The Training Secret Behind Building Adaptive Leaders with Fred Leland | Ep 13

Fred Leland is a retired Lieutenant with the Walpole,  MA Police Department and a former United States Marine. He is an accomplished and accredited trainer with more than 30 years’ experience teaching Law Enforcement and Security. He is a graduate of the FBI National Academy, where he specialized in terrorism related topics, leadership and management.

Fred is a student of the late modern day Strategist COL John Boyd and the Ancient Strategist Sun Tzu. He founded Law Enforcement and Security Consulting, Inc (LESC) in 2006 with the focus of bringing these principles to law enforcement and security.

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Fred Leland on LinkedIn
Adaptive Leadership Handbook - Law Enforcement & Security
Being You
Adopting Mission Command: Developing Leaders for a Superior Command Culture
Chet Richards on LinkedIn
Don Vandergriff on LinkedIn

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Transcript

Transcripts are machine generated and are NOT edited for grammar or spelling.

00:00:00:01 - 00:00:02:11
Mark McGrath 1
So Fred Leland, welcome to No Way Out.

00:00:02:29 - 00:00:05:04
Fred Leland
Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

00:00:05:26 - 00:00:34:07
Mark McGrath 1
We are we're thrilled to have you. It's a we think that the topics that we'll talk about today are pretty timely and should interest a wide variety of of listeners that have a lot of questions about how you integrate Boyd in Boyd's ideas. And a lot of the ideas that are connected to the work of John Boyd and how you've integrated into law enforcement and how you teach it.

00:00:35:01 - 00:00:39:18
Mark McGrath 1
Why don't you start off telling us you know, who you are, your background, and and how you got into this?

00:00:40:17 - 00:01:05:13
Fred Leland
Well, again, friendly Linda. I was a cop or I'm still working. Not as a I'm a retired full time cop, but I'm working a teacher. I'm still teaching cops around the state of Massachusetts. And 38 years on the job in Walpole, Massachusetts. Retired about six years ago. In the training has been my thing since my days in the Marine Corps before I was even a cop.

00:01:05:22 - 00:01:23:11
Fred Leland
And it was when I was in Lebanon in the early eighties, we got involved in training the Lebanese armed forces, and there were six of us guys that were involved in doing that, which was interesting. I was a young kid, so I fell in love with developing people early. But what happened? Once I became a cop in the eighties, I got involved in training.

00:01:23:11 - 00:01:48:00
Fred Leland
And a long story short, you're teaching the way you were taught to teach, get up, lecture, tell people, hey, is what's on the PowerPoint, this is how you do it. Whatever the whatever the topic of conversation was might happen to be tactics and weapons and firearms and marksmanship and the use of force and leadership and other things. But the reality of it was it was a point in time in the early 2000s.

00:01:48:10 - 00:02:09:09
Fred Leland
And I'll show you the whole story, how things happened. It's the old adage of taking a walk. I'm old hiking up in Maine and it's in November. Snow on the ground. And long story short, I get out a distance, I stop, I sit with my son, who at the time is probably ten. And I raise Ethan. I pull out of, believe it or not, a marine Corps gazette.

00:02:10:09 - 00:02:28:27
Fred Leland
Right. And I'm reading it's talking about tactical decision games on this and this issue. And I said to myself, tactical decision games, this is interesting. And it was the it was the stuff by John Schmidt and Klein had helped worked on to Gary Klein. And but I think if I'm not mistaken, I think Schmidt even wrote the article.

00:02:29:08 - 00:02:42:22
Fred Leland
And long story short, he said, Why don't we do stuff like this? All we do is tell people what to do in a police academy. And then they charged to the front door. And not only that, they don't even do what they're told. They end up like pack down the street and get out of your car, walk up so you get a better view.

00:02:42:23 - 00:03:06:19
Fred Leland
Most cruisers parade up out front. You know what I'm saying? So I said, Why are we doing this type of learning? So this is 20 years ago now. This is like 2000, 2001, right? 2002 and I said, Why are we doing this? So that tactical decision game idea, I started a research on online, but it bumped me into the boy cycle boy's work, right?

00:03:07:17 - 00:03:28:10
Fred Leland
Chet Rich's defense and national interest was at the time he was was his site it put me in touch with with them Don Vandegrift his information is he had a web he had a web page. And he also had written a couple of books that one of the ones, big book instrumental in my thinking was by him was raising the bar, which was huge.

00:03:28:10 - 00:03:53:18
Fred Leland
Right. His latest is Big Tool, the mission command adopting mission command. But but anyway, it put me into these things. And long story short, over a period of time, all these ideas and theories, I started saying, how do we push these into development? Better decision making as cops? How do we how do we get them so that they're out there, they're actually able to go make a decision instead of sitting around thinking, hey, they taught us to do this on this type of policy.

00:03:53:18 - 00:04:17:11
Fred Leland
This fits into this book, to this being you, because, well, I'm reading it. I'm thinking, this is why we're doing the shit we're doing because we name something an active shooter, right? Armed robbery, domestic violence, call, whatever, whatever we call it, we name it. And then we think we can come up with a solution to it. It's always going to work, but we think the one the one solution is going to fit the the the whole idea.

00:04:18:03 - 00:04:34:11
Fred Leland
And it doesn't it never does. And this is why what happens like when we were just starting to talk a little while ago mentioned that you've allowed when people see the you've allowed Texas thing, they're up in arms. I think the cops sat, just waited. They were cowards or whatever it was. I don't buy that theory. The theory with me, it's it's risk aversion.

00:04:34:11 - 00:05:04:10
Fred Leland
It's it's it's poor leadership. It's the inability to think outside what they first learned how to do it and they're stuck in it right. Because they haven't been taught to observe orient beside an act. Right. They haven't they haven't learned that idea. They just been taught active shooter to do this right. And you'll hear it if you look at like in policing context, 1999, Columbine, which is the big there was incidents before, but that's the big start of the current move towards safety of schools and active shooters.

00:05:04:20 - 00:05:18:17
Fred Leland
Well, the best practice in 1999 was sit and wait for SWAT to show up. That was how cops were trained. That's how I was. Sit and wait, wait for the SWAT guys. And while we train guys to come and they'll do it and they realize that best practice is no good, what do we do? We say we're not doing that.

00:05:18:17 - 00:05:33:03
Fred Leland
We throw out the best the so-called quote unquote best practice throw, and we come up with a new practice. And we now we say, that's the one, right. Which was a four man diamond and run the halls then. Wait a minute. That's still stood still too slow. What about three. What about two? Now we're all the way down to one.

00:05:33:27 - 00:05:56:05
Fred Leland
And now we want cops with minimal training and tactics to go solo in the buildings. Right? Right. That's that's special forces operators wouldn't go it alone on. It's just remarkable. But anyway, my whole point is, is why do we teach in these rote lessons, in these strict school solutions to guys when they don't? They work great in the classroom environment because we can script it all, we can play it out right.

00:05:56:17 - 00:05:58:03
Fred Leland
But they don't work in the real world.

00:05:58:19 - 00:06:18:18
Mark McGrath 1
Help us understand that that pivot from the traditional way of training and how you started to integrate the the methodologies that are more aligned with, say, John Boyd and Don Vandegrift and others. Give us give us your tale in that sort of blurry period to get from A to B, how did that go around and how to go about?

00:06:18:18 - 00:06:19:13
Mark McGrath 1
How was it received?

00:06:20:24 - 00:06:35:12
Fred Leland
Well, it was in my mind, I said, we got to do this. This is this stuff's working totally different. Instead of being up telling people what to do, what to think and do, I have to teach them how to think and do? And that's what I got from a lot of help from Don. Don and I have taught together.

00:06:35:12 - 00:06:50:18
Fred Leland
I've seen him and Richard speak, met him in person way back in the probably the mid the mid I think 2000 sec maybe was a little late or maybe 2008. I met him in person, but I've been following for a few years and long story short, I got to show him what we were doing and him and I became friends.

00:06:50:18 - 00:07:22:10
Fred Leland
I've been out to West Point helping him and I've been down to Quantico speaking at a Boyd be on conference three of three or four times and he the 28 nine and I think 11 it also he's come up and helped me teach cops you know up this way he's also done big city so we've become good friends I've learned over the the time frame that these whole idea of using instead of telling people what to think and do, teaching them how to think and do, requires what what do we have to change?

00:07:22:26 - 00:07:43:13
Fred Leland
Do I still get up and talk to him? This is these are things which when Michael was a huge in my mind experimental thing was actually to be quite frank, you want to talk about friction and see there was I was almost afraid to change because it was so incredibly right. Like a funny story. When I met with Dawn, I had developed a bunch of TDs in my early days.

00:07:43:13 - 00:08:00:18
Fred Leland
Right. Based on what he was doing. You'll laugh your ass off at this because I put the nice scenario out and then what did I do? Right, because it stuck in my head. I'm trying to teach adaptability and I give a scenario and then I go step one and I leave it blank. Step two. So Don sees it that he shows it.

00:08:00:18 - 00:08:15:11
Fred Leland
I show it to him. I get the shit all laminated up, everything right. He sees it. He goes, This is great. And then he flips to the TDs and he looks at he goes, What the hell is this? Right. And I said, What? And he says, This is great. You've got a nice scenario, but what's the step by step to get them out of there?

00:08:15:19 - 00:08:29:20
Fred Leland
He said, Take them out, right, and let these people just tell you what they're going to do. Basically write it down, think it through so that they develop a course of action, not the steps, but see how ingrained it was. It's so ingrained in the head that you're thinking to yourself, All right, this is the only way to do it.

00:08:29:20 - 00:08:48:18
Fred Leland
The only way to solve a problem is step by step. Works great in technical problems, right? Works great, works great in police work process. In a crime scene, I can follow a nice checklist, right? Get a nice chain of custody and evidence that goes to court and it's all done right. Perfect. But what happens with an adaptive challenge?

00:08:48:18 - 00:09:06:05
Fred Leland
This is a big problem. We look at that differently. We're looking at problems all the same. One plus one equals two no matter what you're doing. Right. So we think we think we can have a school solution. So long story short, I started change resistance. I got resistance up the chain of command and I got resistance at the bottom in both directions.

00:09:06:21 - 00:09:23:08
Fred Leland
I had you up in Massachusetts unions a big I had union involvement. Long story short, once I talked to the union guys and I had a good relationship with them all, I talked to them and I showed them what I was trying to do. They went, Oh, this is going to make us better. I said, Yeah, absolutely. And they said, okay, do it.

00:09:23:08 - 00:09:45:08
Fred Leland
So I started running tactical decision games on my department. Yeah. And we were doing a why what? And here's another problem policing to illustrate it is it makes it hard to get these ideas out because nobody's teaching. Boyd or very few are more out now than ever. But for a long time, nobody was doing it. So the reality is you got to send somebody to work to a classroom, to some formal training.

00:09:45:08 - 00:10:06:10
Fred Leland
Don't. What can we learn right while we're working right. Right on the job from and these lessons. So a long story short over a period of time it slowly developed and I had by the time I was it got into what a couple of years later, two or three years later, after the resistance and change and things and working through it, I had guys come to me, Hey, can I write up a scenario?

00:10:06:10 - 00:10:11:02
Fred Leland
Can I do a teaching for the shift? Can I do this? So it evolved. Yeah. All right.

00:10:11:08 - 00:10:29:02
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Hey, Fred, I want to kind of focus on a little bit more on this. Go ahead. In my mind, you're talking about experiential learning activities, adult learning activities and things like that. And your book that you wrote with Don Vandergrift, I think it's called Adaptive Leadership Handbook. Yes, it was several years ago. You pointed out that you need at least one change when you're doing this.

00:10:29:07 - 00:10:31:07
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So you got to inject some type of change. Right? You got.

00:10:31:07 - 00:10:31:21
Fred Leland
It. Right.

00:10:32:00 - 00:10:49:27
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right. So the idea here that Dave Snowden and Gary Klein worked on is known as Anthro Simulation. It's the human and machine manipulation of the environment that's key here because you got to put a inject something in there for them to shift the way they think is I correction what you're doing.

00:10:50:06 - 00:11:04:27
Fred Leland
Yes, absolutely right. And I'll be honest, let me give you a simple example. Just simple. Right. And they get more complex than what I'm going to share. But I share this with my the other day, my first day, cops come into a room. So it's like the military, right? You come into a room. What do they do when they come into a classroom?

00:11:05:05 - 00:11:19:11
Fred Leland
They sit in linear, right, hands folded books on the table, waiting for you to come in. Right. You come in, and all they expect to do is sit, listen to you. Right, because of the rote memorization we've had all these years. So what I do is I go, okay, this is going to be a different type of class.

00:11:19:11 - 00:11:39:29
Fred Leland
Let's get you've got 18 people. Let's get yourself as close as we can to even groups in and let's put them in a setting that's conducive to good adult learning. A group. A group setting. Right. Go. Yeah. Got one minute and they're trying to figure it out. They're looking like what the ATF flashes across their mind. Right. What is this?

00:11:40:17 - 00:11:58:13
Fred Leland
They flip it around a minute, I stop them. Right. I got my Three Stooges theme on my phone right goes and I go, wait a minute, we're going to do an active shooter and we can't put tables in a room in a minute. What the hell is going on? Right. So they said, well, you know, we didn't we didn't listen.

00:11:58:24 - 00:12:10:05
Fred Leland
Somebody will say, well, usually somebody will say, well, you didn't really you weren't really clear. I said, Oh, so what do you say? My mission, my intent, right? I didn't give you a clear mission. And is that what you're telling me? And they said, Yes, so what do you need to know? So I tell them and I go, okay, 30 seconds, do it.

00:12:10:14 - 00:12:26:26
Fred Leland
And now they they get it in a group setting and they're organized. Right? And then we run from there all week, everything from something like that to the bigger tactical issues they got to solve. And the change is the house of cards, we call it right in the tactical decision game world. You got them going, go and going.

00:12:27:05 - 00:12:46:15
Fred Leland
And now you gave them, let's say, 3 minutes to work a problem. But in 2 minutes and 30 seconds in, you throw that great change that's just happened. Now what? Well, you didn't say that early and you get all this resistance that you see. Right. But they usually they make the move and that helps them develop the skill sets they know in the in the train.

00:12:47:04 - 00:13:05:05
Fred Leland
I'm even trying to stop using the word training in the world of learning and development, they call those. The idea is to put all the learning in the hands of the students. Right. And what they call desirable difficulties make it harder for them to learn. Then they're able to retain it longer and ultimately retrieve it when they need it.

00:13:05:17 - 00:13:08:17
Fred Leland
Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. And and that's.

00:13:09:00 - 00:13:23:17
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
One of the things that we've been trained to do. And I want to check in with you on this is when we push these teams or these groups into an experience for an activity where we change things up on them, we want them to fail in front of other people. Right. That's we learn more from failure. Are you pushing that agenda, too?

00:13:23:18 - 00:13:46:08
Fred Leland
Okay. Yes, absolutely. Because what I find is everybody we make I make them write everything down, right? Everything's written down. They've got to get up in front and brief the group. Right. And a spokesperson for each group and the spokesperson changes my rule. My rule is no, no. Nobody speaks twice until everybody's spoken at least once. And they've got to stand up and they get to brief it and they got to defend it or defend it.

00:13:46:08 - 00:14:04:28
Fred Leland
Or if they see a better way, they adapt and adjust. That makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, and they adjust it. So that's huge because now that builds these character traits that are huge that we we got to blend that training. So we got everything in there, right? All too often everything's set up in a silo, right? Go shoot right.

00:14:04:28 - 00:14:30:23
Fred Leland
Go learn defensive tactics, go learn about the law, write all these things and everything's separate. Nothing's being done together in the real world. They collide and nobody's training it that way. So that's why scenario based work is great. Now, most of my stuff I do is pen and paper write maps and in stuff like that, however, you can take it to the ultimate level and do force on force exams, you know what I mean?

00:14:30:23 - 00:14:47:28
Fred Leland
They will take balls or whatever you want to use and get guys to do it that way. In. In, yes. Because what you want to build during this whole thing is you want to build their ability to build character. So they get used to seeing one, hey, I can make a mistake and own it now I get better at learning tool.

00:14:48:08 - 00:15:12:25
Fred Leland
My option was viable and so wasn't the other guys. All too often in my world, it's everybody says You can't do that. I've had a said, right, you can't do that. Yeah, right. You can't do it. So the so the lack of adaptability is unbelievable when you think about it. And, and the whole idea of doing this stuff centered around conditioning the boy cycle is what they're doing is learning through the void cycle.

00:15:12:25 - 00:15:30:01
Fred Leland
One of the things I think who the hell was talking about it was one of you guys might have been Snowden or maybe I read it like I've had so much stuff you guys sent me on the last week, but they talked about I think it was Snowden, it talked about about teaching theory first and then practice. Right.

00:15:30:01 - 00:15:33:19
Fred Leland
What do you teach? Practice first in theory. And then that was about.

00:15:33:28 - 00:15:57:13
Mark McGrath 1
Yeah, that's so what Dave was saying was that nurses learn practice first and then they arrive at theory. Doctors learn theory first and arrive at practice. And I was saying that I had validated that statement saying, you know, being married to a nurse for 22 years. Yeah. That the new doctors asked the nurses what's going on and then the nurses learn up from the theory albums down.

00:15:57:13 - 00:16:08:13
Mark McGrath 1
So that's that's what he was talking about, how it was like sort of I guess the way I thought of it was a top down theory, bottom up practice, everything not in the middle and everybody learn from each other.

00:16:08:14 - 00:16:31:03
Fred Leland
Tell you how I learned from Dawn is save the theory for later with this type of stuff. Let them go in, let them solve problems. Right. And I've done it now over over the last 20 years, off and on. I've learned I've learned how to do it. Well, if you just go and then you get a feel for the class and everyone's might be a little different when they're ready to hear the ideas behind the boy cycle and the theory right, the whole thing.

00:16:31:26 - 00:16:50:22
Fred Leland
But the reality is, is what they do is eventually you you send them into the problems, you let them solve them. And then somewhere along the line they start to get it. You start hearing it. Yeah. We made observations to conversation at the table, right? We orientated to the problem in this way. Right? Then we made decisions and come up with a course of action and then took right.

00:16:50:22 - 00:17:09:14
Fred Leland
They see it happening and they have never even heard of what it was called. Right, right. And then Don always said, hey, teach them the theory first. I mean, teach them the practice stuff first. Throw immerse them right in the problem. So it's hard for them. Yeah. And then and then go from there and somewhere along the line you teach the theory later and basically what you do is facilitate it.

00:17:09:14 - 00:17:29:22
Fred Leland
So you draw it out of having to learn and then once they get it, you start talking about some of the ideas on how we learn, how we develop, the importance of the void cycle, the importance of leadership, which everything I do with my leadership class is centered on organic design, command and control, which writes leadership and appreciation rights versus command and control.

00:17:29:22 - 00:17:49:20
Fred Leland
All right. And it's it's interesting because that's in policing centralized control, believe it or not, it's remarkable right now. It's so it's still prevalent, despite all the talk for 40 years about decentralized. They'll tell you it's decentralized. But when you get back into the stations, it's rigid, it's inter. I was just watching Hill Street Blues this morning. I just switched over to Prime.

00:17:50:22 - 00:18:03:07
Fred Leland
Yeah, right. And you watch that show and I'm like, Wow, they go to Fiorillo for everything. How the hell is the police department going to work? He's. He's doing a hostage negotiator. Vinny, the drug guy comes in, ask him if he can. I was like, talk.

00:18:03:19 - 00:18:21:15
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Fred, you just triggered something. When you go back to the 1980s and watching Transformers as kids or even, you know, they have a centralized command and control on one side and on the other side everything, right? Yeah. Right. So it's kind of interesting how we're conditioned our culture as children. We're kind of conditioned to see that from time to time and to get in that space.

00:18:21:23 - 00:18:42:29
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Hey, I want to I want to recap something because this is pretty important that when people from a sports team or a CEO of a large organization scratches their head and goes, Why do I care about what Fred Leland's coaching in the police officers or police force or first responders? What would you tell them? And I want to frame this a little bit deeper for you.

00:18:43:22 - 00:19:02:29
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So when we coach organizations on this type of thinking and mission command and the exponential learning activities anthro complexity, here's what I see. A bunch of people come to a room, they bring their computers, their computers are up. They're here to kind of listen to a didactic approach, and they're offended the moment I ask them, put their computers down.

00:19:03:02 - 00:19:18:02
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right, right. They don't want to do that. That's not what they're used to. And they're actually frustrated by that. So we are fighting many forces here when we say, hey, you got to put the work in to actually learn how to be adaptive. It's not something you can just put values on the wall and pseudoscience all over the place.

00:19:18:15 - 00:19:32:03
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
But walk us through what it's like to transition from coaching first responders to going into an organization and showing them the same thing. What are your challenges when you when you go that go through that transition?

00:19:32:03 - 00:19:41:27
Commerical
You are listening to No Way Out sponsored by AGL Elks. Now let's get back to building your confidence in complexity.

00:19:41:27 - 00:20:11:03
Fred Leland
What the biggest the biggest challenges for me was but it's a challenge. But what you work with somebody like let's use the example of the pharmaceutical company that I worked, I did some work with, I did 2 to 3 day symposiums that were have for the CEOs. One would say a big pharma to both would let's just say that two pharmaceutical companies big ones and I'm one of the guys Dr. Terry Barnhart, who's a research and development, a big Boyden thinker.

00:20:11:06 - 00:20:33:28
Fred Leland
He went, think I met him at a boy conference. Oh, God, 28 nine. And he was interested in the tactical decision game idea. So he invited me to two different things one in Philly and one at Washington's crossing. And both occasions, my my biggest fear was, hey, I don't know what the hell. Right? I don't know anything about pharmaceutical company.

00:20:34:05 - 00:20:51:12
Fred Leland
So I talked to him. We developed some small tags, tactical decision games centered around their world. Right. And what they do. And then the first the first year I did one, I took them into an active shooter. They were inside a building with an active shooter. They had to make decisions and they ended up diving right into it.

00:20:51:13 - 00:21:11:16
Fred Leland
Once they got into it and started doing these scenarios, it was they loved it because they were once they got working on the the actual problems, they drove right into it. The second year, which was my favorite, as we developed the whole tactical decision game because they were at Washington Crossing, that's where they were having their symposium right on the on the grounds there.

00:21:11:22 - 00:21:28:04
Fred Leland
I forget the name of the hotel, but it was right there in the heat of it. Right there. They had a Delaware and we met we gave them a scenario based on that and the March on Trenton. And there were 60 big CEOs from the different offices around the world that were at this conference. And we threw them into it.

00:21:28:18 - 00:21:49:22
Fred Leland
And after after doing several smaller tags and what they learned in the end, after three days, they love the whole the whole idea of doing this whole big scenario with the watch in its crosshairs. And I could get I could step off and talk about a whole interesting thing with the George Washington guy the actual George Washington they got down there doing the that just to be.

00:21:49:22 - 00:21:57:01
Mark McGrath 1
Clear to be clear these are not military people these are pharmaceutical executives. Stop learning. They're not learning military.

00:21:57:01 - 00:21:57:09
Fred Leland
Yes.

00:21:57:12 - 00:21:57:24
Mark McGrath 1
Yeah.

00:21:58:19 - 00:22:24:01
Fred Leland
Yeah. Most were nonmilitary, although there were a couple of guys that were in there that were problems military and were now CEOs for the company. But most of them were not right. Most of them were not colleges, hospitals. Right. Same thing, right. Colleges, university hospitals, all these things. And this stuff is, is is good for anything. Just about because you.

00:22:24:01 - 00:22:36:23
Mark McGrath 1
Extract the principles. Is that is that way because I mean, the the principles are the same regardless of the regardless of the space. You're still you're still doing the same principles and find that Floyd's ideas are practical everywhere. Right. Right.

00:22:37:12 - 00:22:56:06
Fred Leland
Yeah, absolutely. The principles and the ideas on how to develop these decision makers are huge. Know. Here's the interesting thing. When I was done, both those let's just go back to the pharmaceutical companies because it's different than policing. When I finished with them, they came up and they said to me, me and Terry Bond had. They said, that was unbelievable.

00:22:56:06 - 00:23:19:03
Fred Leland
It was awesome. They said We loved it. We learned so much. They said that have and we used. All right. They said there were two little puts, big and slow. Now, think about it in their terms. I mean, sometimes it could be weeks, months, long. Their decision making cycle, because they're typing each other via email. Right. And you send me an email and I go, Mark, I'll get to him next week.

00:23:19:10 - 00:23:49:20
Fred Leland
Right. And everything takes forever. But what they learned is they could solve problems in three days that have taken them months right in the real world by working via the computer, because there's no real communique. So they learned collaboration was huge, innovation was huge. Teamwork was better when you when all these things come into play. So that because you're sitting there coming up with real time solutions to problems that make sense via these ideas, and that's what's huge about it.

00:23:49:20 - 00:24:07:02
Fred Leland
And that's what I'm trying to get the policing world to understand. You can't sit here, come up with a solution to a problem, and you don't even know what the problem is. Right? I thought I found funny. I got a cup of coffee right in my hand. I like coffee. So I, I was reading that book and he talks about the cup of coffee all the time.

00:24:07:02 - 00:24:22:17
Fred Leland
I use the coffee analogy now for decade right in my class. I say, look, any situation we go on as a cop is like a cup of coffee. And I go around the room, I say, What do you how do you drink? And right now I'm drinking cream, no sugar, some. Sometimes I'm in the mood. I'll have a black.

00:24:22:23 - 00:24:41:23
Fred Leland
You might like iced coffee. I don't. Right. Some people put some sweet caramel macchiato or whatever it is. Some like Starbucks, some like Dunkin's, some like Green Mountain, some. I had one guy recently tell me he's a maxwell house guy. I said, Well, I just said that like Seinfeld, you put it in one of the team form and stir it right.

00:24:41:24 - 00:25:03:01
Fred Leland
But so my whole point was, yeah, it's a cup of coffee, but it isn't. They're not all the same, right? There's novelties in everything we do, even if it's not, if it's the same, if it's an active shooter, it's it may be 98% of it may be very similar. Right. The age, the weapons, the whole thing. But there's something different about this one.

00:25:03:01 - 00:25:17:03
Fred Leland
You got to come up with that. You've got to come up with some adaptability in order to solve the problem. What you see in a UVA light is everybody hunkered down because they're thinking, hey, should we go in? Is this still an active shooter? Is he got him cornered and there's a host of different things they could have done.

00:25:17:03 - 00:25:46:07
Fred Leland
Instead, they got hunkered because some somebody was getting too nervous, risk aversion and unsafe culture. Right. In the community. That's a big piece of that. Right. Not to mention that they're stuck. What you know, what happens with the procedural things when you follow procedure, all of a sudden they work and you go, now what? You're stuck. Unless you teach these ideas where you observe, orient the side and act in constant assessments, as I call it's constant like that boy talked about.

00:25:46:07 - 00:25:48:08
Fred Leland
It's got to be repetitive, right?

00:25:48:08 - 00:25:51:06
Mark McGrath 1
Yeah. Search and assess. That's what.

00:25:51:17 - 00:25:51:24
Fred Leland
That.

00:25:52:12 - 00:25:59:25
Mark McGrath 1
I remember the weapons instructor. No, see us search it and assess and search and and assess and search and assess and like your constantly looking for mismatches.

00:26:00:09 - 00:26:14:26
Fred Leland
Yeah. And what happens if you don't is, is if you just go one time through the loop. I use this as an example. Right. And it's probably antiquated. But if you just say, okay, let me give you an example. I had a guy call me on the phone a few years back. He says, Look, I fucked up now.

00:26:15:00 - 00:26:16:19
Fred Leland
Sorry if I swore, but you could.

00:26:16:21 - 00:26:19:27
Mark McGrath 1
Yeah, we can. We can bleep it out. We can market and bleep it out.

00:26:20:14 - 00:26:41:03
Fred Leland
Okay. But anyway, right. So that's what I said to him. Right. I said, he says I fucked up, I said, I said what happened. He says, I anticipate the outcome he says of a situation. Right. And I've been teaching these guys and talking to him about this stuff constantly. And he says, Why? So what happened? He says, I went to one woman who was having a mental health related problem.

00:26:41:23 - 00:26:58:22
Fred Leland
He says, I dealt with it before I this. He told me the name. I knew the name myself. He says. And she I talked to her and she was fine. He said she was fine. She was as calm as I ever seen him. So I cleared the call, he says. And then within 2 minutes I'm getting called to go back, she said.

00:26:59:02 - 00:27:17:02
Fred Leland
She called up her friend and said, I do the cop exact words, right? I duped the cop. I'm going to kill myself now. So you hear him over the radio, he says. They say, Hey, you got to go back. She said she duped the cop. She's going to kill herself. And you hear that? He's all worked up. He's like, Roger, he's like, I can't believe I got to go back to this call.

00:27:17:02 - 00:27:31:28
Fred Leland
Right. But he goes, when he gets there, it's totally different, right? He goes up inside the house. She's yelling and screaming, but he's got locked in his mind. He told me, this is just going to be a transport he actually set up before he got there. Backup said, Hey, you need help there. He says, Negative, just going to be a trance.

00:27:31:28 - 00:27:46:13
Fred Leland
What? Meaning we're going to take it to the hospital and that's the end of it, right? So he gets in with that in his mind. He goes up the stairs, she's yelling and screaming and his mindset is, let's go, we'll go. And next thing you know, she's got a knife and a hand coming at him with a knife while right there and trying to kill him.

00:27:46:13 - 00:28:10:27
Fred Leland
So he ends up in a struggle with her on the ground because he was that close. I took one knife away. She had a second knife. Yeah, right. 3 minutes apart. Same person, same location, 3 minutes apart. Totally different outcome. Right. And that just illustrates what we're talking about. If you go through that loop once and you come up with an answer to it, which is what we do when we develop solutions to problems when we end on the call.

00:28:11:08 - 00:28:14:13
Fred Leland
Right. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. We're not going to get at it.

00:28:14:29 - 00:28:20:06
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. We're looking at the first coin, acting on it, the first one that makes sense. Right. And kind of eliminating the other one. Right.

00:28:20:18 - 00:28:53:07
Fred Leland
So there's nothing wrong with teaching basic ideas and principles, tactical principles. But if we think we can always do it the same way, well, one will create friction for these guys because they're going, Hey, this ain't working right. And in two, it's putting people in jeopardy, including innocents. In the end, the officers responded themselves. So what? When you really get into these ideas with Boy, do as you guys are doing, because you guys have got me thinking differently now and I've been looking at this stuff for 20 years and I've been lucky enough to talk about it and speak about Quantico and different places.

00:28:53:07 - 00:29:13:09
Fred Leland
So but you guys have with this these new ideas and these new ways to look, like you said, I heard I think I heard you guys talking about it in the first podcast. You said, hey, boy, what is here in Bishop, right? Ideas. Yeah. And and I believe that, you know, some of these new books like I read that being you, I'm going to have to read that six or seven times.

00:29:13:09 - 00:29:15:00
Fred Leland
I'm just an old friend.

00:29:15:00 - 00:29:34:06
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
I've got an idea here. Let's let's build a snowmobile. Let's let's do with being you. The scenario gave a similar scenario. And I want to throw something else out there from safety, because you brought up safety earlier. And I think there's a connection to the new ways we think about safety and safety differently. Safety, too. And in human resources performance, all of them are complex complexity based safety.

00:29:34:06 - 00:29:58:00
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So I'm going to throw this at you. The four stages of information processing, when we think about safety, are sensing, perceiving decision making and taking action or performing. So we're adding perceiving in that, right? Yeah. So we know from being you that perception is a controlled hallucination. It's constructed top down, inside out. We also know from boyhood it's built on our genetic heritage or cultural traditions and previous experience.

00:29:58:10 - 00:30:21:00
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. Walk me through a scenario where maybe a police officer or a first responder acts in a way that they're going to get blamed for its human error. Right. So how do we help, you know, take all of these ideas that we have from the way you train, the way you and Don train folks, to what we're learning about perception, cognition, consciousness and all that.

00:30:21:19 - 00:30:30:29
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Walk me through how we can help reduce those those errors that are happening out there in the environment.

00:30:30:29 - 00:30:49:15
Fred Leland
Well, what we've got to do is, one, develop individual decision makers to develop an organization that understands that individual decision makers obviously have to have to connect. Right. And work together with others. Right. Because when you've got a team, when you go from a single ops of response to multiple offices, you've got to be able to connect them.

00:30:50:02 - 00:31:08:03
Fred Leland
So you got to you got to have the right leadership climate, right? And you got to develop individual cops to be able to make decisions. This is where tactical decision games come into play and it helps us conditional. Look, there should be NEP. There should never be a time when police are responding to a call that they're hesitant because they're worried the one about getting in trouble.

00:31:08:10 - 00:31:38:17
Fred Leland
Right. Or not doing the procedure 100% correctly because it might not fit right. So we have to we have to take the we're very heavy policy and procedure driven police today wasn't always that way. I was around when we did even have procedure books when I started. Right. And I can't help but think sometimes the procedural things have created this risk averse culture that we're seeing in police work now where everybody's afraid to make decision unless they run up the chain of command.

00:31:38:27 - 00:31:53:07
Fred Leland
We and we have to eliminate that. We can't have every every response from a street cop happen to get permission to do it. You know what I'm saying? He has to he has to know what the mission and intent of his his organization is and what the mission intent is of the of the particular colleagues on and go do it.

00:31:53:21 - 00:32:13:22
Fred Leland
So when we develop those different things, I go back to the the coffee cup analogy. Right that's, that's that's in my mind is about building a building snowmobiles. You have to recognize that every car is not the same. Like every cup of coffee is not the same. Right. And an example, I pick up your cup of iced and I sip on it.

00:32:13:22 - 00:32:32:24
Fred Leland
You got the caramel stuff on it, right? And I go from right. It's time to what shift and adapt and get my cup. That was the next one over. Right, for a simple example. But even in the heated calls, I see it all the time. Guys get stuck like at the front door of a house. 60% of your cops killed at homes are killed at the front door, yet they still respond to the front doors.

00:32:33:03 - 00:32:52:20
Fred Leland
Wow. 60% of cops killed at a home, a dwelling, a killed at the front door. So what are we doing? We're going to Grandma's for milk and cookies. We ought to call. That might be serious if you follow where I'm going. So that's I. There's an opportunity. There's an opportunity right there to to to shift and build a snowmobile, come at a different right.

00:32:53:01 - 00:33:15:21
Fred Leland
Go go to the back of the house, decide on house. Call them outside the you. Right, whatever it might be like. Boy said what I think of building snowmobiles. I love his term. Hey, don't just be a reactor. Because if you're just reacting right, you're not right. He said be a shaper to right. Learn how to shape the conditions using tactics and etc. and tactics are in every business.

00:33:15:22 - 00:33:34:23
Fred Leland
I don't care what you're doing. If you're a pharmaceutical company or a straight business, they get tactics they use to solve that problem and police tactics. It's not just about guns and, you know, Velcro suits. Right. And charging towards houses. It's it's using social skills and all these other capabilities that we have to manipulate or to influence people.

00:33:35:00 - 00:33:39:02
Fred Leland
Right. In a way that they come around while way of thinking to use Boyds term.

00:33:39:02 - 00:33:59:05
Mark McGrath 1
Right. Do you think that's been in compliance Freddy. Think when you when you talk about like hardware like you're talking about and I think we could all agree that when we were kids, you know, the way you see a cop outfitted today is completely different. And I bring it back to Boyd know, I also tie in what you said about policies and procedures.

00:33:59:18 - 00:34:20:26
Mark McGrath 1
You know, Boyd was very clear that it's always people, ideas, things in that order. Do you think that when you look at the the landscape of law enforcement as it's being practiced today, where that where it's not being practiced as well as you think that you could apply some of this training, do you think they clearly have that order mixed up?

00:34:20:26 - 00:34:30:16
Mark McGrath 1
It's not people. They're not focusing on people, ideas, things. They're focusing on things, ideas, people. If if people get technology, how do you see that? How do you how do you see that?

00:34:30:24 - 00:34:52:02
Fred Leland
I think you nailed it. I think we've focused too much on and don't get me wrong, I don't have any problems with technology. It's great. It's but we got an overuse of it, right. And all the use of technology. And then we got systems in place or or leadership styles, autocratic styles of leadership or centralized control. Right. That stifle good, sound decision making.

00:34:52:02 - 00:35:10:09
Fred Leland
Boyd's more he wanted people to be able to make decisions if you want a fluid on a loop, you got to have the front line people developing that skill set. You know, it was interesting, in 2017, I went down and I taught. I got invited to to help teach the drill instructors at Parris Island just a few years ago was like that was like an honor of a lifetime to never go back.

00:35:10:09 - 00:35:33:21
Fred Leland
That went back twice that year, January and July. And it was interesting because when I was a boot going through boot camp, you didn't get paid to think. Right, guys? You remember those days, right? Totally. I am million push up. You get paid to follow orders, right? What they're trying to do when I was there in 2017 is they want that young boot, the young private, to make a decision that may have strategic implications.

00:35:33:29 - 00:35:53:03
Fred Leland
All the way down to the the first front guy. They wanted to make decisions. Right, which is totally different than when I went through boot camp. And because you went from one followed matter of fact, I joke with these guys, but it was true. I said, you know what? When we were we were assigned when I got out of boot camp, went to the fleet as an a grunt unit, they told us to set up our tents.

00:35:53:03 - 00:36:10:27
Fred Leland
We were afraid to start nailing anything in until we got permission from the sergeant. That's how bad it was, right? You wanted to make sure. What are we doing? How are we doing it? Right. And everybody was afraid to make decisions. I can remember it when I talk about. I can remember going, Well, we better get permission first because you were so it was so knocked into your head in boot camp.

00:36:11:07 - 00:36:33:10
Fred Leland
So so to answer your question, yeah, we're not we're not we're not allowing people to make decisions they can make. We give them a gun, we give them a badge, we give them authority. They can take freedom away from people. Right. And yet they can't make decisions. Right, or they're not empowered. So my philosophy has always been any procedure policy right, that is stifles initiative.

00:36:33:10 - 00:36:37:07
Fred Leland
You got it. You got to tailor and you got to make it different, right? If you kick.

00:36:37:07 - 00:36:59:01
Mark McGrath 1
You really hitting it. I mean, you're nailing it like it's a it's a pattern that we see not just law enforcement, but in any any other industry where you're dealing with the same exact problem, where people are focused on things. Yeah, ideas. And they try to retrofit it all to people. Whereas business, policing, the military, it's a people's sport.

00:36:59:10 - 00:37:17:17
Mark McGrath 1
Wars aren't waged by machines, they're waged by people. And people have to be the focus and that's it. So it's it's you know, that's one of the things that we're trying to emphasize as we have these conversations, is that these principles are everywhere. And you can see them in law enforcement, you can see them in business. You can see them in all sports.

00:37:17:28 - 00:37:47:26
Fred Leland
Everywhere, anything, everywhere. And if you think about these these outcomes based learning principles where you're actually developing the individuals to grow in problem solving, I what I look at I think instead of giving you and I'm not saying we don't want to practice our techniques don't don't lose don't lose me but the if we instead step with teaching core competencies like sense making right the ability to size things up problem solving how do we saw how do we frame and solve problems?

00:37:48:06 - 00:38:04:03
Fred Leland
Right. Those are the core things, right? Adaptability. So what I talk to cops all the time in the museum and you see this in any place, right? They're afraid when they get to a problem, they know what they think they should do. And it makes sense to them, but they're going to get permission anyway. They're afraid to adapt.

00:38:04:15 - 00:38:24:18
Fred Leland
They're afraid to make those decisions. We have to loosen the reins when guys if they if they were in accordance with mission intents and the police work, if it's ethical, moral and legal, then let them do their jobs. Right. You can't come up with a process for every single thing. Right? You have to allow guys to think on their feet because the circumstances are slightly different than yesterday's right or 3 minutes ago in the scenario.

00:38:24:18 - 00:38:46:02
Mark McGrath 1
Do you see that, though? I mean, do you see like if I you know, I grew up in the city, there was a beat cop and they had an initiative called Community Oriented Policing. And they knew when they walked around our neighborhood and they knew the wave, the pattern sort of was and if things didn't fit the pattern, they, you know, they knew something was wrong, but they they were integrated.

00:38:46:02 - 00:39:04:05
Mark McGrath 1
They were part of the neighborhood. They were part of the the part of the, you know, the organism, the ecosystem. Do you see where is there like a one size fits all approach that that's getting implemented where somebody that's on a neighborhood beat is is meant to follow something that would apply elsewhere, but not necessarily to their case.

00:39:04:05 - 00:39:06:26
Mark McGrath 1
And they don't have the freedom to to.

00:39:07:29 - 00:39:30:01
Fred Leland
I think the good. Let me back up here in the places that are doing this right, they allow that cop to make the fact. That's what I've been taught for 40 years group polices has been around rights community policing and for 40 years they talk about decentralized control at the individual street cops. Right make decisions and when they do it right and they get the right kind of leadership, leadership an appreciation.

00:39:30:01 - 00:39:46:19
Fred Leland
You've got leaders in there who understand that, hey, I got my guys back. I trust them. They trust me. We can do the job, but at way too many. And if you're going to ask me a number of put on it, 90% of your organizations are doing it that way. Then meanwhile, they'll deal with it and they'll find out what the problem is.

00:39:46:19 - 00:40:05:23
Fred Leland
Somebody will make a decision. They'll say the street cop makes a decision and somebody in the administration doesn't like it, or somebody complains the administration, they change it. Let me give you an example. We would do not job to community policing. I was in charge of patrol. We were doing it. We had my whole idea is don't give me five guys with ten guys.

00:40:05:23 - 00:40:21:20
Fred Leland
The whole organization's got to understand it. Does that make sense? Yes. So I told my guys to get out, get out of your cars, go talk to people. So long story short, that guys guys going into Dunkin Donuts, they're sitting in there, they're talking to the people to having a cup of coffee. Right. And they they hit the donkeys.

00:40:21:20 - 00:40:37:02
Fred Leland
And this is in Walpole. We had five or six of them. Right, right. Then like for me, for an example, I go into the mall right at night on a 4 to 12. What, what's busy of them in a small community of 25,000 in the mall. Right. It's busy. So you got it. Now guess what starts to happen.

00:40:37:14 - 00:40:53:29
Fred Leland
Somebody calls the town hall and says, Hey, town administrator, I see your cops and Dunkin Donuts. And why is that? That side of it will tell it up at the at the mall every day. What's he doing, Jason? Woman Doing something right. So what happens? Think about it. What happens is you get an order from the upper echelon.

00:40:53:29 - 00:41:14:01
Fred Leland
It says, I don't want the guys in the Dunkin Donuts. I go, What do you talk about? You want community policing, adult. You guys have to engage. They have to engage with people. They get to Sydney cars and wait. You got to be in the mall, you got to do these things. So what happens is the risk aversion is so bad that even the top dog in a police department has to deal with the political leaders in the community.

00:41:14:07 - 00:41:16:27
Fred Leland
This is this in the fringe.

00:41:16:27 - 00:41:37:17
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Everything you brought up from the time you were a marine and boot camp to the conversation. Right now, it's really about leadership being seen, right? Being out there with the people. Right. And then we go back to the transition from when you went through boot camp to what our Marines are going through now, where they're being put in situations where their internal locus of control is activated and they're biased toward action achieved.

00:41:37:17 - 00:41:57:10
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right. So we're doing that by giving them leadership moments through experiences. And that's exactly what you're trying to do with these experience. Or are these these are these games, right? Yeah, exactly. So why isn't the rest of the world picking up on this? Why are they so far behind and understanding this is how you create leaders?

00:41:57:10 - 00:42:20:01
Fred Leland
Yeah, I think, you know the best guy and I've talked to him about it and I guess I'll, I'll, I'll take how he told it to me was Don Vandegrift he says look we've we've locked into the industrial industrial age of doing things for so long it's become a habit. Right. And and don't get me wrong, like I said that and it's time the way assembly line approach to training and development was the way to do it right, because they had no choice.

00:42:20:16 - 00:42:37:25
Fred Leland
They had to get guys out and push it through and they weren't. And there was it wasn't as much sophistication and in how we did wars right and battles so we policing took a lot of their training ideas from the military. A lot of them. Right. And now if you think about that, going back to World War One.

00:42:37:25 - 00:43:03:22
Fred Leland
World War Two. Right. And Don goes back even further when guys were doing this stuff before. Right. If you read Don's book, adopt Up the mission command. He talks about it in the air like Frederick the Great and these guys using using outcomes based training to develop their people rights and they had much better results. But we got stuck in it now for a hundred years now, just about a century right in the slow evolution back out.

00:43:03:22 - 00:43:19:05
Fred Leland
So I think that's a big part of it. I think the way we teach in school, how do we learn in school? One plus one is two. I just I was just with my grandson. He's eight. They're doing math. Right. And I'm watching him do because I want my daughter, my son in law out. I'm watching him do it.

00:43:19:05 - 00:43:33:15
Fred Leland
And I'm like, What the hell is he doing? I can't even explain it what he was doing. So I said to him, That's not right. And he goes, God is pops, right? He's got eight years old. He goes, It is right. So I said, Show me so. And he's right, right. The answers. Right, they're doing it totally different.

00:43:33:21 - 00:43:52:09
Fred Leland
Right. So I'm saying that I showed him how we did. He said, well, that's not how we do it. Right. The whole thing. Right. So, so we teach, right? One plus one is two. There's a one solution to every problem, but it's just not. It's that's great technical world. That may be true, but the world of the adaptive challenges, right.

00:43:52:09 - 00:44:28:16
Fred Leland
Or these ill structured problems, we deal with them or wicked problem, whatever you want to call them. Right. I'm with this chaos and all this disorder involved. Right. You have to have wisdom. You have to have experience, wisdom, be able to channel it, leverage it to solve these problems if you can't do it. And the one thing about this training and how we teach it to outcomes based is it teaches us to, like I said, develop problem solve is to increase those intangibles of confidence and adaptability and awareness, all these types of things that make us better decision.

00:44:28:16 - 00:44:48:22
Fred Leland
Right? There's more, right? And then you have to understand what awareness is as awareness just about what I'm looking at or is about awareness of how I learn, how I think. Metacognition, right? All these types of things come into play and this is the stuff that we spend when I do my training up here a week long, you can do it any way I like.

00:44:48:22 - 00:45:06:03
Fred Leland
The week is in the week you see everything take hold. You know what I mean? A couple of days you can do it, but it's really much better to have a it's four and a half days to push them through. What were they were? They actually are doing it more and more because I go from the first day of teaching them, like I told you when they're looking at me and I've had guys come up to me, I owe you an apology.

00:45:06:03 - 00:45:13:10
Fred Leland
I go for what? I sat in this class the first day and said, WTF are you doing right? I've never seen anything like this before. Right?

00:45:13:10 - 00:45:14:07
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Seen it all the time.

00:45:14:10 - 00:45:31:06
Fred Leland
You're right. And then. Then Tuesday afternoon they're coming up to us and saying, the shit's great right now. We get it. Right now we're running with it. And they and they they finally see the value of it. They build confidence. You got to you've got to have training that develops it all, not just one piece of the time.

00:45:31:06 - 00:45:39:04
Fred Leland
It's got to be it's got to be connected. And and that's huge. And that's what outcomes based learning does and what I love about it. Go ahead.

00:45:39:14 - 00:46:00:19
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Fred. I want to go deep, deeper, deeper. So you kind of hinted at this earlier, and that's the intuition piece. And going back to the being you book by Dr. Seth, the inner receptive capabilities, we have our basic sensors, senses sensing organs out there. What about that intuition? How do you help coach that and how do we connect that back to John Boyd's utility?

00:46:01:15 - 00:46:21:04
Fred Leland
Well, that comes back to the implicit, implicit guidance right and control right. And that comes from experience. Experience. I mean, you've got to we have to allow more experimentation on the job. That's why training is good. Nobody's going to get killed in training. But at the same time, when you're out handling a problem, you've got to allow it is a real world problem.

00:46:21:04 - 00:46:43:07
Fred Leland
I mean, you're going to have to allow some of that if you want to get if you want to get good outcomes, you can't have guys sitting there saying, if I do this, they're going to be bullshit. I'm telling you right now that most of the time I talk to cops all over the place, not just in Massachusetts, all across the country, and they tell me that where they feel most stress inside making decisions isn't about what happens on the call.

00:46:43:07 - 00:46:46:05
Fred Leland
It's about what's going to happen to them after the call. So internal bullshit.

00:46:46:06 - 00:46:53:20
Mark McGrath 1
All right. So you mean like you mean like the commander or whoever? The CEO or the supervisor? Yeah. She's going to be pissed.

00:46:53:25 - 00:47:16:27
Fred Leland
Yeah, right. Yeah, it's going to be they're going to be bullshit. And if they make a decision and adapt and when you teach adaptability, this is why one of the things Vandegrift Dawn stresses is you got to try to get that buy in from the top, right. Yeah. Get those guys to see it. And, and I assume that it both ways and it's when you don't get it, it's a constant fight.

00:47:16:27 - 00:47:19:29
Fred Leland
You get into your up like rope a dope up against the wall constantly.

00:47:19:29 - 00:47:37:01
Mark McGrath 1
Right. I remember as a young officer creating PowerPoints or sitting in briefings and the, the, the, the questions that were brought up, the criticisms were about the design of the PowerPoint, not the, the content of the exercise or the training evolution. And.

00:47:38:00 - 00:47:38:08
Fred Leland
Right.

00:47:39:03 - 00:48:02:29
Mark McGrath 1
So the experience, the experience, the experiential learning that that we profession, that damn profession that that Boyd is calling for, it's powerful stuff. And then I guess to tie it back to Boyd and some things that you and I have talked about, we don't have to go into depth, but eventually if you're doing this effectively, you wind up being so effective you don't even have to fire a shot.

00:48:02:29 - 00:48:21:04
Mark McGrath 1
You don't have to have a person. Right. You know, you're you're able to do it's more flow versus force or you're doing more with less and you're not expending life in hardware and ammunition or whatever. But like, like, I guess the parallel would be you're lowering the intensity.

00:48:22:10 - 00:48:38:17
Fred Leland
Yeah. You don't want to come around to use Boyd's words, get them to come around to your way of thinking. Right. That's the goal. Get them to come around to. That's the ultimate goal. If we can get them to give up and come voluntarily comply. Right. That's the that's wouldn't it.

00:48:38:17 - 00:48:43:05
Mark McGrath 1
Be better if there were no shots fired? Right. If there were no persons tased or it would.

00:48:43:07 - 00:49:01:02
Fred Leland
Yeah, no, it absolutely would be. I mean, you know, and I don't want to get too sidetracked here on your show, but the reality of it is cops don't use force very often. You watch TV. That's another thing. They're the conditional, right? The condition and the mindset, the think cops are just like, get in the car and say, let's go see, we can shoot tonight.

00:49:01:02 - 00:49:24:26
Fred Leland
And that's just utter bullshit. So, all right, we use force at about 1.4, 4% of all our encounters, 1.4%. Nationwide gear up the year of the 38 years I've been involved in this business. That's how little we use force. Deadly force is even less. It's .002 fluctuates a little each year, but that's very rate. You watch the news, you think you think we're getting in the car, we're looking for people to shoot.

00:49:25:11 - 00:49:34:23
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah, but that's the narrative that's being pushed and that changes the orientation of people, right? I mean, if, if that's what they hear and this goes back to their the way they make sense of the world decide enacted it.

00:49:35:02 - 00:49:52:03
Fred Leland
Right and you got to and this comes back down to Boyd again right what Boyd talks about you got a one friendly app you want to impact friendly right in a positive way you want to impact the adversary in a positive way and you want to impact the uncommitted, which when I hear them use the term uncommitted, I always think of the public rights.

00:49:52:15 - 00:50:05:24
Fred Leland
They should be committed, but they're outside looking in. And if we don't win them over, right, then things change. You see what I'm saying? We lose in the moral component, right? Right. You can win. You can win at the tactical level and lose the moral lose. The war is bad, right? And that's.

00:50:05:24 - 00:50:14:04
Mark McGrath 1
Bad. Yeah. That's kind of what we're. Let's stick to Sun Tzu, right? Like you got to win the moral war and you got to. It'd be better if you never fired a shot.

00:50:14:28 - 00:50:30:22
Fred Leland
Yeah. Yes. Ultimately, I always use the term and it's so true. I said every and I've been around 38 years, most, most, 99.9% of the cops I've met were rather hug you than hurt you. And that's the truth. Right.

00:50:31:03 - 00:50:47:28
Mark McGrath 1
And it I was going to say, I didn't mean to interrupt you. I was just going to say I took a criminology class in college. I remember there's you have to tell me what the term was like. So if there is a beat cop walking around and people know or see and it stops something. But I didn't know like this.

00:50:48:17 - 00:50:53:05
Mark McGrath 1
I didn't know something got stopped. But like, there's the seen effect and the unseen effect. It was.

00:50:53:06 - 00:51:12:12
Fred Leland
A study. It was a big study called the Kansas City study goes all the way back to the seventies where they they had different control groups. One was saturated with police, one was half the police and one was no police. Right. And the idea was they had cruisers and beat cops walking around and just prevent anything, so on and so forth.

00:51:12:12 - 00:51:28:26
Fred Leland
Right. And ultimately, yeah, they were trying to learn. Does is there a benefit to having rapid response to calls versus. So that was another big issue. What if you want to look at the the moral component of the game we get into we get into this whole idea of, you know what, we don't want the big guys for a period of time.

00:51:28:26 - 00:51:48:10
Fred Leland
We're just going to respond to calls, right? You get in the car, you patrol like aimlessly. You're supposed to be looking for things to happen. But, you know, it depends on where you work. And I mean, you might have a city block where, you know, there's drugs deals and this is where we get into trouble. Right. Because if you've got an inner city block that, let's say minority involved.

00:51:48:10 - 00:52:09:22
Fred Leland
Right. And now you're down there policing was getting policed right that block follow me. So there were in these inner cities that are doing these types of things so so the whole idea is to build relationships, to build internal relationships, external relationships, so that people know who you are. That was a big part of what I did for years.

00:52:09:22 - 00:52:10:01
Fred Leland
Right.

00:52:10:06 - 00:52:16:25
Mark McGrath 1
Are there now an example that you can share? Like are there known examples of models that are out there that are I mean.

00:52:17:24 - 00:52:37:04
Fred Leland
And model the the fair and impartial policing model? The most recent one, the community policing model, goes back to Hermann Goldstein, who was an academic, who he actually wrote a book called Police. He's written several books policing a Free Society, and probably more to policing. Yeah. So there's a ton of different research on it. But and I've seen the.

00:52:37:04 - 00:52:44:11
Mark McGrath 1
Reaction, right. It's, it's a strategic game of interaction in isolation. And if you can interact with people and people.

00:52:44:11 - 00:52:44:20
Fred Leland
Know.

00:52:44:20 - 00:52:48:04
Mark McGrath 1
You and understand you, you build harmony and cohesion. Yeah.

00:52:48:25 - 00:52:52:06
Fred Leland
If you if you isolate yourself from the people discord.

00:52:52:21 - 00:52:57:16
Mark McGrath 1
Do you see too much of that? I mean, just I mean, I think we can all I mean, just too much of that is happening then that.

00:52:58:00 - 00:53:16:01
Fred Leland
Well, it's happening now because of the climate. The whole is going to change back what guys get back in that they're more engaged. But the reality of it is for the last couple of years, we were two things you had you had called it, and then you had the Floyd incident, right. That that sent everybody on a more an anti-police spin because of a bad cop.

00:53:16:15 - 00:53:37:14
Fred Leland
The it it's a tragic set of circumstances but that shows you right there look at the moral component of that game, right? One cop changes policing across the country. One bad decision rate changes because of that, because the reality is in America, freedom's key, right? People fight, die for freedom. Right. We've been in the military. Right. And a cop can take it away.

00:53:37:14 - 00:53:48:02
Fred Leland
So when he does it, he better do it ethically. He better do it fairly and impartially and with justice in mind. If it's fail, if it's looked at like it's not that way, then you see what happens, right?

00:53:48:09 - 00:54:12:11
Mark McGrath 1
There's one thing I wanted to bring you back to. You had mentioned very early in our conversation about overcoming the fear to to be the change agent, overcoming the the difficulty of, you know, bringing novel ideas like void type ideas to an organization. You know, what are some of the things that you did to overcome that fear is it's just as simple as just do it or how did you deal with that?

00:54:12:21 - 00:54:33:08
Fred Leland
No, I did it. I meet resistance to try to put it in short terms, meet resistance and then I did things like when I started doing it, I'd meet with the union guys, try. As soon as I heard there was a problem union, I meet with them and talk to them. That was one. The other thing I did when I first started doing these and that was that include tactical decision games after action reviews, right?

00:54:33:21 - 00:54:56:28
Fred Leland
Because that was something we never did. We never did it right. And we started doing them. I would when we did tags, I started given days off. I do three shifts, right? They shift 4 to 12 shift, been night shift. And I have the sergeants I teach the sergeants how to do tactical decision games. Right. And tell them, hey, you use your own personnel, your own thing, you don't have to follow a script like this.

00:54:57:10 - 00:55:17:25
Fred Leland
And you you pick you pick the best course of action that you thought based on your subjective view, right, about what you think. Rights, who was the best. And we'll give them that will give them a day off. So I gave three days off a month, like I did it for like a year, a year. I was given days off just to try to get them to talk, to get into it.

00:55:18:03 - 00:55:34:21
Fred Leland
And within six months, three, four, six months, I started seeing some guys will come up and say, Hey, can I design a game? I had my SWAT guys, the guys who were part of a SWAT team that's a regional team say, hey, can we teach them this new room entry technique we learned, right? So you can do it that way.

00:55:34:22 - 00:56:08:18
Fred Leland
Yeah, they read guns and go about that way. They had firearms instructors that were trying to get more creative with what they were doing on the range. Right. Instead of just standing on the straight line, develop it that way. Well, inclusive arms. So yeah, I feel even to this day, to this day, just a year ago, right, I finally got the empty sea, the Municipal Police Training Council up here in Mass to allow me to to officially use outcomes based learning for that sergeant's class officially I took listen to this and I say they finally let me do it.

00:56:08:18 - 00:56:25:18
Fred Leland
But there was some caveats to it. I would have wiped out PowerPoint completely. It would have been all gone. Right. We would have had an outline for something, you know, an outcomes that we were trying to do goals for the course. But I would have wiped it out. But, but hear me out. I took it from 370 slides.

00:56:26:17 - 00:56:47:17
Fred Leland
You hear me? Yeah, 370 PowerPoint slides down to 116. And I highly even I hardly even use them. Right. I'll even use the slides, I, I do the scenarios and then I'll show them the slides. We covered this right? Here's what we're doing next. Boom, we cover this right, I'll show I got a couple of videos and there a couple of maps and that's all we really use for any period of time.

00:56:47:23 - 00:57:18:08
Fred Leland
But that was just it'll be a two years now to two years ago. So I feel like I've been rope a dope for a while trying to do this, but I believed in it. I believe in it, and I believe in and Boyd's ideas. I, I love what you guys are doing, because now you got my mind going 900 miles an hour, thinking about the guys, thinking about like that being I was talking to one other guy who's big trainer and he wrote on my on my post, I posted stuff from the book and he goes, Freddie, I read in the book, he goes, I don't think my intellect will.

00:57:18:08 - 00:57:35:08
Fred Leland
I said, Hey, I'm struggling with a to do it. It's not easy. I just keep going when I when I got to I think it was chapter five, page 100 on the what do you call it, the wizard of Odds is where slowly I started the click when they start talking about the Bayesian theory, I think he gets into it in that chat.

00:57:35:08 - 00:57:43:23
Fred Leland
Yep, yep. And then I started seeing Boyd in there in my mind as I'm reading, you know what I'm saying, the ideas. Yeah. Is that makes sense to you guys, you know?

00:57:43:24 - 00:57:45:05
Mark McGrath 1
It makes sense to us. Yeah.

00:57:45:17 - 00:58:24:09
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. We have animations on it now that we'll put out there. And like I said, we're going to have more discussions with people in the doctor Dr. World and one of them's coming up in about a month from now, but we're going to go deep with that. That's going to be fun because the connection between what Boyd knew 20 years ago and what we're learning about cognitive science and neuroplasticity, neurogenesis, there's a whole body of researchers out there that don't know anything about Boyd in the same way that many Iowa psychologists didn't know that plan, execute, assess is really what Scrum is and what's what we're trying to do with teams in an organization.

00:58:24:09 - 00:58:45:02
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So a lot more to come on that. I do want to ask you a couple of things. Yeah. You know, Dawn pointed out that, hey, we need to get together and do some training, some training together. I absolutely agree with that. The tags that you have, we have some, too, that are pretty fun. We're getting away from. We can't get we can't eliminate all the PowerPoints and keynotes out there.

00:58:45:03 - 00:58:46:02
Fred Leland
I get it together.

00:58:46:19 - 00:58:52:15
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
But but a lot of people want this. It's funny, when you go deliver something, they're go can get the slide deck. You're like, Yeah, there's nothing on it.

00:58:53:24 - 00:59:23:00
Fred Leland
So it's a picture condition that you should write to it and you know what? And not to interrupt you, but to go back to your match point. The question let me share this. In 2011, I was at the boy and Beyond conference. I spoke there three times, but there was a situation. Terry Barnhart taught a thing on critical question mapping, right, where you say, hey, you got to for my example, you got an active shooter in the school.

00:59:23:00 - 00:59:41:23
Fred Leland
What critical questions you need to answer to solve this problem. Go. And they have to put one one question. Footnote they put up long story short at work, I watched it work at Quantico. I was like, always get first. I was like, what is this? Right. But then I looked at it. I said, This works. So I took it back, got back to my organization.

00:59:41:23 - 01:00:03:14
Fred Leland
We were going to do a huge, big act of shoot, a full scale exercise. I mean, teachers, students, DPW workers, health department, the SWAT team, everybody. Right. It was like 1800 people involved in the exercise. Right. So I wanted to do a tabletop or tag with them first. So long story short, I said, you know what, they only give me two and a half hours.

01:00:03:22 - 01:00:23:02
Fred Leland
I'm going to try this this new idea, this critical question, maps. Right. I go out buy $100 worth of Post-it notes and all kinds of stuff. Right. And I had no idea how to do it. I had 35 bosses from different teachers, everyone in the room, cops, firemen, everybody in the room. And I didn't I wasn't even smart enough to put them in groups.

01:00:23:02 - 01:00:38:18
Fred Leland
Right. I just threw them into the fire and they worked the scenario. It it worked out really well. But before they came in, I was there an hour, hour and a half before before they came in, I was sitting there and I'm looking at everything on the tables, ready to go it, and I'll never forget it. And I share this with guys because they have the fear.

01:00:38:18 - 01:00:57:26
Fred Leland
There's a fear to do it. They were afraid to step outside the comfort zone. And I remember feeling it. I sat there and I go say to myself, I went, Screw this, I'm not going to do it. I'm going to pick the shit up. Just tell them what they got to do, right? And I was in the middle of picking it up and I said, how to how I'm talking to myself right?

01:00:57:26 - 01:01:22:09
Fred Leland
And I'm even answering myself. So you know what that means, right? And I'm saying to myself, do it. Practice what you preach, right? Step outside. But that's a big piece of this is we learned to do it this way and we get afraid to do it that way, which in that way just made me better. Right. And I found now, 20 years later, it's much better.

01:01:22:09 - 01:01:46:23
Fred Leland
It works. And I just had a guy we just the last course I did was November 18th, finished on the 19th or two days, the Monday. So it was a 19, 20, 21st. On the 19th, the guy that was in the class responded to a huge bus accident involving a college university where one killed, multiple injured. And after he calmed down and got things done, he sent me and the other guy to teach it a letter.

01:01:46:23 - 01:02:05:02
Fred Leland
He says, Thank God I took that class when I did. He says, the biggest mass casualty incident that wall families had and because of the the learner, the boy cycle and how to not be afraid to make decisions and develop our guys. We were able to go handle this in a way that was it. That's the ultimate for money.

01:02:05:02 - 01:02:13:25
Fred Leland
It's nice. It's all great. But that's the ultimate, right? When you get somebody reach out to you and says, Hey, this chip works. And I've had that happen over the years numerous times, but it is.

01:02:13:25 - 01:02:18:12
Mark McGrath 1
Amazing if you let it, if you're open to it, it's amazing what it unlocks in people.

01:02:19:17 - 01:02:39:08
Fred Leland
You've got to resist. You've got to resist the fear. You have to resist it. You have to step outside the comfort zone of afraid to do it will never, will never take the steps. And now, 20 years later and trust me, I love doing it to me. I used to hate Mondays because I hate that look on the cops faces like they completely lost what I'm doing right Monday of the class now.

01:02:39:08 - 01:03:01:17
Fred Leland
I love it. I love Monday. Mondays and Fridays are my best days. Right? I love watching them. I enjoy doing it. So it's like anything, right? You get better at it. And what ultimately you're doing is you're increasing the performance level, right. And what I mean by that is the cognitive ability to decide and the physical skills that have to come into play to do the job right that they have to use.

01:03:01:17 - 01:03:20:18
Fred Leland
And that's something we don't do enough of in my world. And probably in in the West, we have a lot. We want everybody to follow the boss, listen to them. Right? Follow that procedurally, right and so on, so forth. And and then we want the why there's problems because there was something slightly different about that cup of coffee.

01:03:20:23 - 01:03:43:27
Fred Leland
Right. And we didn't recognize it. And that's important in my mind. That's important, especially with anything if you want to be effective, any business. Right. But in my and I world of policing where you know, in military two with life and death or on the line, you certainly have to have these capabilities to not be afraid to make decisions and and not be stifled through speaking.

01:03:43:28 - 01:04:00:15
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Speaking of fear. Speaking of fear, Fred, I'd like to ask you this question for a future episode. We're going to dove a little bit into more of the mental health as we go forward, as we learn more about the things we were talking about earlier. But love to have you on to talk about the trauma, what it's like to be a first responder.

01:04:01:04 - 01:04:08:28
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
What what's going on in their minds when they respond and come home and have to decompress? Because we love to have you come on and talk about that. I'll connect.

01:04:08:28 - 01:04:27:14
Fred Leland
Americans. I am I teach it. I teach that side of it. This year. Matter of fact, the last five or six years I've been involved in teaching the rate. This year we called it 212 degrees preventing office of stress. Right. It's teacher what's post-traumatic stress? All this and it's been the last few years. So yeah, I'll definitely come on.

01:04:27:17 - 01:04:43:05
Fred Leland
And I think that impacts your decision making like anything else, actually. Matter of fact, I see you mentioned that in your thing. Now, now here's I'll leave you with this. I can't see us getting on a shift at roll call and doing psychedelics to get our shit right.

01:04:43:05 - 01:04:46:19
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
No, no, that's not going to happen. We're not pushing that. Yeah, I know, I know.

01:04:46:26 - 01:04:55:21
Fred Leland
That's just joking. It's funny, you know, it's. Hey, hey. I couldn't help myself. I had a brain sort of gallows humor in the.

01:04:55:27 - 01:05:09:07
Mark McGrath 1
Yeah, it brought me right back to that episode of Dragnet. I think it was called Remember Blue Boy? It was called Blue Boy. Yeah. And he was he had his head buried in the ground and his face was blue and he was tripping on acid.

01:05:09:19 - 01:05:11:02
Fred Leland
So God.

01:05:11:02 - 01:05:18:08
Mark McGrath 1
Almighty. And the other thing you did to me, Fred, I'll never forgive you for you've put the Hill Street Hill Street Blues theme in my head and I've been hearing it.

01:05:18:08 - 01:05:29:02
Fred Leland
It's on it's on prime and my wife was laughing because I just triggered my I just switched over my phone. I'm like, That's so catchy. I made it my ringtone. She's like, Turn that goddamn thing go off.

01:05:29:06 - 01:05:38:22
Mark McGrath 1
Yes. Well, what was your fitting? My favorite cop show. I mean, I guess I'm biased because my my colleague is Ponch, but that had to have been my favorite show growing up. Which chips?

01:05:39:07 - 01:05:52:21
Fred Leland
Oh Chips. Oh, my God. Yeah, yeah. I think you know what? Yeah, probably growing up, it was chips was big. That was a big one. Remember SWAT? Yeah, yeah. Emergency versus.

01:05:52:21 - 01:05:54:15
Mark McGrath 1
Emergency. Oh, yeah.

01:05:55:07 - 01:05:59:08
Fred Leland
You want that? You want the the atom 12. Remember, Adam?

01:05:59:20 - 01:06:00:16
Mark McGrath 1
Adam 12.

01:06:01:16 - 01:06:02:13
Fred Leland
Almost shows me an.

01:06:02:13 - 01:06:09:12
Mark McGrath 1
Emergency that had Julie London, the singer. She was the nurse at the Rampart Hospital.

01:06:10:25 - 01:06:14:25
Fred Leland
I forget all their names, but yeah, I remember. I watched that. I remember watching the.

01:06:14:26 - 01:06:15:08
Mark McGrath 1
Classic.

01:06:15:22 - 01:06:24:06
Fred Leland
Like every Everybody Loves a fireman. You know that, right? And these emergency guys. So so yeah. We have fun with that with our fire guys.

01:06:24:20 - 01:06:43:04
Mark McGrath 1
But what do you think? We'll get back to that. Why do you what do you think? Like what? What could change? I mean, seems like a lot of the things that you talk about could really change that, you know, fundamentally really change that perception in people that if they if they understood and connected, that police are trying to do the same thing.

01:06:43:04 - 01:06:53:04
Mark McGrath 1
They're trying to protect life, liberty and property of the of those that they're charged to protect and serve. I mean, how how could that gap close? Because I'd see that for sure. How could that cause?

01:06:53:04 - 01:07:07:08
Fred Leland
Well, you got to keep pushing and police have to always you always got to keep the moral high ground. Whatever you have a cop fall off. Either he's corrupt, done something bad and we have them. We have them every so often. They they they're out there. We do our best in our power to keep them out of the ranks.

01:07:07:16 - 01:07:25:08
Fred Leland
If we find out there in the ranks, you've got to get rid of more. And we've gotten better at that over the last several decades. But, you know, it's like anything. Are you ever going to root out racist racism in society? Is it? We could have 90, 95% of us being good people who love everybody of every color, creed and religion.

01:07:25:16 - 01:07:42:01
Fred Leland
And you're always going to have 5% people not going to get it. You know what I'm saying? And so so you're trying to you got to let people know that most of you guys out there are doing the right thing and they're doing it. Well, that's number one. And and then and then what you need is leadership, which I'm going to say it here.

01:07:42:01 - 01:08:06:23
Fred Leland
I'll say it on your show, in my humble opinion. And there's there's some good ones, but it's all too often. Where have they been? Over the last two years? Right, when cops are being completely crucified unjustly. All right. And most of them have been nowhere to be seen. All right. And we can't have that now. And then we got politicians who, for whatever reason, they're in a weird place now where they seem to be in more for themselves or they have for the people not to get political.

01:08:06:23 - 01:08:27:00
Fred Leland
But the reality of it is you got bosses who are afraid to make decisions because the people above them will oust them. They'll be out of a job or out of career or whatever it is, because they're not playing politics and we're in we're in some different times, tough times politically. And whenever whenever politics gets politics, it's always involved police.

01:08:27:00 - 01:09:02:03
Fred Leland
And because work for the people. Right. But when politics takes a is like rate on your show the fall and you around with every move you make and not allowing you to do your job a difficult job. And when decisions are made like let's say use of force decisions, it gets made. That's righteous or reasonable, is determined by what the law says because of the the the, the VUCA environment, the Graham versus Connor, which is the leading case on police use of force, says, hey, the decision isn't about being right or wrong.

01:09:02:03 - 01:09:13:25
Fred Leland
It's about is it reasonable in light of all those conditions? Does that make sense? Yeah, that's what the law says. Not right or wrong. Is it reasonable because the court even gets it better than we do, you know what I'm saying?

01:09:14:00 - 01:09:31:25
Mark McGrath 1
Well, I think it was making that I think it was somebody very famous from your home state that said that all politics is local and, you know, all policing is local. And when you're dealing people, ideas and things, it's the people that are there with you and in a decentralized way of making decisions can.

01:09:33:03 - 01:09:50:15
Fred Leland
It's like my thing I have no problem with politics being involved as long as it's ethical follow me. Yeah if long as your ethics are there and you're doing the right thing, even if it's hard right, then You've got to. You have to own that. You can't just be in it for the vote. You have to be in it for what's right.

01:09:50:26 - 01:09:57:27
Mark McGrath 1
Let's remember that in addition to tactical decision games, they also have Edgar's in the Marines, which is ethical decision games.

01:09:57:27 - 01:10:17:06
Fred Leland
Yeah, I use them. Use them. I use legal. Ethical. I just put them under the caveat a task. But yeah, legal, ethical, everything procedural. I, I got a whole bunch of a host of different things. So yeah, you can play them out in a host of different ways. And I think my experience has been is that you develop, you develop the ideas of Boyden and you.

01:10:17:06 - 01:10:33:02
Fred Leland
And here's the other thing most people talk about. Boy, they only think about the oral. Yeah. And they only think they only think about the little loop in the in the loop format. Right. They don't, they don't when I show them the real little loop with, you know, all the crap. And now I got to think about your juror in Tropic Water Loop.

01:10:33:02 - 01:10:51:22
Fred Leland
Right. Which is fascinating, by the way. It's a good it's a good way of looking at it. But when you show it to them, you go, holy shit, I had no idea that was that much of most deep. Most most of them are. They never heard of the strategic game. They'd never heard of organic design. They haven't heard of the essence of winning or losing or the conceptual spiral.

01:10:51:22 - 01:11:04:05
Fred Leland
They haven't heard of any of that, right? Because It's it's a typical and that's another problem. It's the typical bullet point. Learning just I like getting into the weeds. Get into the weeds. If you're not going to get into the weeds in training, then you've got to.

01:11:04:05 - 01:11:22:25
Mark McGrath 1
Do the work. Yeah, I've got to. That's an emerging theme that comes up in our conversations. You've got to do the work. I think another thing that comes up is when you do get fluent in these ideas, you realize that it does take a lot of time and and conversation and Boyd's briefs could go for hours, even days.

01:11:22:25 - 01:11:53:13
Mark McGrath 1
So I'll call trouble. Yeah. We'll have you back for sure, because we could go in so many more directions. But we'll leave it here today and we'll come back and pick up we where we left off. But I think the big takeaways are people, ideas and things. And you've got to learn experientially to deal with the nonlinear, complex, asymmetrical world that you're either VUCA world, if you will, and linear solutions aren't going to cut it.

01:11:53:13 - 01:11:55:23
Mark McGrath 1
And that's where vulnerabilities and threats increase.

01:11:55:23 - 01:12:08:10
Fred Leland
So we and I agree 100%, and I can't thank you enough for having me on. Anytime I get an opportunity to talk. Boyd, what guys who are into it is me. And I'll say this 20 years of studying it, I'm always never stop.

01:12:08:10 - 01:12:21:09
Mark McGrath 1
It never stops. No, no. We're hoping to. We're hoping to. That's the mission of the podcast is to promote that and and get other people on board. So thanks so much for for reminding us of that. And then we'll we'll continue the conversations.

01:12:21:25 - 01:12:23:12
Fred Leland
Absolutely, guys, I appreciate it.