Articles written for the NTOA's Tactical Edge magazine that grow out of interviews on The Debrief.
High-performing teams don’t eliminate friction; they harness it by fostering open dialogue and encouraging diverse perspectives.
Superior orientation enables minimal cognitive processing between perception and action, freeing mental capacity for reorientation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
