Articles & Writing

Cake, Not Icing: What We Are Getting Wrong About Performance

Why Your Training Schedule May Be Harming Your Best People

The people running through the intensive training showed little to no measurable effects. The people running the exercises were the ones showing measurable cognitive impairment at the end of the study.

What Cigarettes Can Teach Us About Traumatic Brain Injury & Low-Level Blast

Strong correlation, clear direction of evidence, and meaningful stakes for your people are sufficient justification to act. You do not need the final answer. You need the intellectual honesty to look at what the data is telling you and the leadership courage to move on it.

Build a decision-making machine with a culture-first approach

The teams that make the best decisions in the worst conditions are not necessarily better resourced. They build environments where sound thinking is expected, dissent is protected and learning continues after the operation ends. That is what ultimately improves both performance and safety and what “Culture First” is about

The Ritual Factor: How Deliberate Practices Shape Culture

The world's most expensive baseball player takes time after every at-bat to carefully fold his protective gear and thank the ball boy who retrieves it. This isn't politeness; it's performance strategy. Shohei Ohtani's ritualized behavior reflects a principle that elite organizations have understood for decades: deliberate practices shape decision-making when pressure mounts.

008 - Does Your Team Take Advantage Of Constructive Disagreement?

High-performing teams don’t eliminate friction; they harness it by fostering open dialogue and encouraging diverse perspectives.

The Recognition Problem: When Culture Lives on Walls, Not Floors

Effective culture assessment requires patience and sustained attention to behavioral patterns rather than isolated incidents. The most reliable indicators often appear in the smallest interactions, revealing whether your organization's culture truly lives on the floors where work happens, not just on the walls where values get displayed.

Why 'Sweep the Sheds' May Be Your Team's Missing Culture Defense

The genius of sweep the sheds lies in its function as both prevention and detection. On the prevention side, it creates what Kerr describes as "self-regulation" through deliberate practice: "What we practice, we become." The physical act of cleaning reinforces mental habits of service, attention to detail, and team-first thinking. It's impossible to sweep a floor while simultaneously believing you're too important for mundane tasks.

The Zebra Principle: Why Your Stress Response Is Killing Your Long-Term Performance

Nathalie Pattyn , a physician-researcher with an extraordinary background spanning emergency medicine, military aviation medicine, and tactical performance research, has spent decades studying how elite performers function under pressure. Her insights into the physiological realities of stress and performance reveal why so many tactical teams are burning out, despite having access to more performance enhancement tools than ever before.

The Crisis Facing Law Enforcement Recruiting: A Police Psychologist's Warning

"The question every police chief is asking: Are we really getting weaker recruits, or is this just another 'kids these days' complaint? After conducting 450 new hire psychological evaluations annually for over a decade, I can definitively answer: we're in trouble." Dr. Jenny Prohaska

The Orientation Advantage: How Mental Models Drive Competitive Performance

Orientation, the central concept in John Boyd's strategic framework, functions as your organization's operating system. Just as you update your smartphone's iOS to maintain security and functionality, you must constantly update your mental models to stay aligned with changing reality. The organizations that fail to do this don't just fall behind - they become vulnerable to disruption by competitors who see the same environment differently.

007 - Beyond The Loop: Why Everything You Know About OODA May Be Wrong

Superior orientation enables minimal cognitive processing between perception and action, freeing mental capacity for reorientation.

Want Excellence? Then Embrace Strong Personalities!

Exceptional organizations are the result of exceptional people. Thus, it is essential that leaders spend time nurturing the passion people have for their work. We must encourage them to think outside the box, to not become discouraged by failure, and embolden them to take risks. We need to pick them up and dust them off when they fall. Most of all, we must understand that the fire that drives them will sometimes make them a challenge to lead, they will occasionally “bite us” and will need to be corrected.

This Police Psychologist’s Simple Framework Changed How I Handle Failure

As a clinical psychologist who works on more than 30 officer-involved shootings a year and consults with more than 50 public safety agencies, she’s learned something every entrepreneur needs to hear: the difference between those who bounce back from trauma and those who don’t has almost nothing to do with how severe their trauma was. It’s all about how they view it. Her lessons learned from handling trauma and failure taught me a lot about how to handle failure in business.

006 - Common Pitfalls In Assessment & Selection: Lessons Learned From Elite Unit A&S – Part Two

Perhaps most importantly, these pitfalls highlight why selection cannot be treated as a simple screening process. Done correctly, A&S becomes a strategic capability that defines, reinforces and perpetuates organizational culture. Done poorly, A&S can actively undermine the very culture it’s meant to protect.

Gallup’s Chief Scientist Says Only 20% of People Trust Leadership — Here’s How to Fix That Problem

005 - The Science Of Selection: Lessons Learned From Elite Unit A&S - Part One

The foundation of assessment and selection is the understanding that building and maintaining organizational culture is the cornerstone of elite performance. Put another way, A&S is where organizational values meet operational reality, and without an effective A&S process, high levels of performance are extremely difficult to achieve.

This Navy SEAL Commander Says Leaders Aren’t Born or Made — They’re Chosen Based on One Thing

How to Make Smarter Decisions Under Pressure, From an ER Doctor Who’s Done It for 20 Years

This Cognitive Performance Coach for Special Operators Says Leaders Must Do This One Thing

This Neuroscientist-Turned-Entrepreneur Says Leaders Should Be a Little Naive — Here’s Why It Works

The 3 Decision-Making Rules You Should Steal from This SWAT Commander

Make Faster, Smarter Decisions With This SWAT Commander’s Strategy

004 - Low-Level Blast Exposure And Traumatic Brain Injuries: It Is Time To Start Paying Attention - Part Two

To return to our smoking analogy from part one of this series, you may have to smoke for your mission, but please don’t smoke more than you must, smoke the most filtered cigarettes possible, and give your body as much time as possible to heal between cigarettes.

Bank Robbery and Police Ambush: Insights and Lessons from The Debrief

Jon’s Article in Police & Security News – February 2025

003 - Low-Level Blast Exposure And Traumatic Brain Injuries: It Is Time To Start Paying Attention Part 1

The correlation between RLLBE and mTBI is a lot like the correlation that existed in the 1950s when science first noticed that smokers seemed to have higher rates of lung cancer than nonsmokers. Although there was no “proof” that smoking caused cancer, there certainly was a great deal of evidence correlating smoking and illness.

Watch Out for This Major Red Flag When Hiring

Jon’s Article in Tactical Edge – Summer 2024

6 Career-Transforming Tips From Top Leaders

How to Spot High-Performing Jerks Before They Derail Your Business

Equipping Your Team – Lessons Learned from Elite Units

002 - Stress Inoculation: A Key to Optimal Performance

Optimal performance comes from a physically calm state and a focused mind that is gathering and sorting the most important data to create situational awareness and then make rapid decisions.

001 - Be Prepared for the Worst, It Just May Happen

The first lesson learned from these events is that when things go poorly it happens very fast, is extremely violent and can be much worse than anyone expected.

How a Trauma Doctor's Death Ritual Can Change Your Leadership

This Emergency Room Doctor Has Seen It All — And in Moments of Failure, He Shares The 2 Things That Help Him Start Again

2 Leadership Tricks I Learned From the CIA

My Company Makes Body Armor for Police Officers. When This Happened, My Whole Business Strategy Changed.

Travis Kelce’s Sideline Outburst Taught Us 3 Important Lessons About Leadership Under Pressure

Jon’s Article in Police & Security News – February 2024

3 Valuable Business Lessons from Harvard’s Unabomber College Reunion Controversy

The Gift of Disagreement: Why it makes us smarter and keeps us from making mistakes.

Disagreement is often seen as a negative thing. It can be uncomfortable, disruptive, and even lead to conflict. But the truth is, disagreement can be a gift. When we disagree with someone, it forces us to think critically about our own beliefs and assumptions. It also gives us the opportunity to learn from others and see the world from a different perspective.

Four Lessons of Caution Emerge from the Breonna Taylor Case

I Started My Business In My Mom’s Basement at the Age of 17. Here are 5 Rules I Wish I Had Known, But Had to Learn the Hard Way

Want Excellence? Embrace Strong Personalities

Want Elite Performance? Adopt These 5 Practices Of Top Tactical Units

Four Cautionary Tales From The Breonna Taylor Case

The Breonna Taylor case was a flashpoint for American law enforcement, and four issues give rise to what are potentially the most important lessons learned from the case.

What Are the Leadership Principles of Elite Tactical Teams?

Active Shooter Preparation: Lessons Learned