Left of Bang Revisited

My guest today is Patrick Van Horne. Patrick is the co-author of Left of Bang, How the Marine Corps Combat Hunter Program Can Save Your Life. He's also the co-founder of the CP Journal, where he supports clients in preventing, preparing for, and proactively responding to disasters, disruptions, and acts of violence. After starting his career as an infantry officer in the Marine Corps following September 11th, Patrick has supported public and private sector organizations in disaster preparedness, violence prevention initiatives, and as an entrepreneur, consultant, local emergency manager, and volunteer for over 20 years. Patrick's book, Left of Bang, described an innovative program that taught deploying Marines how to proactively recognize threats, assess human behavior, and gain an advantage over the nation's adversaries. This approach has since been adopted by organizations around the world to prepare for an uncertain future, prevent violence, enhance health care delivery, focus cybersecurity operations, tailor education programs, and improve decision making. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Patrick Van Horne.

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: Patrick, thanks for being with me today.

Patrick Van Horne: Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to it.

Jon Becker: Why don't we start with your background.

Patrick Van Horne: Sure.

Jon Becker: How you end up down the Left of Bang rabbit hole.

Patrick Van Horne: Absolutely. This trajectory started on September 11th. I was a few days into my freshman year of college going to school just a couple hours north of New York City when the attacks occurred and I don't know what path I was on, but that put me on this path that I'm on today. And after I finished college, I went into the Marine Corps, started as an infantry officer and finished my time in the military teaching the Combat Hunter program to deploying Marines.

Jon Becker: So talk to me about the Combat Hunter program. What was the point of the program?

Patrick Van Horne: The Combat Hunter program was designed to solve a very specific problem that Marines were facing in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially in the early days, the Iraq War. After we invaded Iraq, we had shown our enemies very quickly that if they made their intentions known or if they made their affiliations known, it was very obvious that they were going to lose this fight. And our enemies learned very quickly to succeed and to survive, they had to take off their uniforms. They had to dress like everybody else. They had to blend back in with the civilian population. And when they did that, we lost our ability to identify who out there was hunting us, who out there was trying to kill us. And as that happened, we became very reactive to attacks where we would get ambushed or the stories that you may remember about the roadside bombs where we would get attacked, we would put more body armor, more armor on our vehicles, and then wait to get attacked again. But once the enemy attacked us, we finally knew who out there was looking for us. And we could finally do our job.

Well, in 2007, then General, James Mattis looked at the situation and said, "This has to stop." He directed the creation of the Combat Hunter Program, which was designed to give Marines the ability to look out at those crowds of people, identify those one or two people in the crowd who were there to attack us or conduct reconnaissance on us, and be able to take the initiative against them. And that's what led to the Combat Hunter program.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Because I guess the problem with waiting till they manifest an intent is they kill Marines in the process.

Patrick Van Horne: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: And so by starting to identify behavioral cues and other things that we'll talk about, you then enable the Marines to become proactive versus reactive.

Patrick Van Horne: And that was the sole goal of the program is to get Marines Left of Bang.

Jon Becker: So how do you end up at the program? After I finished my I did two deployments to Iraq.

Patrick Van Horne: After I had finished those, I had the chance to join the school of infantry out in Camp Pendleton and I was assigned to the Combat Hunter program. And through my time in that unit, I had the chance to first learn the program and then became alongside my co-author Jason Riley the lead instructors in the program for a period of time.

Jon Becker: And so now, let's fast forward to the book, right? So you're teaching this, you're seeing firsthand that this is working. This approach is working. What makes you decide you want to write the book?

Patrick Van Horne: The first time I had seen or really even heard about the Combat Hunter program, I had already done my deployments overseas. When I came back and I was assigned to the course and I sat through it the first time, admittedly I was angry. I saw this program that was giving Marines the ability to recognize threats, to take back control, to take the initiative. And I wished I had it sooner. And as we had more and more Marines come through our program, we would start to talk to Marines who had come through the course, learned something, gone overseas, and who were coming back with these stories on how something they had learned had saved their life. They're here today because of the course, they wanted to come back through it. At the time though, we could only train about 40 out of every thousand deploying Marines. And 40 out of a thousand made a unit pre-deployment ready. And so we'd have to look at these Marines and say, "We're sorry, but we have to get to a different batch. We have to get to the next group of Marines. There's nothing we can do for you." And at the time, there were no resources. There was no follow-up training. There was no place that a Marine could go to dig back into the material, learn a little bit more, and improve their ability. And so as I got out of the military, Jason and I, we had the chance to write the book and ultimately start the CP journal where we could put this information and these resources out there to any Marine or soldier or police officer who wanted to learn how to use it.

Jon Becker: So CP journal, what is the CP for?

Patrick Van Horne: In the Marine Corps, so the Combat Hunter program was built off of three different components. There was what we called “Combat Tracking”, which taught Marines how to read the ground to identify IEDs. The behavioral analysis portion of the call course was called “Combat Profiling”. And so the CP and then as I got out of the Marines, some of our first customers were police departments and especially in the early 2010 time frame, if you were selling a course to police departments called CombatProfiling, it was an immediate no. And so we changed the--

Jon Becker: George Floyd, the word combat, not so much.

Patrick Van Horne: Yeah. And then profiling on top of it, it didn't land very well.

Jon Becker: So CP--

Patrick Van Horne: CP we embrace history. But it can mean different things to different audiences.

Jon Becker: It's okay. It's coming back into vogue now. You can start using the words again. So, I'm sure you know as you start to do this and you start to get in the civilian world, you realize that the ability to behaviorally profile and identify threats is not just specific to the Marine Corps and Afghanistan.

Patrick Van Horne: And this really became apparent when we were training reserve units before they deployed. There were a lot of police officers, law enforcement or firefighters coming through this course saying, "Hey, this is great. I'm glad I have this before I go to Afghanistan or Iraq, but I'm working 5 days a week in these urban areas and we have nothing like this." And it was really that recognition that whether it's law enforcement or corporate security and now today 11 years after the book was published we see cybersecurity companies building their entire approach to cybersecurity off of the Left of Bang you know concepts and across a number of different industries as well who have taken the concepts and the core approach and are finding ways to use it to really improve how they're whether it's a strategic or tactical level really improving how they're operating.

Jon Becker: So, why don't we start? You know, I'm going to assume for purposes that quite a bit of the audience has read the book because it's very popular in this community, but I'm also going to assume that there are quite a few that haven't.

Patrick Van Horne: Okay.

Jon Becker: So, I'm going to go back to basics with you for a minute.

Patrick Van Horne: Please.

Jon Becker: Let's start with the expression Left of Bang. What do you mean by “Left of Bang”?

Patrick Van Horne: So, when we say bang, what we are talking about is whatever event you care about. A bang could be something negative. It could be an attack. It could be a cybersecurity incident. It could be a wildfire. It could be a storm, but bang could also be something positive. It could be the recognition that you know there's an opportunity to be promoted or there's a chance to meet a key partner or a member of your community or a business opportunity. So bang is whatever event you're interested in. When you take bangs and you put it onto a timeline, it's simply time zero. It's in the middle of that line.

When we talk about getting “Left of Bang”, what we're talking about is having the ability to recognize those pre-event indicators, those warning signs that let you know bang is about to occur and to provide you with enough time to do something about it.

When you are right of bang, it's not just that you're after bang on the timeline, but it's that you didn't recognize that bang was occurring until it happened and you're now reacting. Your first recognition that that event was present or was about to occur happened and now you're reacting to it. So really that Left of Bang approach and that mindset is really about how do you identify those pre-event indicators, those warning signs that let you know, “Hey bang is about to occur.” We should do something about that.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And so in this case, if you think in terms of a timeline, right, Left of Bang is pre-event. It's before time. It's a maneuver in time, right? It's before time. I mean everything that occurs before the event is going to be Left of Bang right any preparation, if it's the Taylor Swift concert it's all the prep to move them in and build the security team and do all of those things that are occurring Left of Bang. It's just in this case we're using it to indicate trying to prevent something negative from occurring by being ahead of it.

Patrick Van Horne: Yes.

Jon Becker: Okay that makes.

Patrick Van Horne: And it's really that advanced warning if you know something bad is about to occur, you now have options. Maybe that event still occurs, but maybe you're in a better position. Or maybe if it's an attack, you've moved your team off of that street or you've put them into a more advantageous position. And so with that advanced warning, you're able to either control or influence that event to accomplish your goals in a way that you would not be able to if you reacted as soon as that attack occurred.

Jon Becker: Yeah. You're moving the start of your timeline before the event.

Patrick Van Horne: Yes. Right.

Jon Becker: So if that means you're maneuvering resources in your whatever having a tactical medicine program is moving Left of Bang because you're having resources on the ground prior to the event.

Patrick Van Horne: Absolutely. Yeah.

Jon Becker: So it's become a very popular phrase which was a phrase before the book but the book has definitely made it a popular phrase. I have friends that talk about things that are Left of Bang, not even necessarily knowing what it means, but it's become kind of like a common social phrase to be Left of Bang or you know…

Patrick Van Horne: Well, that was the goal of the book. So, that's appreciate that.

Jon Becker: Mission accomplished. So, let's go back 11 years. What I'd like to do with you is go back you know get on our way back machine go back and kind of talk through the fundamental concepts of the book and then you know get through that and then I'd like to just kind of talk about how your thinking's evolved and how it's changed.

Patrick Van Horne: Sure.

Jon Becker: In the 11 years since. Let's get in the wayback machine and go back and talk about the fundamental tenants of Left of Bang.

Patrick Van Horne: Okay.

Jon Becker: Start me with kind of what's the overarching concept behind Left of Bang?

Parick: It begins by recognizing that bang is when the event occurs and it starts impacting you. But that's not when it actually began. Before an attacker could launch that attack, they had to acquire weapons. They had to conduct reconnaissance. They had to leave their home and move into position. And so, it's recognizing that the attack actually began well before the thing actually is now happening and impacting you. And that time between this is when that attacker started and this is when that attacker began shooting or whatever it is that we're talking about. That's the window to get Left of Bang.

And the approach that we talk about is really about situational awareness. How do you identify very specific cues and indicators to recognize that attacker that can help you as you're going to, you know, kind of imagine this, really separate the signal from the noise and all of those things that are occurring. So, how do you look at a person and realize this person's a little bit different than everyone else? We should make a decision. We should do something about it within that very tight window of when the attack has begun or, the process has begun, you know, but maybe the rounds haven't started firing.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I mean, you look at 911, right? And there were a lot of indicators that that attack was coming.

Patrick Van Horne: Yeah.

Jon Becker: We just didn't have the ability to separate those indicators from the background noise. And obviously we completely reconstituted the way the United States homeland security works as a result of that with the benefit of hindsight, right? And what I like about the concept of the Combat Hunter program and kind of this idea of Left of Bang is it's placing emphasis on those indicators and looking specifically for those indicators and creating a framework to do that so that you're not doing it retroactively. You're not doing it after the bang.

Patrick Van Horne: And remember that, you know, this was created in the Marine Corps and it's been used in a number of different industries and services and everything, but you know, the Marine Corps could be in any country in the world in 24 hours. And so the approach that was developed had to support that mission set of how can you deploy to some place you've never been to before might have very little information or intelligence on what you're walking into and still give Marines the ability to look out over that area that operating and start to make observations put those into context ultimately to speed up the decision-making process.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Because ultimately it has to be I guess culturally as neutral as possible, right? Because what might be unusual in Somali culture may not be unusual in American culture and vice versa. So the program had to give the ability to recognize context clues that you might not otherwise see.

Patrick Van Horne: Yeah. And I know we'll get into this, but all of the behaviors that go into the way you recognize these threats come back to every behavior has to be universal and uncontrollable. So, we could not teach culturally specific behaviors that would say, "Hey, this person warrants your attention." Because you could spend your lifetime learning those and never master every possible observation. So all the behaviors that went into the Combat Hunter program are all grounded ultimately in universal displays of behavior.

Jon Becker: And those universal displays of behavior are, we're looking for things that are anomalous as opposed to normal, right? Walk me through that a little bit. Like how do we use that to make a decision?

Patrick Van Horne: If we could take one step back and start to think about before we go into the how or the what that we're looking for, I think it's important to first define what it is we're searching our environment for. And that is for people with a violent intent. Any attack that can be prevented the person had to have violent intentions. You can't kill someone if you don't mean to or you can't prevent that attack if no one is intending to. You cannot detonate that bomb if you're not setting out to detonate a bomb. Are there accidents? Absolutely. But that's not the preventable set of attacks that we're looking at. And so that definition is important because that is the one and only one constant that exists in violence. It's the person who has violent intent. It's not attacker demographics. It's not the attacker's motive or ideology. It's not victim profiles or the location of where an attack occurred. You know, it's not even the type of weapon that was used. All of those things change from one attack to the next, but the person's violent intention remains constant through any attack that we can prevent. And so that is what we are searching our environment for. Is there anyone here who possesses a violent intent? And from that definition, we can then start to take a step back and figure out, well, how are we going to search this area? And we can talk about the baseline plus anomaly equals the decision structure that the Marine Corps developed. And then we can talk about the behaviors that we use to establish those baselines.

Jon Becker: Okay. So let's talk about bas baseline plus anomaly equals decision.

Patrick Van Horne: Yep.

Jon Becker: Explain that to me.

Patrick Van Horne: So that is a heuristic and a heuristic is nothing more than a way to make decisions in situations when you have limited time and limited information available to you. And that decision that you get to with limited time and limited information has to be right more often than it is wrong. These are not perfect decisions. They are decisions are more often right than wrong. But it all starts and that's the goal of taking action against possible attackers or to influence or disrupt that attack that we're looking at. But that process begins by first establishing a baseline for the area that you are in. And a baseline is nothing more than what is normal here. And while the anomaly is what we're searching for, the anomaly is what stands out, from that baseline.

So until you have a clearly articulated and well understood definition of this is what's normal, that person who has violent intent you may not recognize their behavior. This whole process starts by defining the baseline and that enables us to identify the anomaly. That person who either stands out because of something extra, what we call an anomaly above the baseline where we're seeing something extra, something that is here today that is not normally here that should attract our attention or an anomaly below the baseline, the absence of something, something that should be here today but is not for some reason. And regardless of which type of anomaly we're looking at, that reflects the attacker. That reflects the person whose intentions for being in this area are different from all of the others who have a legitimate purpose for coming to this mall or this restaurant or whatever it is that we are.

Jon Becker: It's funny as you say that, I think of a farside cartoon many years ago. It's a two-frame cartoon and the first frame is a diver throwing fish food and the water's full of fish and the next scene is just the fish food and all the fish are gone and the caption is “nature's subtle signs of danger”.

Patrick Van Horne: Yes. Right.

Jon Becker: And that's kind of obviously a below baseline event but that is you know when you go back and you look at these events you go “Oh wow like everybody in the village didn't go to the market that day” or “Oh man everybody was really active that day”. I like the idea of establishing that baseline and then using that. How do you initially establish the baseline? Is it just observational?

Patrick Van Horne: It's observational though with historically the way that we did this to you when we were teaching Marines it was giving a process where the minute they hit the ground. They start observing with technology and media and other things today we can short circuit that learning process a great deal but what we talk about in the book are the six domains of human behavior and this is what we want Marines or anyone who is aware of their surroundings focused on and we'll talk about these behaviors but those are very different than the physical objects of that area. When using the example in a classroom, people might describe desks and tables and, pen and paper or computers, an instructor, all of those things can be manipulated and controlled by someone who is intentionally thinking about how to deceive you. But when you look at these six domains of behavior, again, going back to these are uncontrollable and universal elements of behavior. So, it gives Marines and alert observers the chance to not be deceived, to be able to take a very intentional process of figuring out what type of behavior is normal here, what should we start to look at.

Jon Becker: Okay. So, why don't we start talking through the six domains because I think that is kind of the guts of the story here.

Patrick Van Horne: Yeah. And so, the six domains of behavior break down into six different fields of science what can be observed. And so the book talks about “kinesics” which is the study of body movement. It looks at “Biometric Cues” which are the uncontrollable physiological responses to stresses inside your body. There's "Proxemics" which is a study in the relationship between people and the space around them. This helps us assess group dynamics very accurately. There's “Geographics” which looks at how people relate to their surroundings in the environment. There is “Atmospherics” which looks at the collective mood of a whole group of people which is an incredibly important observation. And then there's “Iconography” , those visual representations maybe of a person's beliefs or affiliations. Those six domains are how we start to articulate that baseline.

Jon Becker: We can put these on the screen so as we're referencing them we can reference back. Where do you want to start? You want to start with atmospherics? Is that--

Patrick Van Horne: Sure.

Jon Becker: The logical place to start? And maybe it makes sense too.

Patrick Van Horne: I know you know the way that we wrote about them in the book and the way that we teach them today are a little bit different, and maybe if I could just define that the way that we describe them is by instead of six domains four pillars and all the behaviors are still present we've just repackaged them. We now describe you know individuals which takes kinesics and biometric cues into a single observation instead of talking about proxemics we're going to talk about group dynamics and the reason we made this switch was working a lot of times with law enforcement where we would teach something in the classroom that morning, go out and actually practice the observations that afternoon. We realized the words that we were teaching in the classroom did not match the words that people were using when they're going out to apply it. And so we shifted the way that we talk about this. And I say that because I'm not even sure if I could go back and talk about some of it using just the domains.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I'm not sure I've ever used the word “proximics” before today. That's a fair assessment.

Patrick Van Horne: Yeah. So the collective mood. These are atmospherics where you're assessing whether an area has positive atmospherics or negative atmospherics. A place with positive atmospherics. This is where people feel safe and they feel secure. And you can identify this by kind of breaking it down into some component parts. You're thinking about the noises that you hear. If it's loud, it's cheerful. It's happy. It's laughter. If it's quiet, it's more of a calm and peaceful quiet. The area is probably clean and well-kept. It's probably rather orderly, meaning whatever social customs kind of define how that place works people are abiding by those and as a result you're seeing people display a degree of comfort in their surroundings. There's no perceived stress or threats.

Negative atmospherics it's the polar opposite. If it's loud it sounds argumentative. If it's quiet it sounds like a forced silence over an area where no one wants to talk. If instead of being clean, negative atmospherics, maybe it's a little bit dirty or not a well taken care of area. Maybe it's a little bit more chaotic where people are not following, just seems like people are all over the place or not following any sort of process. And as a result, people may display some uncomfortable behaviors where they perceive some stresses or some threats and their behaviors are reflecting that area where they do not feel safe. They do not feel as secure as they did maybe in a different area.

Jon Becker: So, that all makes up atmospherics.

Patrick Van Horne: Yep.

Jon Becker: Okay. What's next? Let's talk. We've introduced it as the six. Let's talk about it as the four though since that's the way you're currently teaching it. So first is atmospherics. What's next?

Patrick Van Horne: So once I know the atmospherics, I'm then confirming this using individual behavior which is kinesics and biometric cues brought together. I'm confirming that baseline that this area has positive atmospherics by seeing that most people are displaying what we call the “Comfortable Cluster of Behavior”. Once I know that that baseline is now comfort because this area has positive atmospherics, I'm simply searching for anyone who is displaying behavior that is not comfortable. And this could be dominant behavior, submissive behavior, or uncomfortable behavior. If the baseline is comfort, dominance, submissiveness, or discomfort are all different indicators that this person is here or experiencing maybe some sort of emotional or physiological reaction to a stress or threat. And that's what's going to attract our attention.

Jon Becker: So I'm thinking of giving me some examples of dominant submissiveness like what are the kinds of behaviors that would stick out to you in an atmosphere. Let's take a grocery store.

Patrick Van Horne: When we think about dominant behavior, we're thinking about behavior that is either making a person look larger or trying to control the area around them or is confrontational in nature. So, if you go into a grocery store and you see someone yelling at the person at the checkout aisle or pushing their way past other people to get to the produce or something like that. That display of dominance would not match the general degree of comfort that most people are displaying here. But before you actually see them push past the person in the produce aisle, you're probably seeing behaviors where they're making more territorial displays or making themselves look larger. So that would be an example of dominance.

Jon Becker: Okay. What about submissiveness?

Patrick Van Horne: Submissiveness, you're looking at behavior that makes you look smaller or avoiding confrontation. So if you see people maybe moving a little bit less, their arms or legs kind of contained within their body, not trying to attract attention. Or if you're to look at that, if someone's being yelled at, you might see someone just avoiding that confrontation altogether. They're kind of going internal. They're not protecting themselves. They're not defending themselves. They're just taking it in that situation. They're avoiding the confrontation. Then you have discomfort, which is the body's manifestation of the flight response to stresses or threats. You're seeing people with their behavior either attempt to distance themselves from a person or an object and create space, where if I feel like you are threatening me, that flight response, I'm trying to create space from you. And that could be as simple as leaning back and leaning away from you. That could manifest itself in more blocking or protective types of gestures, trying to protect these vital areas of my body. That could manifest itself in what you might otherwise describe as nervous or anxious or jittery behaviors if I start to clench my hands and try to calm myself back down with mannerisms. Those are all things that might help us assess someone as being in the uncomfortable cluster.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I mean, I'm thinking of all the things the TSA is looking for, sweating, avoiding eye contact, or the exact opposite, being very aggressive and loud and I'm in a hurry to get out of my way.

Patrick Van Horne: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: Okay. So, we have an atmosphere. We're paying attention to the atmospherics and then we're looking at the individuals and how they are interacting with the people around them and interacting with the environment.

Patrick Van Horne: Yep.

Jon Becker: What else?

Patrick Van Horne: And one other piece on that. So when you think about maybe some of the ways this has been taught traditionally or historically, there's many police officers that we've talked with who've been taught. You're looking for furtive behaviors, things that we would describe as that uncomfortable cluster.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Patrick Van Horne: But what's really important is that uncomfortable behavior only attracts your attention if the norm is people who are comfortable in that place with positive atmospherics. Flying in today at the baggage claim, our bags were a little bit delayed getting off the plane. That air, that baggage claim had a negative atmospheric. The longer we waited, you watched all the people around, they started to get nervous. They started to pace back and forth, back and forth. You saw them looking over their shoulder, figuring out, “Okay, is my ride here yet”. The baseline in that area was a high degree of discomfort in that situation. A person who is furtive, a person who's uncomfortable, they're not going to attract your attention. They are part of the baseline. And so instead, what we might be looking for is the person who is comfortable, the person who has no place to go. They are not waiting for their bags. They are not in a rush the way that every other person who just got off that plane was. And so if we're only looking for certain behavior, furtive, anxious, jittery behavior that's going to work in some environments, but it's not going to work in the area where that has a negative atmospheric and people are already uncomfortable.

And that is at least in my opinion one of the greatest strengths and one of the most important observations that the Marine Corps developed as part of the Combat Hunter program was being an anomaly means you have to stand out from what is normal. And so it makes every observation contextual. And so I think it's really important as we look at how we're identifying anomalies. It's not just one specific thing. It's how you behave in the context of the surroundings that attracts our attention.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So an anomaly is a deviation from the normal behaviors for that environment. If you're at the DMV and waiting for an appointment and everybody's late and like the atmospherics in the DMV are kind of shit.

Patrick Van Horne: Yeah.

Jon Becker: And people are frustrated and they're angry and whatever. So the guy that is calm and happy sticks out more. I always think of the beginning of Men in Black. Do you remember the scene in Men in Black where he shoots the little girl?

Patrick Van Horne: Yeah.

Jon Becker: And he's like, "Well, why'd you shoot the little girl?" And he's like, you know, a little white girl, six years old, walking through this neighborhood, a bunch of monsters carrying books that are above her graduation. Like, she's about to start some shit.

Patrick Van Horne: Yeah.

Jon Becker: And that's kind of what comes to mind here.

Patrick Van Horne: Yeah. For any police officers listening, I wouldn't recommend pulling the trigger off of that.

Jon Becker: Not just a six-year-old.

Patrick Van Horne: Yeah. But it means that person warrants attention. If that person is in no rush, they're calm. There are legitimate reasons why someone could do that or be behaving that way. Sure. In the DMV, it just means that they are different though than everyone else and I'm going to take an extra look at them. I might want to confirm or try to identify “Well, why they are calm? Why aren't they in a rush?” And that can happen through a conversation. That could happen through more observation. Before you draw, I might just confirm maybe and start to go down that path of why their behavior is a little different before you shoot the six-year-old girl.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I mean, I worked for Will Smith. He got the job.

Patrick Van Horne: Got the job.

Jon Becker: So, okay. So, we have,  the environment, atmospherics, we have individual behaviours.

Patrick Van Horne: Yep, and then you have groups, which is how people interact with each other. If you think about how comfortable you are around your closest friends or your wife, you're probably comfortable if you are physically touching. If your arms and legs and shoulders are touching your wife, you're probably very relaxed. That would be very different if a complete stranger was next to you and your arms and legs were touching. Because you don't know that person, you're going to want more space from them and you're going to become uncomfortable if that stranger gets a little bit too close to you. So based on the amount of space that people keep between them, we can start to determine if they have an intimate relationship? Are they friends? Do they have maybe what we call a professional colleague based relationship where an arms length handshake away versus maybe a close friend gets a little closer to you and then strangers the people that you want the most amount of space from. So based on the amount of space we can start to determine what is the relationship between these members of the group, and from there that informs a lot of maybe intelligence collections or understanding, okay this is the leader, this is the person that we want to pay attention to based on how close maybe a handful of people are to each other and how far away maybe they're standing from the person who's in charge or who's kind of holding court over that group.

Jon Becker: Yeah, you're saying that you conjure up all kinds of examples of a military leader, how close he is to other people, how close they are to him.

Patrick Van Horne: And then how close they are to each other.

Jon Becker: To each other.

Patrick Van Horne: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Patrick Van Horne: And from there, you can start to identify those anomalies.

Jon Becker: Environment.

Patrick Van Horne: So, we did individuals, groups, and then the collective mood. The third one in the middle is the environment. And what we're looking at here is really defining and classifying the type of place that we are in. Is this an anchor point or is this a habitual area? A habitual area is a place that anyone can come or go at any time without any restrictions. It's open to the public. A shopping mall, most restaurants. These are habitual areas. An anchor point - a place where you have to meet some sort of criteria in order to gain entry. And it's not just the fact that that criteria exists, but those insiders and outsiders that are enforced. So if a, you know, a 16-year-old tries to get into a bar, that bouncer is there to say, "No, you can't come in. You don't meet the criteria to come in." That's what differentiates and distinguishes a Costco from a Target. That's what differentiates normal bars from maybe more of a gang or criminal place where they're congregating or hanging out depending on who they accept and who they allow into this area. So by defining the environment, we're going to start to take a look at and get a little closer to what a person's intentions are. Why are they here? If you're observing a habitual area, a Starbucks, or a coffee shop, because it's a habitual area, we know that they're coming into this area to fill some sort of need. Get a cup of coffee, get some food, go to the bathroom, whatever it is. And based on their intentions for being there, we can begin to identify that predictable set of behavior that they have to display in order to accomplish their goal.

If you come into a Starbucks and you're screaming and yelling and you're very dominant, you might not get your cup of coffee. That behavior does not support the reason you are there. And so that's why you usually expect a certain degree of comfort or submissiveness as a person who is going through that process because they want to get in, they want to get out with as least amount of hassle as possible. So that's what really defines the habitual or the anchor points really take us that step to defining what type of behavior is expected here and why does a person's intention shape that behavior as well.

Jon Becker: It's funny because we do this intuitively.

Patrick Van Horne: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: Right. Like everywhere you go. I was recently in Tanzania and Africa and realized that the things that I regard as danger are not in any way, shape or form danger there.

Patrick Van Horne: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: The way that groups of young men on motorcycles sit around, well, they're taxis. You look and you're like, "Oh, there's like 10 guys on motorcycles all sitting around in the middle of the day and they're in their 20s." Well, yeah, they're taxi drivers. So that's perfectly normal there. But in LA, 20 guys with a motorcycle sitting around in the middle of the day, they're up to something. We're constantly running this. What I like about the way that you've built this and the way the program, the original Combat Hunter program is, is it gives us a framework to quantify this.

Patrick Van Horne: Yeah.

Jon Becker: And be able to articulate it to each other.

Patrick Van Horne: Absolutely. Thinking about your trips overseas, you'll notice when I said, talking about the group dynamics. I did not say an intimate relationship is someone between zero and four inches away from your body and a personal relationship is from 6 to 18 inches and 18 to 24 inches or something is professional. Those change wherever you go in the world and what that degree of comfort is. I don't care what that distance is. I just care that that distance and those zones essentially around your body exist. And then it allows me to just start that process of observing and learning and understanding in this culture, in this country, this is where people generally fall based on these types of relationships.

To your point, nothing that we wrote about and Left of Bang, nothing about what we teach in our courses is new. If you have people watching at any point in your life, you have been making these observations. The strength of the program, one of them was that it provided people the opportunity to articulate this. When you are talking to someone who was not in that, not with you or not present with you, you can explain to them, “This is what I saw. Here are these observations that I made all of which are backed by science and this is why and that's how it led me to make this decision”. And you know, law enforcement, you know, certain military contexts, private security, the ability to articulate and explain in a way that the person saying the words and the person hearing the words, if it means the same thing, now we can actually move this process forward. So it really just provides that language and the terminology backed by science that allows people to do that.

Jon Becker: I think it also gives you a framework to consider you like you might look at a situation and go “I don't like the way this feels” but this gives you the ability to look at it and say, “You know the group dynamics are this and that guy's behavior is you know their X this guy's doing Y. It's this kind of an environment where this person's acting this way. I think it gives you that ability to look at the situation and apply the four different analytical lenses. Because of the individual's behavior, the group dynamics are different lenses. I think that what this does is it gives you those lenses to then look at what's going on around you and I think it takes away. I think there are people that could walk into any situation and have a really good sense of danger. We talked about earlier at lunch talking about this concept of how a master can look at something or, a journeyman carpenter can look and go, "Oh, we need to do it this way." But he might not be able to articulate why.

Patrick Van Horne: Yeah.

Jon Becker: I think that part of the challenge in a law enforcement context or any kind of prevention context is, yeah, somebody who's done this for 25 years may look at this and go, I don't like the way that guy's acting, but that's not teachable.

Patrick Van Horne: Yes.

Jon Becker: That happens from 10,000 hours of experience. If you look at Gladwell, it's this concept of blink. And what I like about this is like, no, these are the four lenses you're going to apply and this is why you're going to look at this and go, “Oh, this is different because”,

Patrick Van Horne: I think there's two really important applications from that one, we cannot ignore our biases. There are police officers who work in really high crime areas day in and day out. They're used to and the volume of observations they have been made by criminals far exceeds what other people have done. And recognizing they have biases, they can take a step back and go, let me think about this for a second. What is the baseline based on these indicators? What was this person displaying based on these indicators? Here's why I made that judgment. It can help the person who might be overly sensitive to certain behaviors step back and remain objective. But it can also help the person who doesn't have that same experience, who has not been exposed to violence as much as others, who doubt themselves, who are going to denial, saying, "This person is displaying these cues, but no, there's no way. Not here, not today." And we also can minimize that risk by bringing it back into a structure. What's the baseline? What behaviors and indicators is this person displaying? Yeah, they're an anomaly. We need to do something about it. And again, not saying that we just jump right to some sort of lethal response, but you've gone from looking at this crowd as a whole down to that one or two people that really attract your attention. We can also compensate for our biases a little bit as well.

Jon Becker: Which is then ridiculously resource efficient.

Patrick Van Horne: Yes. Right.

Jon Becker: You're not looking at everybody. You're looking at the people that are sticking out from the environment. Yes. Talk to me a little bit about, as you guys taught this in the Marine Corps Combat Hunter program and then, you know, in life, talk to about the benefits of this as an approach.

Patrick Van Horne: I think there's a couple that really stand out. You know, one that articulation piece, which I really can't um, you know, kind of underestimate the importance of being able to talk about and explain to someone who is not there. This is what I observed. This is why I felt threatened. This is why taking action is really important and especially for people who work on their own. If you cannot articulate that it becomes really hard to explain or justify your actions to someone else. I think there's a lot of power in simply being able to talk about what it is that we're observing.

Jon Becker: Well, you've also created a nomenclature, right?

Patrick Van Horne: Yes.

Jon Becker: You've created if I tell you, hey, you know, I really didn't like the group dynamics. Then you know exactly what I mean by that. What I saw was uncomfortable group dynamics. I saw overly aggressive individual behaviors. You've now created a common framework that we can talk about the problem through that probably wasn't there before.

Patrick Van Horne: That exact point leads into training. An education of how you are teaching someone to be able to recognize these behaviors. By putting the language to it and then defining the science behind it, we can then show a million different videos and examples to someone. These are all the different ways people can display dominance. And with each repetition through that video or that training exercise their ability to identify and assess accurately this is dominance or this is submissiveness or this is discomfort or this is comfort. They can do it much faster and much more accurately. So, I know that you had a just absolutely incredible interview with Dr. Gary Klein. We're talking about recognition prime decision-making because we're putting these into very specific behaviors and with that communication, you can now teach it proactively.

The other thing that you can do is teach from experience. With all the different media and the surveillance footage and body cam footage and everything else that exists, you can now also go back and debrief with people, “Well, what did you see? What do you remember seeing?” And pull it up with the video and start to very systematically go through that video. “Okay, did you actually see that or did you miss this indicator?” And really start to hone not just off of notional examples, but their personal experience. Go back through and really articulate based on this footage, these are the behaviors that you either saw or missed and that's why some of these are important. So, in terms of a learning tool, that ability to articulate is absolutely incredible.

Jon Becker: Well, and it's funny because one of the things that Gary and I talked about in pretty good depth was debrief, right? And how we learn through debrief and how you know recognition prime decision-making means I'm able to quickly identify what factors are driving the decision and what are the things that are distinguishing my alternatives from one another. I always think about how after the Boston bombing you saw all the videos of the behavior of the two brothers walking around the street and how unusual they acted relative to the crowd that was watching the race.

Patrick Van Horne: Do you remember how they acted? Did you remember any of those points?

Jon Becker: Yeah. I mean, it was furtive.

Patrick Van Horne: Yeah. There were some things that they had a little bit of situational awareness looking around, but they're also relatively calm because they knew the explosions were going to occur and calm that's also can be relative and comfortable. Everyone around them hysteria, mass panic, very uncomfortable because those other people did not know if there were more bombs. They did not have any context. They were watching a race and then their reality changed immediately and so their behavior was well below the baseline.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Right of bang.

Patrick Van Horne: Yes.

Jon Becker: In this case, literally bang. Their behavior was dramatically different than the people around them, which is ultimately how they get identified. Right.

Patrick Van Horne: It's been a little while since I looked at that, but I believe there was an FBI agent who saw the video and immediately pointed them out of saying their behavior does not-- it wasn't that they were using the framework or the terminology, but same process to say these there's something wrong. And from there, rewind the tape, go back and go, yeah.

Jon Becker: Yeah. This framework is Left of Bang or Right of Bang, right? Like it's just obviously we want it to be Left of Bang because, you know, we don't want bang to occur. But in either case, being able to look at it with these four lenses gives us the ability to identify behavior that is a threat or behavior that manifests a threat after it's been engaged in.

Patrick Van Horne: Absolutely. It just jumpstarts the process where at no point are we limiting someone's ability to use things that are not part of the specific assessments that go into the four pillars of behavior. If you have time and there's not an immediate threat and you've gone through the process, by all means, you can continue to search and use different approaches to find people that may attract your attention, but this gets the process started. So, you have that routine. You have that process. I walk into a new area. I walk out of their restaurant. Here's the steps that I'm going through to just quickly establish an initial baseline, and then start to deepen that with each additional second and minute that you're into that area. And so, it just gets that process started very intentionally and very quickly.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I always use the example of a rattlesnake and the first guy found a rattlesnake got bit by the rattlesnake and you know if he didn't tell anybody then they people kept getting bitten until the guy's like “Hey long skinny thing rattle on the tail pointy head”. To some degree this creates a thing to go yeah no pointed head and you know rattle on his tail and everybody goes “oh yeah rattlesnake”. If you've not had that conversation you don't have that framework trying to explain what it is a much more lengthy process and is also you know as you're saying this it dawns on me the margin of error is narrowed through this common operating picture through this common lenses we narrow the margin of error of you misunderstanding what I'm saying or vice versa.

Patrick Van Horne: When people or organizations invest in developing a new capability which is what the Marine Corps did they recognized that there was a threat, the IEDs, the ambushes, the attacks, the sniper fire and it was no longer acceptable. They were choosing to invest in programs to change those dynamics. In that situation it was Right of Bang. And for a lot of organizations, it is something bad happening, a surprise that was occurring that was unacceptable or something just growing into a risk that is no longer tolerable. That's oftentimes kind of that trigger or that initiation point for that organization to say, “It can't happen again. Okay, now we can start to get into the left move Left of Bang for future threats”. But oftentimes there is that past event that brings leaders and people together and say, "We have to do something about that. That can't happen again."

Jon Becker: This is one of the things that drives me crazy with this show. Like this the whole point of this thing is we're right of somebody's bang to be hopefully left of yours.

Patrick Van Horne: Yes. Right.

Jon Becker: Because these events recur, right? There is Columbine, Parkland and Yuvaldi. The same kinds of things keep happening. And the whole point of The Debrief is to get you to hear the right of bang somebody else's incident. So then you're like, "Well, that's not good. We shouldn't let that happen." But we are beginning to create a bit of a culture where we're just looking for who we can blame for the problem and not really looking at what happened. And that terrifies me because then we're going to be right of somebody else's bang.

Patrick Van Horne: And you know when I talk and present now, one of the points that I bring up in almost every presentation, it's that organizations that are able to get Left of Bang, they have to learn how to learn from others. Right? Nationally, disasters, shootings, attacks, they occur at a relatively low frequency at the local level. Nationally though, they're regular. They're routine. The number of shootings, the number of hurricanes, the number of wildfires, whatever it is that we care about on a global scale, they're much more routine. And so those organizations that get Left of Bang, they're looking at what happened at Yuvaldi or Parkland or any place saying, "What are those lessons? What do we have to learn and internalize and put into place before it happens here? They have to learn how to learn from others." And I certainly kind of respect the work that you've done in just sharing those lessons for people who are aware and looking at a very uncertain future. What are we going to do about it? And so sometimes that right of bang is necessary.

Jon Becker: One of my recent passions is the way police departments respond to officer-involved shootings when an officer is injured or killed in the line of duty. If you ask me what is the one common context for that, I would tell you that they do it wrong. 100% of the time. It drives me crazy because and and I had this conversation with the chief of police says look the chances of you having an officer killed in line of duty is almost zero. Really is. It's really small. The number of police officers are killed every year. And if you're any agency and it's a small agency, it's almost zero. However, the chance that an officer will be killed today in the line of duty is 100% whether it's yours or somebody else's. And the cost of you not being prepared is so high that you just have to do it.

Patrick Van Horne: Yeah.

Jon Becker: You just have to do it. And I think that that's part of what I like about Left of Bang and and the work you've done subsequent is it is this notion of like look, it's going to happen. This is going to happen. We will have another terrorist attack. We'll have another active shooter. We'll have another police officer killed in the line of duty. We'll have another war. Hell, at the rate we're going right now, we might have four or five. It is this idea that you have to develop a threat recognition structure that you can then teach and apply across an agency to spot these events before they happen.

Patrick Van Horne: And kind of going back to where we started, I think it's important that when you think about there are some attacks where things are already in motion and it's our first response, it's our public safety, it's our security industries that if we don't have the ability to first recognize potential threats and then confirm them as actual threats, then make a decision about what we're going to do about it and then act, the bang is going to occur. It just requires that process of going, well, we have this window. What are we going to do about it? It's unfortunate that sometimes we have to learn and invest after something bad has happened. As long as we take those lessons forward.

Jon Becker: Well, I think the only thing worse than the fact that we have to invest after something bad has happened is when we don't. And then whatever bad happened, whatever officer lost his life or people that were killed by an attack or whatever, I always say like if you're not studying history, the lessons and the pain and in this industry, lessons are taught in blood. They just are lives in blood. And if you're not learning from them, you're wasting the lives and blood that were before you that could have prevented this.

Patrick Van Horne: It's worth, kind of noting we're not doing this for paper cuts or slivers. We're doing this only for those threats and risks where the consequences are unacceptable. Someone like an officer getting killed in a line of duty, IEDs and ambushes overseas. It wasn't for every risk. It was just those things that we cannot accept those consequences for. The rest of them we better build resilience to, kind of maybe some of the more minor ones, so that those really significant, those high consequence events, those are the ones that we're focusing on.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So it's been 11 years since this book came out and you're still working in space. You're writing, you're teaching, you're consulting. What's changed in your mind?

Patrick Van Horne: Yeah.

Jon Becker: I mean, we talked about the six domains becoming four pillars and that kind of collection of thoughts, but tell me more as to what has changed in your thinking.

Patrick Van Horne: One of the big ones is where decisions get made. When the Combat Hunter course was being developed, you look at the behaviors and the process that that goes into it, it was a Marine on the ground who had to establish a baseline, recognize an anomaly. They alone maybe made that decision of what I'm going to do about it, and then they acted. That entire process occurred inside one person's head. And that was the goal because of the physical proximity of how close we were to potential attackers. It was the individual's decision-making that we had to speed up and inform.

Today, I don't know if that's the same risk that it used to be. When I look at organizations and work with organizations that are struggling to make Left of Bang decisions, it's what changes when you go from an individual decision-maker to organizational decision-maker, where one person has to recognize the threat and then they have to stop and communicate and articulate this is why this, you know, thunderstorm or this possible hurricane or this, you know, whatever is of concern. They're communicating that to a decision-making body. They are often taking only what has been given to them by that observer. They're making a decision based on their perception of the urgency and the importance and their perception of that threat. And if they make a decision, then they communicate that to a third group of people who's actually going to put that plan or enact that decision. And that slows this process down to a point where there have been a number of preventable incidents where the limitation was how organizations communicated and made decisions around possible threats.

In terms of what kind of has changed at the time of the writing of the book that individual decision maker that was the most important point but today that organization is in my opinion a very critical step in figuring out how do we accelerate this process for them because they are the ones who will determine whether they get Left of Bang as a company or as a public safety entity or whatever, how quickly they can make that decision.

Jon Becker: Well, and I can tell you as a guy that spends his time immersed in this stuff, generally speaking, these incidents don't go catastrophic at a tactical level. They go catastrophic at an operational level. It's almost always when you look back at the, you know, the fiascos and and you know, pick your favorite catastrophic event, usually it is a leader's inability to make a decision. Yuvaldi being a perfect example where they can't make a decision or won't make a decision or won't take an action that then continues to perpetuate the problem once bang occurs.

Patrick Van Horne: Yes.

Jon Becker: And so that really is kind of an organizational problem.

Patrick Van Horne: Well, you know, as you bring that up, it also kind of leads into maybe something else that my thinking has changed a little bit on. When the Combat Hunter program was created and when we first, started our company to teach this and provide this training to law enforcement and military and security organizations, the focus was on prevention because we were talking about these events that could be prevented. How do you stop that attack from occurring? But as we look at things like hurricanes or some wildfires or some other risks, it's not just prevention. It's also about how do you use this advanced recognition and this advanced aware early awareness to preposition yourself where using even just the Los Angeles fires from January of this year there were a lot of warnings about the weather conditions and the risk of fire and you saw as a result public safety entities shifting into a pre-positioning where they were doing maybe patrols or other actions to just be a little bit closer should an incident create or incident start. They couldn't necessarily stop that fire from igniting, but that advanced early warning may have changed or modified how they were going to respond, once it did kick off.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I mean, I think back to my interview with Trey and Bobby about the Altadena fires and their ability to quickly make a decision that they were not going to stop the fire. When you see the videos of the fire, they were not going to stop the fire no matter what they did. Their ability to quickly pivot to, “Okay, we can't stop the fire. Let's save the people. If you can't make the fire not affect the people, make the people not near the fire.” That is the reason nobody died in Pasadena, was that ability to like, “Okay, we can't win here. Let's move here.” And it was the fact that they knew each other. They established nomenclature between each other. They could quickly get to decisions. They could communicate in very short heuristics. Like all of those things that had gone into training and prep prior paid out at the event and led to a fantastic response.

Patrick Van Horne: And even just think about the benefit of time. It's you get to start to think about, well, what could I do? Or if this happens, what am I going to do? And you start to shorten that learning curve. So when it does start, you're going right into it. You'll be able to make those decisions and do that thought without the stress and all the body chemicals hitting your system and you're able to do it maybe calmly, rationally, and really think through what would your response be. You are much further along the curve in that situation as opposed to the person who had no advanced warning, and wasn't thinking about this at all. All a sudden that event occurs and now they're reacting, right? And they make every decision, all of their processing that's occurring after the fact in addition to all that chemical cocktail hitting their body which limits and makes decision-m much more challenging.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I mean this whole concept is maneuvering in time.

Patrick Van Horne: Yes. Right.

Jon Becker: It's this tactical science concept of maneuver in time. It is taking the time prior to the event to do everything you can if the event occurs in the same way that we do and this is usually why problems don't fail at a tactical level interestingly because teams and officers are preparing for an active shooter. They're training for an active shooter. You look at Yuvaldi, they made the right decisions all the way up to the door where the shooter was. And that's because at a tactical level they had been trained. The problem is at a leadership level, we're not educating people. We're not teaching them how to get ahead of these things in time and how to precondition what their responses would be. And so when it happens, not only are they reacting rather than being proactive and giving up the time that they had to pre-position resources and establish relationships and do all that, they're also now at the bottom of their brain. In a reactive monkey brain mode when the top of the brain is not going to work well. And so now you're trying to solve a complicated problem with an overloaded physiological system.

Patrick Van Horne: Yeah. It's hard and the chance of making the wrong decision goes up.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Exactly. You've introduced additional errors. So what else is as your thinking has evolved here? What else has changed?

Patrick Van Horne: One of the things we've been talking a lot about lately, it's the role of AI in a lot of this as well, what we're talking about in the Combat Hunter program and Left Of Bang, it's situational awareness and, you know, as some of the AI tools that are coming out, the effort required to execute work outside of the actual things that require hands, a lot of the public safety work where you cannot automate that, the trades, etc., or those things cannot be automated. But the recognition of risks and understanding and thinking stress testing your plans learning from other organizations AI provides an incredible capability today to accelerate that learning. But what becomes important it's the recognition that I need to learn about this topic or I need to stress test my plans for this specific type of risk. The awareness and then the clarity of the question you ask about what you want done that is shifting right now. And we're again going back to that situational awareness that is becoming increasingly important and that discernment of knowing not just what do I need to do but why and how are we starting to think about that.

So as we think about some of the next evolution of Left of Bang you know it's interesting to watch the role that technology plays in this and also you know the role of some of these AI tools to even in retrospect look at videos and start to identify patterns of behavior that are shockingly accurate sometimes as well.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that's really interesting. I hadn't thought of it from that perspective. It it strikes me like obviously Combat Hunter is built around a very specific type of threat, but in the work that you're doing now with other organizations like this concept has spread to a lot of different types of risks.

Patrick Van Horne: Yes.

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

Patrick Van Horne: This was an unintended outcome of the book. When Jason and I wrote the book, we rather simplistically said, you know, if this keeps one marine, one soldier, one sailor safe overseas, that's a success. The humbling part of that even to this day, the emails and the phone calls we get from police officers and members of the military of “I read the book, I came through the course, I'm here today because of that. Thank you.” But it's been really interesting to see other sectors and other industries say, “Well, we want advanced warning. We would benefit from a little bit more time Left of Bang.” And thinking about how we then apply this framework and this advanced enhanced situational awareness to other types of risks has been really interesting because with thought you can essentially you know for any type of risk start to move that timeline you know backwards and start to think about if it's a weather event let's say what are the watch points what are those conditions specific cons weather conditions that I am looking for that are going to say I need to start monitoring this storm system this weather pattern whatever it is a little bit more specifically and define what are those action points. What are the things I need to see that when they are hit, we're going to start prepositioning resources. We're going to start communicating risks. We're going to, pre-activate and really defining for any different type of risk what are those watch points and what are those action points to just provide those organizations time to go from passive monitoring of their environment to something a little bit more active and focused into we have a little bit of time before an event occurs? What are we going to do about it? How are we going to make sure that our organization is ready to go when that occurs? And so it's applying a lot of the same concepts of what are you looking for and how are you looking for those threats just across from cyber security to weather to you know public health related concerns a number of different types of risks as well.

Jon Becker: It's funny, it reminds me of an interview guy named Bob Coonts. So Bob was a nuclear submarine commander and one of the things Bob talked about was trip wires and how in the nuclear submarine community they're just trip wires. A trip wire means if this happens you must immediately take this action. an immediate action drill in the Marine Corps. One of the examples he gave is if any other craft gets within a certain distance of a nuclear submarine, they immediately take evasive action, no matter why they're there. You're a thousand feet under the water and this ship just happens to sail over you, once it crosses a certain barrier, you have to immediately take action. He said, “The reason that it is that case is because we have on the front end identified that for this chain of events to occur for this negative chain of events to occur this a vessel has to get within a certain distance. Well then the second a vessel gets within that distance you break that chain immediately and you take this action.” As you're talking through this that's what's coming to mind is this idea that well we know that if this happens we are going to immediately and like if the fire reaches here we're going to immediately evacuate homes.

Patrick Van Horne: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Regardless of how it got there, why it got there, if it crosses this line, we're out of here. It's interesting how you are expanding the amount of time that you have to respond to something even after it occurs because you've precreated.

Patrick Van Horne: Yes.

Jon Becker: What your response to these kinds of events are going to be.

Patrick Van Horne: In our work, we find that oftentimes those trip wires though, they're not defined very clearly.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Patrick Van Horne: The problem then becomes, you get a lot of false alarms or you spend a lot of time looking at noise, not the specific indicators and you get people spun up and it's not just a false alarm, but it was, you know, a foreseeable false alarm. Taking the time to think about, well, what are those indicators? And this isn't just risks or threats. It could be again thinking about, benefits of bang, too. If it's getting a job promotion or a business opportunity or all these different things. It's just taking a step back and going, at what point do I really want to start watching and at what point am I going to start acting on this information? The more clear you can do that, the more likely you are, especially again at the organizational executive level, pulling that executive out of that meeting, changing their daily schedule, doing something where saying, "Hey boss, you know, there's a chance today that it's gonna happen. You should be ready and be thinking about these sorts of incidents or certain potentialities as well and just make it really clear if that executive has bought in on it. You don't have to hesitate. You don't have to worry how this is going to be interpreted. Is my reputation at risk if it doesn't occur? You've done that pre-work to say these are the things that should warrant our attention. And in no way does this limit your ability to maybe activate for something that is not on that list. And at no point do we override someone's judgment to say, “I know you thought that you should be monitoring or positioning but if you don't think that's the case today”.

Executives always retain that judgment but it starts with just a really critical or a very specific indicator of these are the things that we should circle up on and make sure that we are making the right decision.

Jon Becker: Do you think that the mindset towards prevention has changed in the decades since you wrote this book?

Patrick Van Horne: Without a doubt. When the Combat Hunter course was created, there weren't a lot of resources or training or books that talked about prevention. So much of it was on protecting and reacting. And one of the things that I think is you know the outcome of the program, it's now there's tons of training that's out there to get Left of Bang. There's more technology and other tools and approaches to do this. When I think about the Combat Hunter program and one of the reasons why Jason and I wanted to tell the story was because of the success that Marines were having, those who had come through the course and they were seeing overseas, this became for many organizations like the 5-minute mile. Once people knew about the 4-minute mile, whatever the really fast option would be, that, hey, you can do this, this is possible. And once that switch occurred, that flip occurred that yeah, we don't have to just react. We can get ahead of this. Once that caught on and once people embrace that now people are finding opportunities to do this in all sorts of fields.

Jon Becker: So in the work you're currently doing, we're 11 years post Left of Bang or 11 years right of Left of Bang. If you had 30 minutes with a team leader or emergency manager, what would you tell them?

Patrick Van Horne: I'm looking at four things I want to know. One, what are their watch points and their action points? What are the things that they are monitoring their environment for that is going to change what they do? I'm going to ask them once that initial threshold has been passed, how are they confirming that this is a real threat or that nope, this is a false alarm? Third thing is if that is a real threat, how do you activate it? What is your time to decide and your time to action? How quickly can you go from yes, this is bad to being able to mobilize people or start to influence the event? And that fourth piece being actual now what is your impact? I want to see from recognition to confirmation to activation to impact how quickly they can go through that because that determines whether that organization or that team can get Left of Bang or not. And figuring out, once you kind of diagnose that now you can figure out, “Oh, your threat recognition is pretty good. But it takes you a long time to mobilize or you can mobilize very quickly but you're wasting a lot of time trying to notify executives and you're articulating it in a poor way where they can't make a decision. That's the part of the process that is limiting your ability to get left.”

Jon Becker: Can you do those four for me one more time?

Patrick Van Horne: Threat recognition. What are you looking for that says this is a possible threat. The second is how are you confirming that it is a threat, something potentiality? How are you saying yes, this is worth monitoring? Third is how do you activate? How quickly do you go from zero to you know one? And then how quick or how long does it take to start impacting that event? How can influencing outcomes?

Jon Becker: That's really interesting. Okay. So, from an organizational standpoint, give me more.

Patrick Van Horne: For organizations that have a Left of Bang strategy. And this is what really started to shift my focus after writing the book and developing our initial training programs, looking at what organizations are able to do this well and what organizations struggle with who comes through the class and they want it, but it never goes anywhere. And it comes down to organizational strategy more than anything of how they are preparing for an uncertain future? How are they preparing capabilities for who knows what the world looks like in 10 years and first breaking that down and then thinking about those capabilities. And so we work with organizations to define those risks. What are the things that they truly care about? And then start to look at the capabilities. Can you develop a plan? Can you put it into action? Can you accomplish your goals? So it starts with that strategy piece of, have you embraced a Left of Bang strategy? Yes or no?

Jon Becker: Yeah, that's really interesting. Okay, what else?

Patrick Van Horne: That's the big one. Once they have that strategy, that executive then can figure out these are the capabilities we need and then it shifts from that, kind of strategic level down to that operational level. And it takes a lot of work. It's change, to adjust your capabilities, change the way that you've operated, identify improvements to be made and whether through awareness and training and exercises, make sure that your organization can implement them. And that's where a lot of the work comes in that planning that training those exercises, make sure that whatever vision that executive has can the organization execute on that vision.

Jon Becker: How are you teaching organizations to learn from other people?

Patrick Van Horne: Again using some AI tools we have pulled in after-action reviews from you know hundreds of wildfires or hurricanes or tornadoes to pull out core lessons learned. Okay we know that in almost every incident there's going to be a public communication problem. There's are going--

Jon Becker: Comms suck. That is the one constant in every debrief I've ever done. Comms suck.

Patrick Van Horne: Comms suck. All right. So, what's your plan for that? How are you going to not let that happen here? And if the answer is we don't have a solution for that, great. Well, that is a clearly scoped problem. We need to figure out how our communication and information sharing processes are going to work. If we know that that is limiting that coordinated action then that's where they should focus their efforts and the same thing with public messaging. We could find similar things with resource management from where are you surging resources too? Is that the appropriate place? That goes wrong on a number of different incidents, and there's others as well.

Jon Becker: Talk to me a little bit about your current work like what you're doing now with organizations.

Patrick Van Horne: Helping with strategy. Okay. You want a Left of Bang strategy. You want to get away from Right to Bang metrics. Let's take a look at your organization and figure out what is your time to decide. What is your time to action and how quickly can you implement those capabilities? That's where I spend a lot of time also assessing programs. Okay, you know what you want. Can you execute that? Assess, review their plans, interact with stakeholders to figure out, can you execute with your goals that you have and corrective action.

Jon Becker: Okay. So, how can people follow your work? Where can they find you?

Patrick Van Horne: Most of what we're doing you can find on our website, the CP journal, which is CP-journal.com. From there, we try to make everything that's required, what we're learning to get Left of Bang, readily accessible to people. That was the goal when Jason and I wrote the book. That was the goal when we started the company. It's to not hide this information to make sure that if a person wants to learn what it takes, they can do so. We got our free articles and our courses and a number of different playbooks and resources that are available. We're constantly adding information that really is designed to help a different part of that process of learning to recognize threats, validate it, activate plans, or begin impacting incidents.

Jon Becker: Love it. We'll share it in the show notes. Patrick, thanks for sitting down and doing this with me, man.

Patrick Van Horne: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.