and you must have the judgment to teach that lesson.

I use three levels of play. Each level involves more speed but less contact. I start with the one-step. That’s the slow motion, taking turns, efficiency exercise described in Drills: Training for Sudden Violence, (That’s Smashwords. Link to Amazon Kindle.) Next level up is to blend that into a faster flow drill. The third level of play is infighting randori–fast, all techniques allowed, but very controlled contact.

The one-step helps the students see opportunity and experiment with multiple types of force simultaneously. It is safe, requires very little training and has many variations. It is particularly useful at pointing out the bad habits that come from fast training.

The primary flaw in the one-step is the slowness. You must face speed to be prepared for speed. A flurry attack is often mentally and emotionally overwhelming. The slowness can also be exploited to cheat, if the students can’t get over the winners/losers concept.

Drills are what they are and no more. I never call the one-step a fight simulation. It is a geometry problem made out of meat, and your job is to solve the moving meat problem as efficiently as possible.

The one-step allows thinking time. The flow level speeds up the action and decreases cognitive time, which is a good thing. But any increase in speed has drawbacks:

As the students go faster, they see less and thus they learn less
As the speed increases, the safety flaws become more necessary
As the speed increases the safety flaws have to become more automatic. Speed ingrains habits harder, including the bad ones.

Students need supreme control and confidence to play infighting randori well and safely, and frequently, this one has a winner. It integrates skills better than anything I know, because it is too close and too fast to process cognitively. The range allows all categories of attacks simultaneously: strikes, kicks, strangles, locks, takedowns, biting, gouging, etc. and because of the complexity and speed, it rewards and reinforces adaptability under stress like no other drill I know

Scenario training is an attempt to simulate real encounters. It requires the right equipment and a superbly skilled team to run scenarios well. Done well, scenarios force students to use judgment in tandem with their skills and integrates self-defense skills beyond the simply physical stuff.

Those are the games I use. A student will play the one-step first, before any instruction whatsoever (other than a safety briefing and a demo of how to play the game). This is important, because if they give themselves permission to play, it doesn’t require special training to be effective. This reinforces the earlier message that none of this is special, surviving is what you evolved to do.

The process, from here is simple. Play the game, do a breakout session for skill building. Put the students back in the drill.

Skill building sessions require you, as the instructor, to know your building blocks and principles inside out. You must come up with ways to demonstrate them and, more importantly, ways for the students to experiment, discover and experience the concepts.

One example: Joint locks breakout session.

First talk (Teaching): There are a few principles that are critical for making locks work, so leverage, two-way action, exploiting gravity, basing, and “gifts” (you don’t make locks, you find them) are explained. All principles are demonstrated and the students get to ask questions.

Second talk (Teaching) There are only three kinds of joints you can lock in the human body: Hinge, ball-and-socket, and gliding. Hinge joints are locked by applying force just above the joint and as far down the lever arm as possible.

First game: Challenge the students to come up with eight different elbow locks each. (Elbow locks are safer than knees or fingers at this stage).

First discovery— the students will see that there are both an infinite number of locks and only one.

Second talk and first game are repeated for each type of lock.

Special session on fingers because they are a doubled hinge joint in the same grip space as a ball-and-socket joint and close enough they can be spiral fractured against each other. Fingers are an especially target-rich environment.

Second game: After all the joints are covered, the next game is a lock-flow drill where students practice seeing the gifts.

Then the students return to the 0ne-step. Not to do only locks, but because locks are fresh in their brains, they will see a lot of them.

Repeat the cycle. Break them out of the game to work on something else, like targeting. Then put them back in the game.

Theoretically, you could, after each skill, increase the speed through the flow and randori levels.

I don’t do it that way. They can work on the principles in one-step forever. I move them to flow and randori based on their abilities and confidence level. Animals learn through play and the first exposure to randori should be fun and slightly overwhelming but shouldn’t make them feel terrified and helpless.

The last, critical piece to self-defense is to occasionally run good scenario training. That allows them to use their skills in tandem with their judgment. And use more force, because of the armor. That said, scenario training is very hard to do well and safely and easy to do poorly. And poor scenario training can mess up students, physically, tactically and emotionally. It is better to stay away from them completely than to do them poorly. You need not only proper instruction, but practice.

In the end, the goal of real force training is to be ruthlessly efficient. To achieve one’s goal with the absolute minimum of wasted effort and time. PBT is my attempt to apply that sensibility to teaching as well. To use everything we know about how people learn and how they react under stress to create a superior survivor in the minimum time. Principles-based training is a step in the direction of ruthlessly efficient instruction.

There are some caveats, though:

1) Done properly, it allows and encourages creativity. Which means your students will innovate some sneaky shit and beat you far sooner than if they train in techniques. PBT is not a good method for egotistical instructors.

2) It can be hard to measure and test. Using this platform for jointlocks, we’ve gotten untrained officers improvising locks under pressure in an hour. And some of those locks would seem to be advanced. But they wouldn’t have been able to name a lock or to demo a specific lock. Which makes organizations and concrete thinkers uncomfortable.

3) It’s incompatible with most martial arts business models. The student/teacher relationship will shift to colleague/colleague very quickly. I like that, personally.

To quote Melody Lauer, a handgun instructor in the US, critiquing a (completely unrelated to me or PBT) class she had recently attended: “The way the class is structured and the instruction method demands an excellent instructor to pull it off.”

Principles based training elicits excellence from the students, but it demands excellence from the instructor.

Basic Teaching Methodology, Part IV – Rory Miller

In my opinion, there are four ways you can get a skill into someone else’s head: Teaching, Training, Operant Conditioning and Play. All have uses, all have drawbacks.

Teaching is sharing concepts from brain to brain by juggling symbols. Lectures, writing, and diagrams are all teaching. This article is teaching. And almost anything taught is useless under stress. The neocortex is far too slow to handle the action of a sudden assault. No one can simply read a defensive driving manual and respond appropriately when a deer jumps in front of a speeding car.

Teaching is a first step to understanding. Teaching is what allows us to make connections with new information, to come up with possibilities to test. It is critical to laying the groundwork so that the students are prepared for the other levels of training.

Very importantly, teaching needs to be taught. Communication skill needs to be communicated. Learning to teach by trial and error can destroy a lot of good students.

Training is anything you do by conscious practice. It is all the drills and rote memory practice. The thousands of reps punching or stepping into a throw or transitioning precisely from a specific armlock to a triangle choke.(And, for the record, be careful with the language here. We are so used to using the word, “training” for all aspects of preparation that I may not distinguish training from teaching, conditioning and play consistently.)

Training is likely useless in your first real fight. According to Ken Murray in “Training at the Speed of Life” the Air Force set ‘ace’ at five dogfights because their best research showed that no one—no one—remembered their training for their first three to five dogfights.

Grasp that. With the best training in the world, you still got through your first 3-5 fights on instinct and luck.

After this threshold, training did kick in and you had an ace, someone with instincts, luck, and now he or she could use training. And that is damn formidable.

This is the abyss for self-defense instructors. “You will fight the way you train” is a lie. The first force incident will be a mess of your nature and your conditioning and past experiences and half remembered training experienced in a stew of hormones, brain chemicals and adrenaline. “You will fight the way you train” becomes true with experience. This is one of the crucial differences between teaching professionals and civilians. A professional in certain fields– policing, military or club security, for instance– will hit that threshold and will be able to access their training. But the average civilian should not face that much violence in a normal life unless they are making very poor decisions.

Part of the problem with training, like teaching, is that it wires to the wrong part of the brain. The thinking mind is slow, far too slow to be of use in an ambush. Training physical skills to the thinking mind makes them almost useless.

A certain amount of rote training may be necessary, but I am coming to doubt it. There is a very real possibility that, for fighting purposes, ‘reps’ do far more harm than good.

Operant Conditioning. We are not talking about physical fitness conditioning. That’s important too, but it isn’t learning. We are talking about Operant Conditioning.

Operant conditioning is fast and powerful. It can take hundreds of reps (training) to learn a new skill, but most people learn about touching hot stoves with a single rep. That’s conditioning. Skills trained are notoriously perishable, and conditioning is notoriously robust. Do you have a friend who gets sick when he or she smells a certain type of alcohol because of one event getting sick years ago? That’s conditioning.

The principles of Operant Conditioning are simple and a Behavioral Psychologist will argue that this is the model for all learning:

Stimulus

Response

Reward/Punishment

Something happens. That’s the stimulus. Then you do something, that’s the response. What you did either makes things better (Reward) or Worse (Punishment). You see a hot stove (stimulus) you touch it (response) you get burned (punishment).

Operant conditioning works at a subconscious level. There is no cognitive processing to it, which is why it is one of the few methods that can bring someone close to reflex speed.

To properly use OC as a training method, the stimulus must be clear, and the stimulus must match what you expect to encounter. A fist flying at your face is unambiguous. Punching people is a good stimulus. Also, the response must work. An effective response is it’s own reward. Punch to the nose, good stimulus. Bob or parry fast enough (response) to not get hurt equals a reward. A block too slow equals getting punched in the face, commonly considered a punishment.

To effectively use operant conditioning, many martial arts instructors have to change their teaching style. If you are used to correcting details, that is incompatible with OC. If the student must try to anticipate what you will correct, she must be thinking, and the whole point of OC for self-defense is to move faster than thought.

Understand that conditioning trumps training. Common example: A student trains for years to become good in a sparring session and one day scores on the instructor. Instead of celebrating, the “master” with the bruised ego proceeds to make an example of the student. The student trained for years to win, and when he did, he was punished. The years of training have been wasted because the hindbrain, the old brain, has learned that winning is punished.

One act of poor conditioning can erase years of training. Never, ever, ever punish someone for being successful at what you taught her.

Reward and punishment are very specific concepts in OC training. As are the words ‘positive’ and ‘negative.’ Reward is anything that increases behavior. It is almost always something that makes people feel good. Reward is different for different people because we don’t all like the same things. But even things as simple as saying, “Good job” are rewards. And saying, “Good job but this is wrong, do it this way” is not only a punishment (all corrections are punishments) put sends a mixed signal and makes the deeper part of the student’s brain trust you less.

Positive and Negative are not value judgments but only indicate presence or absence. Reward and Punish are the value holders.

Positive Reward (PR): Something good happens. Kid gets a new video game.

Negative Reward (NR): Something bad DOESN’T happen. Kid gets a night off from homework.

Positive Punishment (PP): Something bad happens. Kid gets a spanking.

Negative Punishment (NP): Something good is withheld. Kid gets grounded.

Timing on reward/punishment is critical. Just like you can’t punish a dog for a day-old stain on the carpet, it won’t do any good to tell your students they did a good job at the end of class. Reward and punishment must be as immediate as possible, just like in the real world.

Training, as said, doesn’t come out in your first fights. Conditioning will, good or bad. The things you have conditioned will happen too fast for your decision making process. In a life or death emergency, good conditioning is a life saver.

Play is the fourth method of learning. In my opinion, it is the most important. This is how all animals learn. This is how you learned everything you are really good at. You can memorize thousands of words in a foreign language and know all the rules of grammar, but until you can go to the market and haggle and argue and flirt, you don’t really speak the language.

It is an effective learning method and we are wired to absorb and integrate knowledge this way. How long does it take a kid to learn a video game? Most kids are proficient in hours at most. Because they run through the tutorial and then they play. If we tried to teach video games the way we try to train martial artists, how many years would it take to get to that level of proficiency, if at all?

Anything you teach, anything you train, will ingrain harder and be more available under stress, if you have made a good, hard physical game out of it. This was Kano’s epiphany about judo.

Play has operant conditioning built in. There is immediate feedback on what works and doesn’t and realistic stimuli. And this operant conditioning works in a framework of chaos and irrelevant stimuli and all the other things that make real encounters so difficult. Life is an awful lot like play, if you want to look at it backwards.

One caveat, and this goes for designing play and for conditioning: The game is the game. It will never have a one-to-one correlation to reality. Getting good at sparring or getting good at push hands or getting good at rolling are all pieces. You will get a visceral understanding of principles some of these games. But if you believe the game is the reality, you have just willfully blinded yourself, and that blindness can be passed to your students.