Lessons Learned from Elite Unit Selection Processes - John Dowd

Jon Becker: My guest today is John Dowd. John is a former Navy SEAL who 15 years ago founded a company called “Software”.

John and his team for the last 15 years have assisted the most elite tactical units in selecting and assessing their personnel.

I'm excited to have John on the show today because his experience and his team's experience with selection and assessment, can carry down to any Tactical Unit, First Responder unit or business. My goal today with him is to get best practices to share with your team.

My name is Jon Becker.

For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units.

As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations.

The goal of this podcast is to share their stories in hopes of making us all better leaders, better thinkers, and better people.

Welcome to The Debrief!

Jon Becker: John, thanks for being here.

John Dowd: Thanks for having me.

Jon Becker: Why don't we start with just kind of a brief bio of how John gets interested in this, and how he ends up here.

John Dowd: So Naval Academy, graduate, had bad eyes, went into the surface Navy.

Snuck up to Canada got my eyes lazed. This is before the days of lasik, and that sort of thing. I had some confidence that the Navy would approve this eventually. But got them lazed, put in a transfer package, went to buds and got married somewhere along the way.

Page 2 of So a couple deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq, marriage starts falling apart. In a misguided attempt to save it, I get out of the Navy. From there I go into private business, have an idea for a startup and I'm the cliche dude who's second mortgage and maxing out credit cards, and cashing in TSP and all that kind of stuff run out of money don't want to give up on the idea teach myself how to program.

Then somewhere in there Adam Brown, (who some of your viewers probably know the name) had died, and we were having a fundraiser for his widow. It was a Race in Virginia Beach. A buddy of mine was still on active duty. I told him what I was doing. He was at a unit there and needed software built, and so that was the start of the company.

He asked me if I could build him a thing. I built him a thing. A very accidental business and 15 years later here we are.

Jon Becker: It's not surprising that you end up in the teams after you sneak off to Canada to lazed your eyes that demonstrated your skill set that was required.

John Dowd: Right.

Jon Becker: But no, it's funny because I think the best businesses start like that.

John Dowd: Well what funny is I had started a different business before this. And well the one that I ran out of money on right must have written 50 business plans and yadayada-yada. I never wrote a single business plan for this one. First one fails, this one succeeds. I don't know what the lesson is there, but you tell me.

Jon Becker: The lesson is that you need a customer that wants what you have, and you need to build. I think in business building for a person, or a specific mission is always more effective. If you look at the way we develop products, every product we've ever developed, every set we've ever worked on, every big project, I'm always building for an end user. There's a guy in my brain every time.

John Dowd: With a name and a face that you know.

Jon Becker: Yeah 100%.

John Dowd: I love that.

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Jon Becker: Yeah because and so it makes sense that's how it works. So selection assessment obviously it's a topic in Special Operations from tier one units, down to small part-time Municipal SWAT teams. Selection is a problem. Picking the right people is a problem. Keeping the right people, and developing them is a problem.

Part of the reason that I was excited to sit down with you today is because you were sent to me by some of the most elite units in the world who said, “This is the company we're working with to do this”.

When I initially did the research on you there's nothing. There's a website and very little information about what you do, and you know you haven't been on podcasts. To some degree this is a coming out party for you. So I appreciate you sitting down with me.

I think it probably makes sense for us to start with kind of how 20/25 years ago somewhere in there, the tier one teams began to look at their selection assessment processes and refine them. I don't want to use the word ‘professionalize them’ but I can't think of a better way to do it, and in talking to the community that's kind of the word that has been used is they ‘change’ the way they pick guys.

John Dowd: Yeah, I think that's fair I mean 20 years ago is too far for me to comment on directly other than like that maybe when I was going through buds. But I was on the wrong end for this conversation at that point. But certainly in the last 15 years like we've seen tremendous, you know I'll go with ‘professionalization’ although that maybe is not the precise word ‘evolution’ for sure. These teams have gotten way better. They're taking it so seriously. They're investing more resources. It's gotten a lot better for sure.

Jon Becker: Well I think it's easy to look and go “Okay well you know Navy Seal. Harry Chester Frogman. We're just going to pick really tough guys.” But it's that's not enough right it's a great it's a great selection for certain criteria and certain skill sets and certain attributes if you go with Rich Divy look at it. But it's not enough to pick the right guy who is then going to subsequently go on into a tier one unit or is going to go on to lead a unit, and so I think it does make sense that they started to look at what is the right combination.

John Dowd: Yeah. I think there's been a tremendous amount of differing efforts, some disconnected from the one that came before it. So a lot of activity. And how much of that activity has actually resulted in the evolution progression, I think it's a mixed bag. I and we are certainly not experts on all of that activity, but we have had a very unique vantage point.

The thing that I tell a lot of people is if you're running one of these commands say NSW for example, and you have these different pockets of ANS happening routinely (Buds, Green Team, whatever the case may be) you'll get you typically really good dudes rolling into those positions. I mean your community is full of really good dudes. Hopefully you're paying attention to who runs those particular units because that's your new blood right, you got to get that right.

Page 4 of The problem is they're in the unit or they're in that position rather for two or three years, they got a bunch of collateral duties. They're only doing it in this narrow silo and there's 50 other silos around the military, 500 other silos around the military where people are grappling with similar issues. And there just wasn't cross talk cross colonization. Everybody was doing their silo rolling out after 2 years.

Well we've had this and it's like not any kind of a strategic genius on our part just serendipity, and maybe we earn the trust of some people but we have this perch of we can actually work with you know 10-15 different units simultaneously each in their own silos, and we can stay on this topic all the time and never come off it.

So that's really why I was interested in talking to you was we've accumulated a bunch of stuff in our brain. I kind of feel bad that it's in our brain and not in the brains where it can really do the most good, and so hopefully this conversation is a way for us to kind of return the trust that was placed in us over the last decade and a half.

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's the same thing that we see in our business. Our program officers might turn over every year, year and a half. At a minimum every two years you say, “Let me tell you about your program”, and there isn't the great vehicle for the retention of corporate knowledge.

So a lot of times an outside firm like yours like mine, are in a position to gather a broader swath of lessons learned but also to kind of carry the corporate knowledge about a topic in a way that is difficult even for the command themselves if they're trying just because of unit turnover and changes of command and everything else.

John Dowd: Vehicles like this where the knowledge just gets disseminated, maybe that raises the floor just across a whole bunch of different enterprises even some that we never hear about and never talk to that. That would be a huge victory. I would love that if that's what results from this sort of thing.

Jon Becker: One of the things that I'm seeing more and more as shows are starting as podcasts, and shows and conversations are starting to be had there is a great deal of knowledge at the top of the DOD tactical hierarchy. There's a lot of money being spent there's a lot of expertise.

And by guys like you coming out and having these kinds of conversations SWAT teams in whatever oversee, Wisconsin can hear the things that elite units are thinking about in selection.

One of the things that you know the great joy for me and this show is I can take a guy like you that none of these people are ever going to meet, and they can meet you and they can have this conversation and learn about lessons learned.

Page 5 of Let's talk about the evolution. I know that the work that you are doing is built. Obviously we stand on the shoulders of giants right.

John Dowd: Boy is that true.

Jon Becker: Talk to me a little bit about that.

John Dowd: There's too many people to really name, but I do want to call out a few, people that I've just spent endless hours talking to and have really shaped my thinking.

And as you and I are talking today if I don't mention their names, I'm going to feel like I'm taking credit for stuff that isn't my own, I want to call out Aaron Rie, Hans Hansen Trey Free these are guys who are operators in these spaces who then became very-very deep thinkers and practitioners in this art of assessment selection. Psych Dos, there's a bunch of them but Chad Marrow, and Mark Stall, both of them tremendous influence on me and on us. And then a guy named Preston Kelin who you should probably have on your show one day. I'll talk to you about him offline.

Jon Becker: No, I know who Preston is.

John Dowd: Okay, yeah he's a great thinker in this space as well and a good friend of ours.

Jon Becker: I actually just interviewed Dan Doris who's the medical director for MCTI.

John Dowd: Oh really?

Jon Becker: Yeah.

John Dowd: Oh that's awesome. I don't actually know him.

Jon Becker: Dan’s fantastic.

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John Dowd: Yeah. We had this great good fortune of being able to work with these units, and then you go and there's tremendous person and you're thinking through complex problems and they're sharing their insights with you. I mean man, that is the most rewarding thing professionally for me in a long-long time.

Jon Becker: I think every organization struggles with picking personnel. I don't care if you are trying to pick a girl scout leader. Trying to pick the right people who fit into the organizational culture, and have the right mix of personality type and skills and all those things, is what separates a great organization from a good organization. It really is.

When I teach leadership I would say, it's about people. In the end it's about people and so selection is such a hot topic. The teams that we deal with and guests that I've had on the show, it's always something that comes up. Why don't we start with just some kind of baseline definitions?

John Dowd: Yeah, I think that would be useful. So you mentioned attributes earlier yep that's a good place to start. So we were actually in the crowd that was in fact an early version of our way. One of our white papers said, ‘Everything starts with attributes or something that affects what we have learned the hard way’. That's the wrong approach.

I'm going to introduce the idea of behaviors as a replacement for where you might start with your ANS program.

Specifically you want to do your task let's say to stand up an ANS. Well how do you possibly begin that task? Step one go find the high reputation Gray Beards in your community. The guys who have been there done that. Ask them, “Hey man, what are the concrete observable behaviors that you've witnessed with your own eyes that made a difference in a workup cycle on the battlefield, you know serving a high-risk warrant late at night?” Whatever the different components are that you know matter in your given community, find the guys who have done it, and ask them for concrete observable things they've seen with their own eyes that led to success, and the anti- patterns that led to failure.

When I say ‘behaviors’ that's what I mean. You're identifying something very concrete. Now eventually you can bring that back to attributes but I'm going to skip even talking about that for now and we'll arrive there eventually.

Jon Becker: All right, give me some examples of what constitutes behavior.

John Dowd: Great question because the answer is very varied, so we'll just throw out a few. I'll pretend to be the Gray Beard in this case.

Jon Becker: I mean I’m looking at you, your beard's gray.

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John Dowd: So things like “Hey man, when we were in Afghanistan you know a lot of our targets involved high altitude long range rucks”. Okay well if you can't do that then that's going to lead to failure. All right, roger that. We need to be testing for if the guy run underweight for long distances right, concrete absorbable behavior. That’s physical and you can imagine, oh caving ladders we got to do that. All right, well let's do some pull-ups right or cave ladder climbs.

It's also hey when things go really sideways and bullets start flying, can he get on the radio and form a coherent sentence so he can talk to the aircraft to tell him where to drop the bomb or is he freaking out. Okay well there's another concrete absorbable behavior are officers.

The officers who can get in front of the sort of commander and give an effective presentation. Take some hostile fire from the audience, and deliver an effective brief.

When that happens we get the mission. When they wither you know while giving that brief we don't get the mission. Okay there's another concrete observable behavior. Our O's need to be able to be effective public speakers in front of potentially hostile crowds.

Let your wander. Any kind of job performance breaching, sniping yada-yada-yada all these things are potentially concrete absorbable behaviors that will lead to success or failure.

The absence will lead to failure on the battlefield which kind of brings me to another point.

So it's useful I think when you're talking about building your ANS program to think about three different lanes. So there's the job performance lane which is probably honestly over measured right and that's where you get your pull-ups, push-ups, go to the range, string a HF radio antenna, all the technical tactical physical skills that's job performance. It's important I think we tend to over measure it relative to the other stuff.

Second lane is team impact right and I know you've written an article on High Performing Assholes and so this is where that concept intersects with us. Team impact, I don't care if you can run a 4-minute mile and you can shoot the lights out from a mile away and you can do this and all the CQC or God in the house whatever.

If your impact when we add you to that team right there, if your impact is you're going to make that team degrade in some way, you're going to lower morale, you're going to you're going to bend their moral compass a little bit South. You're going to create acrimony and hate, discontent as if none of the stuff over here matters. Your team impact is cancerous and so we got to pass.

So when you're doing your ANS of course you're worried about the job performance stuff. You need to spend a lot of time worrying about this team impact stuff too. You measure them very differently but they're both very important and probably the team impact one is the more important of the two.

Jon Becker: Okay.

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John Dowd: Then the final lane I'll talk about real quick because this is much harder to measure especially on ANS time frames but your devotion to the community. Are you here because you've watched too many bad movies and you want to be Charlie Sheen in the bar getting in a fight and getting the girl? Is that way you're here? Because we're not interested in that right.

We need folks especially as they ascend in rank who will always sacrifice their own interests for those of the community who will make the unpopular decision with their guys because it's the right thing for the community. So those three lanes I think are just useful buckets to have in your mind as you're thinking through who we are trying to screen for.

Jon Becker: So let me go back and let's just walk through those again.

John Dowd: So job performance which is all the normal stuff you would think about how fast you can run, how many push-ups, how straight do you shoot, land warfare tactics like everything--

Jon Becker: Skills. I mean mostly you would regard those as skills.

John Dowd: Yeah, physical measurements, skill measurements, technical tactical stuff.

The meat of the job you're doing.

Jon Becker: I call it your ability to do the job.

John Dowd: Yeah absolutely.

Jon Becker: And then the second bucket is the effect that you have on the team that you work with.

John Dowd: Team impact. Are you curious? Are you able to give and receive constructive feedback effectively? Are you low ego? Are you decisive? Do you have a high drive? ‘Cause all those things there's a culture out. There's team rooms right now that have a certain cocktail of those ingredients. We're going to put you in it. If you're the apple to their orange that can be disastrous. Team impact is huge; this is where you screen out the High Performing Asshole.

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Jon Becker: Yeah and I think I think as you were saying that that was what I was thinking of because it's very easy to look at skills like how fast does he run. Those are easily quantifiable. They're objective: we can measure how fast you run, how well you shoot. It's hard to measure how well you get along with the team and the effect you have on groups. So we tend to default to objective measures.

John Dowd: Yeah.

Jon Becker: We can go well you know John runs a 440 and Aaron runs a five minute so you know John beat Aaron. In the article that I wrote for entrepreneurs I literally referred to that as the “land of the High Performing Asshole”. Objective skills-based tests are where High Performing Assholes thrive.

John Dowd: Yeah and you understand why people measure. Like you said, it's the easiest stuff to measure.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

John Dowd: Not only is it easy to measure because you just count or time or whatever but there's also a certain thing where these communities are physical studs by and large.

It's part of the identity of the community they say, “Hey we got to make sure guys can do 20 pull ups or whatever”.

Regardless we end up being drawn to measure the things that are easy to measure and unambiguous. We don't have to have huge drawn out arguments about whether or not that push-up counted.

Jon Becker: No, it feels fair. If you outran me then you're faster than I am and that feels fair. It doesn't feel fair to say well you I don't really like the way John affects the team in the team room whereas you know Aaron or Bill has a better relationship that feels kind of subjective and icky to most people.

John Dowd: I think because when people try to do that it's often done poorly, and it ends up being icky.

Jon Becker: It also ends up being an excuse for you to pick your friend.

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John Dowd: I think you can be very rigorous about this. I think there is a right way to do it, and it can be clean from that accusation of, “Oh you're just really like picking the guy you wanted to pick anyway”.

Let me back up a step. When we're measuring the job performance stuff like the language, we would use for that is you want to design an assessment typically. So an assessment is a discrete window of time, it's like Tuesday at 1:00 we're going to do the PRT. There's a discrete moment of time. We're going to count some push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups whatever or we're going to do some house runs or we're going to do a medical scenario or ropes, or whatever the case may be. But you're engineering that moment.

Aaron, the guy mentioned earlier likes to talk about “The perfect realm for assessments is where there is no gap between the best and true self”. So the best self is like your displayed self, your facade, your mask.

I want to get a job at your company and if you interview me, I'm going to put on a facade-- it's human nature.

In an assessment, there's no gap between your best self push-ups and your true self push-ups, if you can do 100 push-ups.

Jon Becker: You can do 100 push-ups.

John Dowd: Yeah, but there are other arenas where that assessment that engineered the moment is not at all the right instrument because the gap between best and true is large. So all the stuff we were talking about a second, all the team impact stuff, you almost never want to measure that in an assessment. You want to measure the survey.

The survey our term just means, no engineered moment just put guys together for an extended period of time, ideally make it an intense period of time. Ideally erode them you know physically, make them tired hungry, wet, cold whatever. So their ability to sustain that you know that displayed self the best self which takes cognitive energy to do erode that. Then leave them alone in a barracks with some chores to do while the cadre leaves. Then ask them how that went.

There's a lot of guidance in exactly how you, which questions you ask and how you ask them. The key Insight here is just you as a cadre cannot by virtue of how humans work you cannot hope to get around this facade that they're going to wear, this best self that they're going to put on display for you in order to measure their team impact. You've got to set some conditions, get out of the room and then come back to their peers and harvest the information then.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it makes perfect sense right. It's like they always say that the commander by entering the room changes the room. The assessor who is running the assessment or the person that's doing the job interview changes the nature. One of the things I like to do with key employees when I hire them is take them to lunch, and have a casual conversation and watch the way they treat the waiter because if they mistreat the waitress it says something.

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John Dowd: Sure does.

Jon Becker: It is those little moments that are outside of and I guess you are trying to get past that you know displayed self of I'm putting my best foot forward I might be a complete asshole. I'm going to be really nice to you because I want this job and putting them in a position cleaning barracks. How much do they participate? How do they get along with the other people while they're doing it? You are more likely to see what somebody really is when you present them with something that is not obviously a test.

We have you interviewed by multiple people.

I will send you a you know petite female who is not going to be somebody you work for.

People don't realize it when you work for us but she has the ability to torpedo you because if she walks in she's like “He treated me like shit”. He's not the guy but that's because he's already in his mind the way you treat the receptionist, the job interview says more about you than the way you treat the guy that's interviewing you. I think that's an interesting concept that I don't think we tend to think about.

I want to just go back for one second. Explain for me just from a nomenclature standpoint, what is the difference between a selection and an assessment?

John Dowd: So we're mixing terms of ours. We internally use these terms assessment and Survey so I don't know if those are universal definitions but I think they're instructive regardless, as opposed to you'll frequently hear the term A&S Assessment and Selection. So conceptually in different plain English that just means, “Hey we're going to take you know 50 job candidates essentially”. Except they're not candidates for Walmart they're candidates for units that deal in life and death and so you know we got to be a little more rigorous than Walmart. We're going to take them. We're going to put them through. We're going to assess them in general, we're going to measure them in various ways. Once we have the results of those measurements. We're going to make some decisions we're going to select him, her, him, not him, not her, not him. So you assess and then you select.

One of the guys I mentioned earlier by the way Hans had a he's got a bunch of great lines but one of them was “Your whole career is a selection event”. We tend to think of them as these buds: Green Team Police Academy. There's a reason why we think that but honestly it should be every day of your career. If you fuck something up today that should have some bearing on whether you get promoted to that spot over there.

Jon Becker: Yeah that's interesting and I think that is a place where law enforcement especially struggles because again you know fairness. You want to have a fair process so everybody gets a fair shot and there isn't again you're defaulting back to those objective measures or you're defaulting back to these selection events, these assessment events where you're going to sit down and be interviewed by a panel of five people who you have to impress.

Page 12 of You have to do a good job. You're preparing for it, you're walking in prepared. You're having this conversation with people that you know are determining whether you're getting the promotion. So you're going to act a certain way but you're missing out on all of that other intangible middle bucket of team effect that you're not going to pick up with a single assessing event.

John Dowd: Google's done a bunch of work here in hiring people not ANS you and I are talking about it but instructive nonetheless. One of their findings is (and it's consistent with findings from decades of research) job interviews are completely uncorrelated with later success in the job. It's an IQ test. If my IQ is north of 100 and I sit down across from you and I'm interviewing for a position at your company, I have a basic sense of what you're looking for and I can fake it for 45 minutes by sitting in an air conditioned room.

So you've proven that my IQ is above 100 and that's all you've proven.

Jon Becker: Yeah it's funny because it's been 38 years that I've owned a business and I've hired and fired people and I rely so much less on job interviews and so much more on gut instinct and conversation and things that are harder to quantify. Trying to read who the person actually is not what they can do. What they can do means less to me than who they are. I think it kind of points up this difference between things that you can teach, and things that you can't teach.

John Dowd: Yeah. We have a different phrasing for that exact concept because there's a key constraint here. The commander has told you to run this ANS program to screen 50 people to make 20 or whatever it is. By the way in six months or one year or whatever your time frame is, the graduates of this need to be deployable. They need to be useful to that team right there.

So if you think through that for a minute, there's some implications. People are going to have to show up at your doorstep on day one of this ANS having achieved a certain threshold value of pull-ups. So we call that “the buy threshold” and then the contrast is the build. Somebody shows up running 8-minute miles, there’s no way we can build that to 6 minute miles. If they show up at you know 6:30 we can buy at 6:30 and build to 6 whatever I'm using--

Jon Becker: That's an interesting yeah, it's an interesting way to look at it is buy versus build. I don't want to buy you know a cart horse and try to turn him into a race horse. I need to buy a race horse that's got a certain skill set and then I can train them and build them and do all of that. Yeah that's an interesting way to look at it. I think it's also a place that people struggle.

I think we tend to conflate those two and think “Oh I've got to get this whole skill set out of the gate because I can't build it. I think it's also as you were saying that what I'm thinking is there are certain things that you can build quickly. There are other things that you can't build quickly.

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John Dowd: Exactly.

Jon Becker: I think that timeline is going to effect when you're looking at what you can build versus buy you've also got to be looking at the timeline you have.

John Dowd: 100%. The commander says, “Hey, sorry John you know about budget cuts.

Your six-month operator training course is now going to be three months.” “Okay well that sucks but it means among other things I can no longer buy at the 630 mile, I got to buy at the 615 mile if I need to ultimately produce a six-minute mile.”

The classic example by the way of the thing that cannot be built at all is what we have Crucible events for so think like hell we can buds and different programs have different Crucible. So Crucible is just prolonged really intense discomfort in every possible way that they can inflict discomfort on you physically, psychologically whatever.

There's a few points but the thing that a Crucible event teases out very quickly is the behavior of not quitting. That is not a build that is a buy. It's some intersection of your desire to be a part of this, your desire for this community, your desire to be worthy of the guy next to you, just your ability to withstand suck.

I've never met anybody who claimed, “Oh yeah we can buy low on that and build it up”.

Jon Becker: And sell high.

John Dowd: Yeah. You got to come through the door with that.

Jon Becker: We're going to take the guy who quits even trying to find a parking place and we're going to turn him into a guy that could be deployed by himself in Afghanistan.

John Dowd: Yeah good luck.

Jon Becker: With a sniper rifle. It'll be great.

John Dowd: Yeah.

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Jon Becker: It's interesting. I had Michael Lumpkin on the show who at one point ran--

John Dowd: I know him. I don't think he'll remember me. I was the Ops down at special bow team 22 in Stennis when he was the commander of Navski Ops.

Jon Becker: When Michael was running buds one of the things that we talked about I said you know people identify buds. It's a training event he goes it's not a training event.

All we're trying to do is figure out what's inside we're looking for certain traits, certain abilities to withstand suck and to not quit and to compartmentalize and all of these things.

He says, “The idea that it's training we're not we're not going to teach you anything. You may walk out of it feeling better about yourself and knowing that you have these things.

We're not going to teach you how to overcome pain or cold or sand or any of those things in the process of buds. It's just not going to happen.”

John Dowd: Yeah. I think all that's true but I think historically (and this has gotten better) but a lot of that stuff even the ‘I'm not going to quit behavior’ even that falls into that job performance. I got to run so far, I got to shoot straight. I got to do this blah blah blah. I have to be tough. I have to be able to withstand the suck.

So buds do a great job of that for sure. It screens out a whole bunch of people who watch the Charlie Sheen movie thought they wanted it but then you know six minutes into it we figured out they really didn't. None of that by itself proves anything about the team impact part and buds is rich fertile territory for harvesting that kind of data because these dudes are spending six months together, lots of reps, lots of time.

You have to deliberately harvest that information but if you don't you very much have the potential of graduating the High Performing Asshole who can withstand the suck and yada yada yada but is going to be poisoned when he goes into the platoon hut.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I guess if you're intentionally harvesting that information you're going to get the middle of the curve otherwise what you're going to get is the two extremes. He is such an asshole that people talk about what an asshole he is or he's such a great guy that everybody loves him. Anything beyond those two are not going to immediately rise up without an intentional process.

John Dowd: Oh yeah. 100%.

Jon Becker: You won’t just trip your way into “Oh this guy's he's pretty good”.

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John Dowd: Here's a classic way where you can kind of stumble your way into a bad process.

Jon Becker: Oh sure.

John Dowd: A question that I got asked about my peers when I was in buds was, “Would you go to war with him?”

If you think about it for two seconds, okay I guess that's a question. Then you think about it for two more seconds and you think, “Wait a minute, something feels off about this”.

Here's how I would break it down: when you're harvesting information you don't have assessment events where you're engineering it and everything's precise and it reliably produces an insight into this or that behavior. This is the prolonged exposure and then we you know come back and talk to you and ask you about these folks.

There's two ways to ask those questions. One is behaviorally anchored questions, so things like he shows up to work on time with the right gear-- very behaviorally anchored.

So if you're asked that question about me whoever is requiring you to answer it, he doesn't have to know or care what you think about the value of punctuality and preparedness or whatever else he just needs you to make the observation, “Yes John shows up on time. He's got the right gear cool.”

I'll put that in contrast to the second type which is outcome oriented. So outcome oriented is like wanting to go to war with him. I don't like that for other reasons but here's a different version of it that I got from a friend of mine: I would actively recruit him for my next platoon.

Jon Becker: Oh yeah that's a very different thing.

John Dowd: Well the key here is--

Jon Becker: That feels very different though. It's the same question but it's two different questions.

John Dowd: Yeah the best version of that “I would go to war with him” is trying to be the, “I would actively recruit him” but it's just too laden with other crap. Let's just think about “He shows up to work on time I would actively recruit him for my next platoon”.

So a couple things I'll point out this is very narrow one single behavior you know John might be super punctual but he might be horrible in every other regard. If you say, “I want to actively recruit him for my next platoon” you're mentally bundling up a whole Page 16 of bunch of behaviors that you care about and that you've seen this individual demonstrate.

You get a lot more bang for your buck here than here. In buds however you can't do these.

The 17-year-old who was in high school last week you don't give a shit what his opinion is of who he would actively recruit for his next platoon. He knows nothing about your culture, no basis to compare apples to apples or anything else. So with anybody who's made any kind of discontinuous leap certainly high school to buds would be one you can get more nuanced with a special mission unit is that a discontinuous leap. I'm not sure.

Jon Becker: But based on the washout rate. I would argue it is.

John Dowd: So regardless of whether it is or it isn't you have to be thinking about that right and then if you're in the scenario where there is a discontinue. And actually I bet you the answer is more nuanced. There are certain things where there's perfect continuity between the whites off and the and then there's other areas where there's a divergence. So you have to carefully think through that and when you are in the land of discontinuous leap you got to stick with the behaviorally anchored questions.

Once you've arrived at a spot where you say, no this group that harvested info these are trusted cultural agents. They've been around. They know who we're trying to be. They know our aspirational culture. They buy into it. Well now you can ask them all the outcome oriented questions you want right because you have a reasonable expectation that you're talking about the same thing. And that's where you could start harvesting really low level data from the front lines bubbling up 10 layers in the hierarchy. Now for the first time in his life, the commander has deep insight into the front lines of his organization.

This is not ANS specific thing. I mean we do it there of course this is your whole career Commander should be routinely harvesting this kind of information because as you said earlier they can't observe it directly. They walk in the room people act differently but when they're not in the room all these other people are, and you can ask them questions about it,

Jon Becker: Yeah. When I teach Culture Centric Leadership I talk about getting to ground truth like you. You have to know what the person on the front line is because in your organization the people that sew our armor know more about the manufacturer of our product than I will ever know. They have much more experience doing that thing.

They actively do that thing every day. They're not fragmented. So if I have a question about that, that is the best source of information in the building to go to. It isn't two steps up in the supervisor chain. It's like go to the person that actually makes things, go is this occurring. The same is true here, if you're trying to measure several steps into the organization you're getting away from that ground truth that the people in the team room see and nobody else does.

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John Dowd: Yeah, so you know where here's how to make this very visceral for people listening. How many times have you seen this scene? There is a room with a bunch of people in it, cameras, lights, and a podium senior leader walks out to the podium, faces a crowd and says something like “This incident does not reflect the values of our organization”? I empathize, and totally get it. My translation of that is: I'm the commander. I've lost the ability to directly know what the culture is, which is ironic because I'm the guy who can influence it the most.

Jon Becker: Yeah I always take that. That's always, “This does not reflect the you know beliefs of this organization”. I always think to myself, it doesn't reflect the beliefs that you would like for the organization to have.

John Dowd: The aspirational culture.

Jon Becker: That's different.

John Dowd: The actual culture.

Jon Becker: And see that's an interesting point is, you do have two cultures.

John Dowd: You do.

Jon Becker: And the closer those two are aligned probably the healthier your organization is.

John Dowd: Yeah well you know it's a good step to being healthy? Just being able to measure the difference in the first place like maybe you're aligned maybe you're not. I mean nobody's perfectly aligned.

Jon Becker: Sure.

John Dowd: Step one is you have to have like you know know you're aspiration, you're the commander like you're the definition of the aspirational culture and that's what you do. You set the culture and of course you're not just making stuff up right there's constraints on Legacy and all this kind of stuff but more than anyone else you're the one Page 18 of who decides what the aspirational culture is. But you really need a mechanism to figure out where the actual culture is because in some places, there's going to be such tight alignment it doesn't require your attention.

Other places there's going to be a variance. You have to know what those variances are, how you know unspecifically what behaviors and then you've got to figure out a plan of how you're going to reconcile those.

Jon Becker: So let's dig a little deeper into you know and ask here. I want to measure concrete observable behaviors. This is where I want to kind of dig into your best practices. Walk me through if I'm running my assessment and selection correctly, what are the kinds of things that I'm doing? Give me kind of John's you know okay best practices list.

John Dowd: All right let me just kind of free association this. So first off you should be very thoughtful about like there's really three archetypes of Cadre. So there's the Sensei.

Sensei is the guy you want and I'll circle back.

Jon Becker: When you say ‘Cadre ‘you mean the assessor?

John Dowd: Exactly. We'll come back to Sensei in a second. Gatekeeper he's the guy when you (and you've seen this I'm sure a bunch) the guy who's constantly angry at the candidates, you just met him but he's constantly angry.

Jon Becker: How dare you try to come here and be what I am?

John Dowd: Yeah, so the gatekeeper what he sounds like, he is going to make damn sure that you don't get in unless you absolutely you know or twice the operator he was or not operator candidate that he was when he was going to the same process.

Jon Becker: He's the bridge Troll from Monty Python.

John Dowd: Yeah, there you go and then there's Santa which is kind of the reverse. He did something poorly and they just can't bring themselves to give you a bad grade on it.

So the Sensei obviously is the good guy in the story. He is eager to welcome you so long as you meet the standard and he will rigorously enforce the standard. He's not angry at Page 19 of you in the meantime right he's rooting for you but he's not going to give an inch. So you want Sensei more than Gatekeepers or Sensei. Ideally you'd have all Sensei but it's probably not going to work out that way. But at a minimum know who your Senseis are, not your gatekeepers, know who your Santas are. Gatekeepers and Santa are fine for timing runs and counting push-ups.

Jon Becker: Yeah I mean as you're saying that I'm picturing buds right. That's a good place for gatekeepers.

John Dowd: Yeah there needs to be Sensei there too because the other worry here is and you alluded I forget what you said but it instantly made my mind go here. What you're talking about, these ANS processes, these are sadism sandboxes, if you're not very-very careful. Every fraternity hazing incident or the Stanford Prison Experiment there's a group of people in charge of a group of people who had to do the every beck and call. Those conditions left unchecked can veer quickly into sadism. There's a bunch of safeguards to prevent your process from veering in that direction but step one is have a bunch of Senseis especially in the key leadership roles.

Jon Becker: Yeah because if you if all you have are bridge trolls no one's getting across the bridge and everybody will be dead when they're done.

John Dowd: Yeah and it'll turn into a sadism sandbox. The problem with the sadism thing is like A, you're going to occasionally kill a dude right or injure somebody. But let's say you get super lucky and that never happens.

There's still a really big problem: people are going to graduate your pipeline having learned as their very first lesson about your community that sad sadism is cool here and that's what we do right. Just let your mind wander about how that turns out for you 5-10 years down the road. So you're making your first impression as a community on this new blood, you really want them they're going to come in idealistic, super excited, nervous all this kind of stuff.

Graduate them with some amount of that idealism, and optimism still in the tank, don't displace it all with cynicism and sadism, God forbid.

Jon Becker: Yeah because the kid that survives the sadism sandbox.

John Dowd: He learned them.

Jon Becker: Is the most sadistic kid in the sandbox.

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John Dowd: He didn't learn that sadism is unwelcome here.

Jon Becker: He learned it cool and it and it's going to help him succeed it's interesting it has to be kind of a balance right because there has to be like you said you can have a bunch of Santas that are handing out cookies to everybody but you know you don't want to have a sadism sandbox. I'm going to guess that of those three personality types the Sensei is probably the hardest to find.

John Dowd: They're not super rare. These communities tend to draw really good people.

Really good people are often thoughtful and wise and if you have all those criteria you're probably more of a Sensei or disposition is to be a Sensei.

Unless that's you from the perspective of Sensei and you come on to the team, and the leader is a gatekeeper and the culture is gatekeeper. And now you're a wannabe Sensei surrounded by gatekeepers everywhere. They're probably going to turn you into a gatekeeper too.

Jon Becker: Yeah because you're living in the sadism sandbox.

John Dowd: Yeah so step number one when you know Jon Becker stands up his next ANS is you know find the Sensei to occupy every key leadership role. And if you get Sensei all the way down the ranks so much the better but at least the key leaders.

Jon Becker: Okay. We got to first define our criteria with our Gray Beards-- what are the behaviors we want to see.

John Dowd: Yep.

Jon Becker: We've got to pick Sensei to be the guys that are actually going to run that.

They're not going to give it to you but they're going to help you. They want you to succeed like you said. They want you to succeed but they're not they're going to hold the standard but at the same time they're not going to torture you recreationally, they're going to torture you for a purpose.

John Dowd: Yep. We talked about the lanes so the Gray Beards will have identified a bunch of stuff you got to bin them okay hey this is job performance. We can engineer an assessment that will reliably produce an insight into actually a unit that you and I are Page 21 of both familiar with. They have a height phobia test. It's an elaborate setup and none of it matters.

Jon Becker: I'm familiar with the test.

John Dowd: Yeah none of it matters until there's a moment where you get to this spot and you got to just jump. Everything else was just window dressing. But when you get to that moment are you shaking, and does it take you 10 minutes or you do a reasonable risk assessment and then jump. The reason why I love that example is it's so crystal clear. That will reliably reveal candidate after candidate after candidate reveal something about that behavior that like I am comfortable in heights behavior.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's like claustrophobia is another one that a lot of units test for.

John Dowd: Yes and you can get very clean looks at it. So there other things are much harder to test-- still doable but it just takes a lot of creativity and whatever. Your behaviors that the Gray Beards gave you, bin them. Is this job performance? Okay cool the next task is we're going to go through and we're going to engineer events that will or assessments that will reliably produce looks at the presence or absence of that behavior that the Gray Beard identified. So that's a bucket okay.

Another bucket team impact and the Gray Beards will have a ton to say about this. Some of it you can immediately picture like: does he carry his weight on the team, does he show, is he on time, does he have the right gear, are we always waiting on him and somebody's got to lend him a this and lend him of that.

They may not use this language but a growth mindset is what they're going to be getting at. So if you go in the house and you I fuck it up, and I tell you you fucked it up, what's your reaction?

Jon Becker: Yeah do you beat yourself up or do you go “Okay and I'm going to learn from it” and adapt your behavior or do you lie and deny?

John Dowd: You make excuses yada-yada-yada. So obviously what you want is the curious hungry growth mindset make me better. I fuck something up, great tell me what it is. Anyway, the Gray Beards will have a bunch of those.

So now you're going have to engineer this but you're not engineering assessments you're figuring out how you can set the conditions for his peers or all of their peers to be able to derive this Insight during your whatever it is one week, six month process.

Page 22 of The final one is that you know the devotion to the community is much harder to tease out. It's a related thought here think about the time span you need to have confidence in a measurement from a given bin. I can very quickly get confident in your understanding of your ability to do push-ups. It will take two minutes.

Jon Becker: That's a two-minute event and we know he does X many.

John Dowd: Same thing with stringing HF radio take a little longer whatever but in very short order I can have a high degree of confidence that we all on the assessing and selecting side have an accurate read on your ability or pretty much anything in that job performance category.

The team impacts stuff you can get a lot done if you're thoughtful about keeping the candidates together, pressurizing the situation, wearing them out physically and mentally giving them really frustratingly difficult things to do in their downtime with no supervision. There's ways to engineer such that at the end of whatever a week or a month or something, the peers will have reliably learned about team impact in a way that you can harvest it from them.

Jon Becker: Give me some examples of this kind of frustration?

John Dowd: 5,000 piece puzzle that has no actual image to it, it's just the “Hey this will be done by the end of the week and you can only work on it you know after the training day is over, and you're back in the barracks while you have to take care of eating, you got to sleep, you got to take care of your gear the team gear yada-yada-yada”.

Jon Becker: Interesting.

John Dowd: It's stupid right.

Jon Becker: But it's not.

John Dowd: You’re setting the conditions up for the narcissist to say, “Fuck those idiots let them worry about the puzzle.” I'm going to go… Page 23 of

Jon Becker: Get some sleep.

John Dowd: Yeah get some sleep, fix my gear, prep for tomorrow's evolution so I can look like a hero. There's ways to engineer that but you should have some humility around it. Your confidence in your understanding of John's ability to do push-ups is really high. Your confidence in your read of John's team impacts high but lower. If a guy is smart enough and say he comes in with a super strong cardio engine. So even though you're trying to beat him down his cardio engine so hard you can't really put a dent in it, he can fake that team behavior for a week. Then the community devotion thing like you're not going to get a good read on that until he's got to make a hard choice, “Well this would be best for me. This would be best for the team. (Or not the team the Enterprise)” So very important to measure. You can start getting looks at it and the psychs can help Cadre, the peers. But you should still remain humble like your confidence in that measurement should be the lowest in that bucket compared to the other three if that makes sense.

Jon Becker: Yeah, makes perfect sense. So one of the things that you mentioned the psychs. I think one of the things that is unique about selection in elite units is the use of psychological professionals. Maybe we can just touch on that a little bit, kind of the role.

Without getting into details that reveal the kind of unit secrets, the types of things that psychologists are assessing for or the kinds of assessments that you see them doing, what's the role that they can play?

John Dowd: So there's a few things. One thing which you're alluding to and which I have very little insight into is Wonderlick or I don't even know the names of the other test.

Neo I think is one. There's some battery of tests that they will do.

We're not directly involved in that. You have to have a conversation. There is real insight to be gained there if you have the luxury of having psych docs encourage you to use that.

That's not my John Dowd's personal vote for the value that they really offer, not to diminish any of that. But in my mind the real value is the good ones right. I've actually said this to the guy who runs all the psych docs at the highest level within Socom and he agrees with the statement. 70/80% of psych docs that we've come across are awesome.

20/30% not so much.

The key difference is it's actually that ironically it's the community devotion thing. The 70/80% they are there to serve you the selector and this is their value. You say, “Hey the Gray Beards told me you know that we really need to test this for this behavior. I don't know how to get at it. Help me think through.” They're coming from a much different place than you.

So the intersection of your expertise, your history, your whatever and then their totally orthogonal-like skill set the odds of you being able to come up with a good way to reliably test that thing that the Gray Beards had identified just went through the roof. So that's a tremendous value that they add.

Page 24 of The other value that they add that's really important and often get short shrift is we haven't really mentioned this explicitly but there there's this idea of quantitative assessments versus qualitative. Quantitative is easy on to count or measure (time).

Qualitative often is how you have to measure the really important things. Easy to think of all the ways that can go wrong. Psychs can inoculate you against some of those rights, norming sessions.

Before you do something that is deep in this qualitative sphere-- so I'll give you an example: We're going to give officer candidates you know very short time frame to consume a bunch of fake intel packages and then 30 minutes later they got to you know brief this assembled audience on a “warno opo” kind of thing for some you know notional mission. The behaviors we're trying to tease out here are maybe number one, can they deliver the brief effectively.

Number two, we're going to have the audience members be sort of hostile confrontational, how does he respond to that? Is it fetal position and sucking thumb or is it some resilience there? Number three, we're going to inject some new information late in the game. Does he have the sort of humility to take that information on board and change his plan on the fly? Humility is maybe the wrong word but the flexibility, the adaptability whatever.

So those are the three behaviors we want to test for. Well if you got a whole bunch of people as role players who are watching that go down, there's a really high risk that the yardstick that you should own as the assessor is going to get surrendered to each individual. So they're going to grade things idiosyncratically per their own preconceptions of what right looks like. In that case, every bit of data you've just gathered is garbage.

Jon Becker: It's completely subjective.

John Dowd: Yeah and unfortunately you don't know that. You think you gathered a bunch of signals you didn't, you gathered noise but you still think it's a signal. So that's like the worst case. You'd be better off not having done the event at all.

The psych docs can help with this because you could for example show a couple three different past iterations of this before we go live to the whole assembled group. The psych docs or senior enlisted walk through “Hey, let's everybody grade in silence. Okay now let's talk about our grades out loud. We got some triangulation here. Let's talk through this.” So you gave a high grade because you thought X that's actually a misunderstanding. What we're really trying to do is this other thing, and now you've calibrated everybody.

By the way the psychs have a role there but there's a bunch of other problems, and mitigations around delivering these qualitative assessments because they really are the richest source of assessment data over here but they're just so easy to do wrong. We can dive into that now or maybe circle back to it later.

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Jon Becker: No, I think we can dig in a little bit now. One of the challenges of subjectivity is making sure that we are all measuring the thing that we need that we're looking for and creating a common operating picture, common nomenclature.

We know what we're looking for at the beginning. I think that's a place with selection assessment that a lot of places fall apart if you're looking for one thing. I'm looking for something else, and we don't agree on the front end what we're looking for.

John Dowd: Yeah. So we call that “Own the yard stick”. So the small number of guys who put together the selection or if it has existed for years they inherited it whatever, there's some small number of leaders who are in charge of it. The rest of the staff are there to grade.

So the small number running the process, they need to own the yard stick to meaning they tell you what right looks like. So you're an assessor. I'm the guy that owns the yard stick. I don't care what Jon Becker thinks a good push-up looks like I'm going to tell Jon Becker what and then Jon Becker needs a grade according to that yardstick.

There's a few ways to either optimize your chance for that or to detect problems on the back end which is almost as good. Ultimately there's a grading sheet of some sort right and it says something and then you read it and you watch and then you record a grade.

The thing that it says needs to be “Docker concrete and observable”. Early on (that was probably part of the problem here) units would routinely have the event I described earlier with the 30 minutes to prep.

So there was a scorable thing labeled “compartmentalization - not concrete - not observable”. If you were standing in the front of the room and you watched the audience members or the role players, you could actually see them do this.

Jon Becker: What does that word mean?

John Dowd: Let me translate that into behaviors. Now that I've translated into behaviors did I see any of those behaviors? You just made so much work for them as opposed to “He took Heavies from the audience and maintained composure”. Nobody needs to do that you know in response to that, that's visceral. He was rock solid.

So number one the thing you ask people to grade needs to be concrete and observable.

Number two, when you're counting push-ups one person is fine. When you're doing something like this, the qualitative stuff ideally you have multiple people rating the same individual at the same time-- and why do you do that? For inter reliability. The way you know that everybody was on the same yardstick is you have several people measure at the same time, and the degree to which they differ suggests that everyone was on the same yardstick or not.

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Jon Becker: Yeah your standard deviation there is everybody grades John between three and four that's a very different selection than if they grade him between one and 10.

John Dowd: Yeah. Exactly right.

Jon Becker: The breadth of the disagreement there is going to tell you to some degree the accuracy of the measuring stick.

John Dowd: I will say this: We're typically doing a one through five grading scale. So three is the standard, one is terrible, five is awesome. Every now and then you'll see the same dude was graded at the same event. You got a one and you got a five or a couple of these and a couple of those.

I'd tell you the reason every single time that I've experienced it, Time Slicing. The Time Slicing is we're all going to grade all of them at the same time which means I'm watching Billy from zero to 30 seconds.

Jon Becker: Got it.

John Dowd: And then I slice over to somebody else. So I see Billy do something awesome and then I move over to Johnny and then you look at Billy and you see him do something silly. I give him a five, you give him a one. Every single time I've seen it that's been the culprit.

Jon Becker: Interesting. That's a new concept I hadn't even thought about is Time Slicing. So when you are evaluating…

John Dowd: Don't Time Slice.

Jon Becker: You can't right the because otherwise you're not getting an accurate representation of you and I might see two completely different things. I could see that we didn't do a good job of quantifying on the front end what we're looking for. So you're looking for one thing and I'm looking for another thing, but I can also see where if we do, we have a meeting of the minds beforehand Time Slicing is going to be, “Yeah, he did it right nine times and he totally screwed it up one of the times. I saw him do the one you saw him do the nine. You think he's awesome. I think he's terrible.

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John Dowd: So when you're gathering data, it's important like the custodians, the leaders of this program. Hopefully we're doing a good job of presenting, “Hey man, this is a really deep topic like these guys need to be invested. They are empowered by the commander.” It's a lot to ask but you know couldn't be more important but their job isn't done yet. So even when the assessment is over the next step is “All right cool let's go look at all the data we gathered. What can we learn?”

Jon Becker: Yeah.

John Dowd: Oh my God. I'll give you a few common problems we just talked about. This event had really bad Interreliability IRR, people were getting ones and fives at the same time. Okay well we got to trace down the problem. Is it Time Slicing? Is it there was one guy who was a gatekeeper who was giving out ones and everybody else was being more faithful to the truth, so the problem isn't the event, it's the gatekeeper? Is the event just poorly engineered? Whatever, you got to figure that out.

Another thing for you to look at in the aftermath is differentiation, so if you have an event let's stick with the one through five grading scale, you have an assessment and you devote a bunch of time, your limited time resources whatever else and everybody gets a three.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Then you've assessed absolutely nothing. That is a completely useless test. Don't even bother doing anything.

John Dowd: Exactly. You just burn time and money and whatever. Your assessments have to reliably produce differentiation meaning he's out the good, the bad the whatever and it could be that. If you had an assessment to tie his shoes well everybody would get a five, no differentiation whatever. The problem here is you're testing a stable part of the culture. Everybody can tie your shoes, you don't need to test that. Find stuff that isn't stable parts of the culture that you're worried about, test those things and when you test them make sure you generate differentiation-- if you don't re-engineer the event.

Jon Becker: Yeah that's actually really interesting because I think that would be a common pitfall that you would walk into where, “Oh we're going to test X. We want to make sure everybody can run a 10-minute mile. Yep everybody ran a 10-minute mile.”

You accomplish nothing, make them run a six, and see who doesn't.

It strikes me that the assessment part of this comes at the margin of whatever the skill, behavior or task that you're testing is. It's not in the middle of it. For lack of a better term that line that separates we they have to be here we have to have these kinds of behaviors versus we don't. If what we're doing is we're picking something that kind of everybody can do well “Oh everybody shoots a perfect score”. Then the test isn't hard enough.

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John Dowd: Yeah. There can be a scenario where like caving, ladders, pull-ups whatever 20 is the number. If you can do 20 versus 40, I don't care.

Jon Becker: Right.

John Dowd: There was some data done by one of these units where they took (it was decades, 20/30 years) PT scores from guys at the outset of selection and then the people who completed the OTC. So they compared completers versus the starting point for everybody. Pull-ups, push-ups and sit-ups, have zero correlation whatsoever. Runs and swims, there was no limit to the correlation. The faster you ran the faster you swam the more likely you were to complete the whole course.

Jon Becker: That's kind of crazy actually. Push-ups, sit ups and pull-ups.

John Dowd: The caveat that should be mentioned here is everybody showing up doing 20 pull-ups. Now if somebody had shown up and couldn't do one or could only do five or seven or something like I think they would not have made it. If you're at 20 then growing to 40 doesn't actually improve your odds of completing the whole pipeline.

There was nobody doing less than 20. So it's not totally a fair test if that makes sense.

Jon Becker: Yeah it makes sense.

John Dowd: The explanation for the run and the swim, I think we call this in one of our white papers “The special case of trainability”. We're interested in all these behaviors and all those you know things and eventually you reduce them down to attributes so you have a convenient shorthand. But it's the behaviors we care about not the fancy sounding word. This trainability notion is important because whereas the other behaviors are what's going to make you succeed or fail in your first role in the community, trainability is what you have to have to get there in the first place to complete the pipeline.

We're going to be A physically degrading you, and B throwing a lot of stuff at you because we need to train you into something usable. So what's your starting IQ? Because that'll affect your trainability. What's your cardio engine? The stronger your cardio engine is, the less degradation of cognitive bandwidth will happen as we put you through OTC, and so you'll be able to absorb stuff.

You mentioned one earlier like the guy who beats himself up after a failure. If you and I are perfectly identical like all the way through training and then today we have the exact same fuck up. I'm the dude who beats myself up and you're the dude who shrugs it off, well tomorrow we're not identical anymore. You're way ahead of me.

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Jon Becker: Yeah it's interesting, one of the performance psychologists that I interviewed talked about one of the things separating amazing athletes, really high performing athletes from just below them tier one from tier two for lack of a better term is the ability to compartmentalize failure.

If you watch the Super Bowl this weekend you saw Kansas City have not had a great Super Bowl but if you watched Mohomes every time he walked down the field he looked exactly the same. There was no there was no emotional outburst, there was no throwing his helmet. Yeah, it didn't go well but you could see how in his brain, if you missed the shot you still have to take the next shot. And you can't let the fact that you missed the last shot impact the current shot.

John Dowd: You're not going to like how that works out.

Jon Becker: At some point you start to just cascade downhill. That ability to overcome failure and move on to the next iteration is obviously a really important skill.

John Dowd: 100% agree and you triggered a memory. There's a guy that we work with actually we still work with him from time to time he's at one of these units. Back when he was on active duty I asked him (first name is Jason), “Hey man, what's the number one reason why things go wrong for these dudes?” Looking at the candidates. He said, “Oh easy failure spiral”, something like that. The idea was this: These units draw really high-end performers right just from every walk of life. They haven't experienced a ton of failure. In your unit, your ANS they're going to experience failure. You can easily pull that thread just a little further and arrive at the conclusion of well you know what happens a lot on the battlefield? Failure, uncertainty, disappointment etc.

Your job performance stuff-- we're not talking about stringing the HF radio on the beach in LA. We need to make the conditions as challenging as possible and so that means your ANS should be deliberately injecting failure, uncertainty, disappointment, inject all those things and then take your measurements.

The measurement is kind. I think this exactly the point you're making with Mahomes where you can engineer an event that delivers a lot of disappointment and other psychological stressors. How about this, a failure assembling a weapon in front of you like in a shoot house with a bunch of folks up in the rafters like season operators you're trying to impress and the really attractive female psychologist. You're failing in front of all of them and nobody's looking at anything else except your failure. The instructor right in front of you is announcing just how fucking awful your failure was to that whole assemblage.

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Jon Becker: Jesus.

John Dowd: So what happens right in that moment doesn't matter.

Jon Becker: Crucible event.

John Dowd: What's super interesting is now he leaves he goes over here and he does something else unrelated to assembling a weapon. How does he do?

Jon Becker: Oh interesting.

John Dowd: That's where the story is told. This was just setting the conditions.

Jon Becker: A precursor.

John Dowd: Yes.

Jon Becker: It's a catalyst.

John Dowd: And now we want to see how dysregulated you got by that.

Jon Becker: So we're going to put you in a situation where you're going to fail.

John Dowd: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Because there is no way to win. We're going to make it--

John Dowd: You can't make that transparent because then the curtain gets pulled back.

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Jon Becker: That part of the gun that you're going to put together doesn't quite fit and it's never going to quite fit.

John Dowd: Yeah there's probably better ways to because a nightmare scenario is the guy realizes that he's been set up to fail. There's another way to engineer failure which is just like in a JTAC scenario where JTAC (Joint Terminal Attack Controller) does it on the ground with the radio talking to the aircraft telling where to drop bombs. So you can absolutely induce failure by just add another asset and if that doesn't do it add another asset, and keep playing that game and at some point no human brain is large enough to all that different altitudes, you will reach failure.

So my only point there is just like you should measure what happens after failure, but just be careful about the failure. If you do it too artificially the whole experience becomes less immersive and that works against what you're trying to accomplish with a candidate.

Jon Becker: He has to legitimately believe that he failed at something that he could have succeeded at.

John Dowd: Should have.

Jon Becker: Should have exceeded while other people were standing around. I can see that as a very interesting way to test. That tests a number of things. It tests their resilience, their ability to compartmentalize, and all these things where they have this moment where they have to say, “Okay, I need to move on”, and also their ability to cope with failing in a public way.

John Dowd: The point is just to inoculate ourselves against the sadism sandbox, because we're not doing this because it's mean. We're doing this because on the battlefield or the late night high-risk warrant, those environments punish poor performance regardless of whether the poor performance is because of incompetence or because you got your feelings hurt, or you were super disappointed about a thing, or you had a failure in front of somebody whose opinion you cared about.

Regardless of what happened that caused the bad performance, the result is your buddy got shot. So we want to be in that spot. We want to figure out where you're at with reacting to these psychological stressors and go back to the buy-build threshold. You can probably build some of that; Athletes do it. You hear them talk all the time about things like “I try not to get too high and not to get too low”. They're trying to emulate the Patrick Mahomes of the world. We need to measure it not for no reason for that reason.

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Jon Becker: Yeah we need to see. I guess the two extremes there would be you want somebody who does feel the failure but you don't want somebody who it breaks.

John Dowd: Right.

Jon Becker: And it's interesting because failure is a topic not only in selection assessment but in training that is really undervalued. I teach a class called “Lessons Learned From the Debrief” and one of the things that I talk about in that class is “Embrace failure”. Failure is where you learn.

John Dowd: Yeah.

Jon Becker: You don't learn doing something successfully 100 times, you learn failing at it a certain number of times. One of the guys that works for MCTI Dan Dorcas who's the doctor that I interviewed, talked about his ritual when a patient dies. What does he do when a patient dies? He said, he assembles the team that worked on the person, he puts his hand on them because it's usually at the feet and he says, “I'm sorry. Thank you for teaching me today. I'm sorry that all I could do for you today is learn”, which is really powerful and you hear him say it and you feel it hit you in the stomach.

John Dowd: Yeah chills.

Jon Becker: It's this leaning into failure and developing from it not allowing it to control you. It strikes me here that a selection assessment process for a certain number of people is going to fail. The whole point here is that a large number of people are going to fail because we're trying to pick the best of the best, or however you want to put that. I think the way that the unit handles those people would really matter though.

John Dowd: Yeah. There's a few units that we work with that have given this a lot of thought. I had not given it any thought until interacting with these guys, and now I can't believe that everyone else isn't doing the similar things. And I'll go back real quick to the sadism sandbox.

Another way for you as a leader to inoculate yourself or to reassure yourselves that your program is inoculated against a sadism sandbox is to harvest data from the non-selects.

This will segue us back to where you just had us.

When they go back to their unit whatever their unit is even if it's back to civilian life, they're still Americans they can still serve this country in some way shape or form. Send them back better than you found them. That's number one. Don't break them. Don’t leave them some broken husk of a man or whatever, that's not serving anyone's good.

Page 33 of Send them back better than you found them and send them back as evangelists of your unit. You can absolutely do that while being insanely rigorous with your standards.

They see it. They see professionalism. They see the level that you're playing the game at and they realize they can't play at that level, and they're not butt hurt about it. They're disappointed but they're not holding it against you. If anything you have your community has been elevated in their eyes. They go back home to wherever they started.

They talk about you in glowing terms. I've seen this happen totally doable.

If they go back and they're bad mouthing you, and talking about how unfair the process was like something's wrong.

Jon Becker: That is a profound statement because there's a lot to unpack with what you just said. If you go through the process and you fail, and you walk away and you're not bitter and you've become an evangelist of the unit that means I've not only in your mind created a process that was fair. But it was on point to the mission, the alignment of the tasks that you performed were aligned with what the job ultimately needs to have but that also you felt that. I treated you objectively fairly.

I didn't not pick you because I don't like guys in blue shirts. I didn't pick you because you couldn't do the things that you needed to do that's a that's a tall order.

John Dowd: You get there with Senseis. You don't get there with Gatekeepers. You don't get there with Santas either by the way. If they come to your selection and they encounter nothing but Santas, the esteem with which they hold you is not going to grow going to shrink. It is going to shrink if all they interact with as Gatekeepers.

But the Sensei who take their job seriously care about the community. High standards that's fine. This goes back to that third lane of the community devotion, in the end what I should want is not what's best for me but what's best for the community. If it turns out that I'm not good enough for that role in the community, then I should be rooting for somebody else to fill it and recognize that I can't.

Jon Becker: That is really interesting. Sending people away better than you found them, and having them walk out feeling fair, feeling they were treated right is really a hallmark of a very effective selection.

John Dowd: Some of these things are hard to do.

Jon Becker: Sure. If things weren’t hard to do, we wouldn’t have this conversation. If this was easy, you wouldn't have a job.

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John Dowd: The things that are hard to do sometimes there's things that are easily done to check if the hard things were done.

Jon Becker: Give me an example.

John Dowd: We just talked about how exactly do you get them to leave better than you found them, and to leave as an evangelist holding you in higher esteem than when they first showed up? Well there's a bunch of Sensei in there and you know y there's a whole bunch of stuff in there. That would take a long time to really fully tease out every key step. There's one thing you can do that's super easy to figure out if you did it. On the way out talk to them.

Jon Becker: Debrief them.

John Dowd: Debrief them. Absolutely that's super easy. Obviously there's going to be the onesies and two-- the narcissists. You didn't pick him because he's a narcissist ‘cause his team impact would be awful and now you're telling him he's not good enough. Well there's no amount of Sensei or anything else that's going to prevent that guy from bitching. But that explains you know one, two, five percent of your failures.

The other 95% you're on the hook to leave them in that state that we just talked about and if you don't then we know something's wrong with the process.

Jon Becker: Yeah that's really interesting. We're kind of walking down the road of best practices. Is there anything that we haven't covered that you think we should?

John Dowd: A couple things I think so one thing we haven't talked about yet is what Aaron calls the first data point. So the first data point is let me phrase it as a question so you're going to start this ANS, gone to the Gray Beards, you've organized in the bins and you've engineered the events, and you figured out how you're going to do the survey stuff. Then the first class rolls in, and you start measuring. In that scenario, what's the first data point?

Jon Becker: I don't know.

John Dowd: The first data point is way back here. This process is making you renew your definition of what this community is all about. From the Gray Beards you're teasing out the key behaviors, the anti patterns. Then you're encoding them into ANS which is forcing you to really crystallize what those behaviors mean and how you can suss them Page 35 of out. So the first data point is what you just learned about, what you just defined about the community.

Jon Becker: Oh that's fantastic. You've defined your culture. You've defined your standards. You defined all these things.

John Dowd: These surveys we call them “perception surveys”, I was wording them earlier I would actively recruit him for my next platoon. His career is unlikely to be derailed by legal or ethical troubles. So they're always stated that way where a positive answer is good if I agree with the statement that's a good thing.

Jon Becker: We do a very similar assessment in employee assessments. I can trust John to tell me the truth.

John Dowd: Yeah beautiful. You know what's great about that it elicits a visceral reaction.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

John Dowd: If a dude is shady, I don't have to think about it. The answer jumps into my mouth “Fuck no”.

Jon Becker: Yeah, and that's the thing is it gives me, let's take a scale of one to five on that five John will tell me the truth even when it's at his disadvantage. One, John will never tell the truth no matter what happens. If this guy was blue he'd say it was gray. A 3-4 doesn't tell me a lot. A one tells me a great deal, and a single assessment point of A one tells me we have a problem.

John Dowd: You touched on some rich ground here. Let me circle back real quick to this first data point idea, and then if you're okay with that I'm going pursue that.

Jon Becker: Totally.

John Dowd: The first data point, you've teased out the job performance stuff that's not going to be super news. We know we got to run fast, we got to shoot straight whatever Page 36 of but this culture stuff, the middle bucket the team impact, what you just got from the Gray Beards, those are the key cultural markers of your community. When our community is working at its best, it's because were interacting with one another in these ways.

So your first data point is a really concrete definition of your aspirational culture. Now of course I skipped this part but it's only because it's obvious, the Gray Beard, you go to the Gray Beards for those concrete observable behaviors but guess who else gets a vote?

The commander. It's his community. He's doing some Horizon watching. He might know that we need to veer this way or that way.

Some intersection of what the Gray Beards have seen and what the Commander's vision produces you know this very concrete representation of the aspirational culture. Now that you have it, measure everybody on it.

There's some dos and don'ts here, and you don't want to induce survey fatigue and induce cynicism. There is no reason for every layer of that organizational hierarchy to ever want for insight about the gap between the community's aspirational culture and their local actual culture, or the community's actual culture.

That information is there. You just got to harvest it.

Jon Becker: That's very interesting. So you're going to go back and measure, this is where we want to be, where we are now.

John Dowd: Yeah. So typically when a commander wants to affect culture change, there's a limited set of tools at his disposal. He can talk about it, whenever he's speaking publicly he can hit consistent cultural themes. When he's giving out awards of some sort he can ensure that the recipients are reflective of the culture change that he's trying to evoke. He can put in the hallway, the seal ethos or the Ten Commandments of being an awesome SWAT operator whatever.

All of these things are good ideas and should be done but the thing about them is if I'm the rank and file guy, you're the commander and you're trying to influence me none of those things that I just laid out, you speaking you giving awards, you hanging stuff in the hallway, none of those required anything of me. The thing hanging in the hallway in two seconds or not two seconds but in two days, it's going to be an invisible part of the furniture for me.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

John Dowd: Here's a thing you can do: You've worked out what these Key Observable Behaviors from the team impact category are you know with your Gray Beards and you weighed in on them. You've got them, at least some of them tease into these perception statements. Make me routinely grade myself and everybody around me on those. You are actively deputizing me to tell you about you know my ability to meet these standards, and you're deputizing me to grade everyone around me.

Page 37 of Right now there's a humility that you have to have. These can't be generated out of thin air, your Ivory Tower whatever. When I look at the stuff that you're asking me to assess myself and others on, some of it has to be very important to me-- not necessarily all of it.

There have to be things in there that make me say, “Oh yeah the commander he cares about what we care about”.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

John Dowd: Anyway, when you do that now three things have happened, one I get insight to self-improve, and my immediate leader gets insight about me that helps him mentor me, that's great.

Second thing, that's even better is you know all that data that we harvested, we can bubble it up at every layer of the organization and now we're revealing at each of those layers is the aspirational versus the actual culture where are the gaps. In this little corner the gap is here, in this corner the gap is there. Overall we look like this all that's great. The final thing that I think gets the least attention but is arguably the most important is the very act of doing that is shaping the culture in the direction that you as the commander wanted. You're making us wrestle with those things.

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's interesting to some degree simply doing self assessment the ability to introspect in and of itself makes you a better person.

John Dowd: 100%.

Jon Becker: The more time you spend-- and it's funny because you talk about traits of really effective leaders and the most effective leaders the smartest guys I know the best the best leaders I know are the most introspective, the most self-critical and are constantly in this growth mindset of “I need to be better at this”. The worst leaders I know or the ones that think they're the best leaders they are.

John Dowd: Yeah.

Jon Becker: It's fascinating. You talked about trainability, it's almost self-trainability, it's humility and I feel the weight of command. I feel the responsibility to the people that work for me and I want to be as good as I possibly can be and that requires introspection. It requires that moment of, “Nobody's ever going to be the best at this so I need to figure out how can I be better at it”. Then culturally that means how can we collectively, if we're a collection of individuals if all of us are introspective and all of us are trying to get better then collectively as an organization as a culture we're trying to get better.

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John Dowd: Yeah and I think there's an an implicit thought there that I want to make explicit which is, we have to be introspective subordinate to our devotion to this community.

There's guys who say, “Oh yeah, I'm going to go I'm going to go do that you know a really cool sexy job for four years, and then I'm going to use that as a springboard to do this other thing and then whatever”.

So we want them to be introspective but we want that introspection to be in service not of their own ambitions, but out of their desire to ever more faithfully serve this community. That's important at every level but as you ascend in leadership it quickly becomes the single most important thing dwarfs everything in the you know both the team bucket and the job performance bucket. Otherwise you end up with the commander who is making decisions based on his ambition or because he can't tell the boys the bad news right and so he just does the popular thing rather than the right thing.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

John Dowd: Those never end well.

Jon Becker: What else? Is there anything else we haven't covered you think?

John Dowd: I'm sure there's a million things but maybe we should give up on the idea of trying to do all of them.

Jon Becker: We're peeling an onion little by little. Where can people find your work? I know you know obviously you are operating in a realm and with units that are not particularly overt in the things that they do or the process. Yet, I know that you find new units to work with, and you will work outside of this community.

If I'm listening to this show and I go hey I want to learn more about what John does or we want to take a look at our assessment process, how do I find you?

John Dowd: Softwarellc.com. Pretty sure there's an email address somewhere on that website. I've talked about some white papers and that sort of thing. We're happy to give that out, we wrote it to give it out. So by all means if any of this has sounded interesting email us, we’ll send you copies.

Then if it goes further than that we do have some software in the space, and we're interested in getting that distributed as well; however, we're going to be very Page 39 of methodical about doing that because our nightmare is we roll it out too fast and people use it poorly and don't get good results.

So happy to give out all the white papers and all that kind of stuff. Excited to do that, and then if the sort of relationship seems like it's promising then we go further if people are interested.

Jon Becker: Yeah. We'll link to that in the show notes. John, you've made me a much smarter man today and hopefully you did the same for the audience man. Thank you so much for doing this.

John Dowd: Thanks Jon. I appreciate the time.