The Dynamic Risk Assessment

Denial

Human beings have a very simple way of coping with high stress situations; we deny them. Rather than accepting the reality of our situation, we tend to ignore our predicament, denying that we are in any danger at all. Our instincts may tell us to run or get out of a place but we will immediately look for and accept any reason that will allow us to stay put; however tenuous, ridiculous or patently dangerous it may actually be. 

A statistic that should be in everybody’s head is 6:36. 6 minutes and 36 seconds, is the average length of time that it took for people to start evacuating the second twin tower after it was hit by the second plane on 9/11. Imagine sitting at your desk, aware that the unthinkable has just happened - a plane has hit the tower next to you. Now imagine that you here an explosion many floors above you and then you feel the building you’re in start to shudder and groan. Now set your watch alarm for 6 minutes and 36 seconds and wait. This is the average length of time that people working in that second tower waited before leaving their desk in search of a fire escape. This is the denial phase and it has a gravitational pull that is strong enough to keep people in a state of inertia regardless of the information and awareness that they have concerning their situation e.g. friends and relatives watching the events, from the outside, on the ground were phoning and emailing those within the second tower, keeping them up to date with what was going on.

The reason we go into a state of denial so quickly and firmly, is because the human brain is extremely adept at building scripts that automate many of the “tasks” that we fulfill on an everyday basis. If you’ve ever gotten into your car to go to work, and after 15 minutes find yourself there without any real recollection of the journey, it’s because you’ve completed that familiar task on your automatic pilot; you’ve slowed down, braked, accelerated, changed lanes etc. without ever being consciously aware of your environment. A person going to work in the Twin Towers on 9/11, wasn’t expecting a plane to crash into their office space; it wasn’t in their script. Their script or model involved, grabbing a coffee, getting in an elevator, sitting at a desk, attending a meeting etc. The only “disasters” they’d been led to expect that could possibly happen (and maybe trained for) was the risk of fire – and how many people in offices assume that each time they hear an alarm, that it’s a drill and not the real thing? Getting people to take the unexpected seriously is a difficult thing.

If you’ve ever had that feeling that says something’s wrong e.g. you had a bad feeling about a person, thought you were being followed or didn’t like the feeling of a place etc, your first response was probably to deny your feelings and tell yourself to stop being stupid and imagining things. If you weren’t able to immediately identify the cause of your unease, you probably discounted what your initial reaction to your situation and continued doing whatever you were in the process of doing i.e. you went back to following your script. I’m sure that nobody in the Towers that day could have completely ignored the impact of a 747 plane that took out four floors and would eventually bring the tower down. The noise of the crash and the shuddering of the Tower’s support structure would have sent an immediate signal that all was not well. However because nothing bad happened in the immediate aftermath, it was possible to deny/ignore what had just happened and go back to working from the familiar and comfortable script, that we were following before. It is much easier to believe nobody is following us than have to deal with the consequences if somebody is. The most important state for us to be in is one of immediate safety and if our script confirms this we’ll readily accept it and maybe even go to great lengths to match and mold our reality in order to fit it.   

Having scripts that allow us to repeat common tasks, without having to think, enable us to complete them quickly and efficiently without us requiring any real mental bandwidth. Things fall apart when the real world ends up not matching the script. So strong are these scripts and models that we often choose to believe them instead of what is actually in front of our eyes.  It was this holding on to inappropriate scripts on 9/11 that kept people sitting at their desks for an average of 6 minutes 36 seconds before they made their way to an exit or fire escape. Some people took longer, some people never moved.  There were of course those people who reacted and responded instantaneously, these people are the ones who are equipped with what we refer to as a “survival mindset”.

Survivors, survive because they exhibit a curiosity about their surroundings and environment. It is this curiosity which allows them to break out of their scripts/models and accept the reality of the situation they’re facing. Survivors don’t deny or discount the various possibilities and causes of danger however improbable and remote they may seem. They will take in every bit of available information concerning their environment and re-work and re-write their scripts and models accordingly. They will also be prepared to go against what may seem to be better judgment if their gut and instinct tells them otherwise.

When I talk to people who have been assaulted one of the most common statements I hear is, “I just couldn’t believe this would be happening to me.” If a person’s entire modus operandi is to work to a script then the unimaginable has no place. If you believe that you won’t be mugged in a crowded shopping mall, bus or train station etc, when it does happen to you, your response will be one of disbelief and denial. This is one of the biggest causes of denial in violent situations: a person having built themselves an incorrect “model of violence” e.g. crowded places are the domain of pick pockets and surreptitious criminals not of muggers and sexual predators. A woman may believe that she is safe from being raped on a populated subway carriage but the truth is such assaults have taken place – and unfortunately will continue to do so. A rapist can carry out an assault in less than 10 seconds, using the cover that bystanders afford along with the victim’s sense of disbelief/denial to commit their attack with little fear of being discovered or caught. If your model of violence states that muggers and rapists only operate in deserted places then you are reinforcing your ability to deny these assaults happening in any other scenarios.

Experience can often work to reinforce and validate an inappropriate script or model. For every subway ride you’ve taken where you haven’t been raped or mugged you’ll reinforce your perception that these threats and dangers are not something that need to concern you when in such a situation. Experience can have the effect of reducing your ability to be curious about your environment and stop you from questioning events, behaviors and actions that may occur within it. Familiarity breeds contempt and the result is a false sense of security. As soon as you stop thinking and questioning your environment you run the risk of becoming a victim. Just because something hasn’t happened ten thousand times doesn’t mean it won’t – the Twin Towers didn’t experience an attack by air for over 50 years however the unthinkable/unimaginable still happened. You may have walked along a street a thousand times, drunk in a bar five hundred times, all without incident. However you’re continued safe experience of these things means you’re more likely to deny the possibility of violence occurring in the future than had you had to deal with aggressive behavior in these places in the past. Experience can often be translated as, everything you previously got away with without any consequence.

Our natural optimism concerning our belief that assaults happen to others and not to us, reinforces our scripts that disallow for the possibility of violence to interrupt their smooth running. When this is coupled with the fact that we over-estimate our ability to deal with aggression and violence when it does occur e.g. our “it will be alright on the night” approach to handling such situations, we find we have no pre-built scripts to deal with violent behavior that contradicts our normal models/scripts. If we were to have built some type of “emergency model” to handle these situations we could use such scripts to replace the ones we normally use to lead our life by. These pre-built models are a key part in both increasing our situational awareness i.e. we are able to identify and acknowledge behaviors that represent a threat, and allow us a path to follow as a solution to them.

 Denial is a natural response to violence. It is easy to discount and deny the possibility of danger; after all bad things happen to other people not us. Our scripts and models disallow us the opportunity to accept the presence of danger and our experience(s) confirm these – if it’s never happened to us before then it is hard for us to believe it when it does happen. I am sure that the persons, who evacuated the Twin Towers in the first instance, did so after initially “denying” the situation they might be facing. Many people when first confronted with extreme aggression will actually laugh assuming that the other person must be joking or playing a prank. I remember as a child the very first time I was bullied, I simply didn’t believe that other children could or would want to behave this way or in fact that anyone would socially interact in this manner (an incorrect model of violence). I wasn’t sheltered as a child I’d just not experienced behaviors such as exclusion, extreme ridicule or physical violence before and they ran contrary to every script I had. Because I couldn’t imagine such things happening, I had difficulty accepting them when they did and because of this I initially kept denying that I was a victim of bullying; even when I experienced this, again and again. Many of our scripts and models are learnt/created early in our lives and we must learn to adapt and change them as we get older, wiser and more informed.

Your initial reaction to violence will always be denial however much training you receive. We humans are continually optimistic creatures and we believe that what has kept us safe in the past will continue to do so in the future.  When we understand that violence rarely adheres to both our models and experience, we are able to set ourselves up for the next stage of the process we go through: deliberation.  

Deliberation

                                The individuals in the World Trade Center who eventually passed through their denial phase and accepted that something was very wrong were faced with many choices e.g. should they wait for instruction on what to do, should they evacuate the building, should they try and find a supervisor/manager who may have more information etc. In such high stress situations many people get caught in a loop, comparing and evaluating the best option available to them. They will weigh up the pros and cons; eventually they seem to reach a decision, only to repeat the process over again. People do the same when dealing with potentially violent situations.

Imagine you are being followed and you notice/hear the footsteps of somebody walking behind you. You might initially discount or deny that this person is following you but as they start to match your pace, slowing down and speeding up when you do, it becomes evident that you have to accept that you are being followed. Your next step is to work out what you should do. You consider turning around and confronting the person, next you decide it may be best to run or possibly walk up to one of the houses your passing and pretend you’re visiting someone. As these thoughts race through your mind you realize the person behind you is getting closer and you start to think about what their motive could be, if they’ve got a knife etc. You start to run through your options again, with an added sense of urgency and feeling the pressure of your situation. You are stuck in the “Deliberation Loop”, trying rapidly to find a solution without ever fully reaching one. It is a classic example of overthinking.

The problem is that just as we have models and scripts that allow us to automate tasks, so we have ways/models of thinking that help us function in our everyday world. We are blessed with a rational brain that allows us to collect information, compare different pieces of it and eventually reach conclusions. When people make a choice about a car they are going to buy, they will consider things such as: reliability cost of parts/maintenance, fuel efficiency etc. When selecting a university or educational establishment: price, reputation, location, length of the course etc. will all be taken account and a comparison of different schools and universities based upon these factors will be reached. This is called “Rationalistic Decision Making” (RDM). It’s a method of evaluation that we use to make and justify our decisions 99.9% of the time. It’s a fantastic way of processing complex data and making informed decisions based upon it. It has one drawback: it takes time. Unfortunately violent situations have a habit of developing rapidly and time is one of the components of a situation that any assailant/attacker will try and eliminate.

    The individuals in the World Trade Center on 9/11 were working against the clock – it took people an average of one minute to clear each floor. If you were an average person who took six minutes to gather your senses and leave your desk, you’d have been six floors higher than you would have been had you managed to start moving the moment you heard the initial explosion/felt the building rock. Without being over-dramatic those 6 minutes for many people were the difference between life and death. There also would have been individuals who “revised” their evacuation plans along the way. The majority of people don’t have strong models and scripts of what to do in the event of an emergency. There would have been individuals who had never completed a fire drill, or ever taken note of where the nearest fire escape was. If a person went looking for an escape route or fire escape and couldn’t initially find one, they may well have ditched their escape plan in favor of another possible solution they’d considered; waiting for a Fire-Marshall or supervisor to tell them what to do i.e. they were still deliberating after they’d appeared to reach a decision. There is always new information that becomes available as things develop and this needs to be both considered and used to revise a plan. However at the very beginning the initial plan needs to be acted upon with complete conviction. 

The problem we have in our rational thinking model is that we are looking to find the best solution to a situation. The problem is that the “best” solution requires a comparison of all possible options to take place in order for a thorough evaluation to take place and this takes time. It is much quicker to simply search for an “effective” solution; something that will work/solve the problem and not care too much if it is the best one available. If you believe someone is following you and running would prevent you from being assaulted you should run. It should not be compared against the other possible options it should just be acted upon. If you are in an argument that is only going one way and walking away will not be effective, nor will continuing the argument or backing down, then your only real choice is to make a pre-emptive strike – with full conviction. This mode of thinking is referred to as Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM). It is a fast way of reaching decisions because it only asks a person to make one comparison of a potential solution (is it effective), rather than comparing each possible solution with each other.

It is easy for us to overthink, we have brains that allow us to do this – it’s why we are able to be creative; we can imagine what is not yet there. This is a dangerous mode to operate in as it allows our minds to create new problems that don’t exist. In high stress, emotional situations where time is of the essence we need to find effective solutions quickly and not worry if better ones may be available to us.

Reaching Decisions, Acting & Choosing the Right Time to Act

                Once we have “chosen” a particular solution, we have to act on it. This is often the hardest part of the continuum. Our perceived inability to act may well cause us to revisit and reconsider the other options that we thought about before initially deciding on one plan of action. We may also try and look for other potential solutions, especially if we start to over-consider the potential consequences of what we first decided upon. This way of thinking puts us squarely back into the “Deliberation Loop” and moves us further away from action, which should be the goal of our threat recognition and decision process.

                Our fear instinct often prevents us from acting upon any decision that is made when in a high stress situation. If you are involved in an incident where an aggressive individual is screaming and shouting obscenities at you, despite being fully aware that at any moment he may start to physically assault you, and that your best plan would be to either run away or attack him first, your fear emotion may well hold you in check. In any potentially dangerous situation, even where the level of risk to our safety may be small, our fear emotion will often prevent us from acting.

Anyone who has bungee jumped or parachuted will tell of the inertia that is experienced when you stand on a platform waiting to jump into open air. Our conscious mind knows that both of these activities are relatively low-risk however our emotional self knows otherwise. Our emotional self knows that whilst you don’t act you are not experiencing pain or danger and this is good. Let’s now take the parachute example and say that the plane is about to crash, you’ve got over your denial, deliberation and that your only chance of safety is to make the parachute jump; there will still be hesitation. In the moment when you are waiting to make jour jump you are safe, you are not experiencing pain or trauma and your emotional mind will assure you that this is a good state to be in, and whatever you choose to do will take you out of this state. Your emotional side doesn’t understand the future, it only understands the now. It doesn’t know what you will feel and experience in the future, that your only chance of safety is to jump. It just knows that at this very moment you are safe.             

                This fear inertia is what holds you back from acting when dealing with an individual(s) where it is obvious that physical violence is the only outcome. As you stand there waiting for the inevitable punch, push or grab, your fear emotion will tell you that at this moment you are not experiencing any pain or discomfort and that you shouldn’t do anything to risk this state of affairs – whatever action you take, whether it’s running away or making a pre-emptive assault carries a degree of risk to it, and this is an unknown. What your body does know is that whilst not acting nothing bad or painful is happening to you.

                When you overthink the consequences of a decision, your natural hesitation to act is reinforced. I see this all the time when I watch sparring (which is great training for fighting but barely resembles a street-fight itself). Often I will see two individuals, at distance, looking for openings. One will start a kick or an attack only to see their opponent respond and pull back etc – for more experienced individuals, these responses can indicate how they should initiate their next attack. However most people start to imagine what will happen if their attack is unsuccessful. They have seen/realized that their opponent is going to respond in some way to what they were planning to do and they now start to imagine all the ways in which they might respond. Weighed down with all the imagined consequences of their action they end up doing nothing. Our fear response may hold us back from initially acting but it is these imagined consequences that reinforces it.   

                In Combat Sports, such as Boxing and MMA (Mixed Martial Arts), the pre-fight build up to a contest is a great example of an individual attempting to get their opponent to consider the consequences of certain actions. A Boxer who repeatedly tells the media that the person he is fighting will not be able to get past his lead punch without walking on to his straight right, is attempting to get his opponent to hesitate and consider the consequences of trying to do so when in the ring. In a street-fight when an aggressor keeps telling you what they’re going to do to you, they are attempting to intimidate you into not acting. When a person tells you their plan for you, they are trying to reinforce your own fear instincts desire for inaction. You can choose to believe what they are telling you or not. You can also choose to believe your own imagination’s conclusions and scenarios concerning the consequences of acting as well. Or better still you can simply act on your decision.

                Too many individuals in hostage and abduction scenarios miss their best opportunity to act because they believe the optimum time for action is always in the future; never now. They are yielding to the fear system’s belief that because pain is not being experienced at that moment it would be unwise to act and risk the perceived safety of the present when the consequence of any action may be pain. With few exceptions the time to act in an abduction or hostage situation, where you are the target, is immediately. That a person needs to move you from one location to another (in an abduction scenario), means that your best chance of escape and survival is in the one you are in. In a hostage type incident, an assailant(s) most disorganized and unprepared moment is the very first instance of the assault – you don’t need to be a celebrity or politician to be taken hostage, it may happen because you are a bystander in a drug-store/bank hold-up when the police arrive etc.  

                Being able to reach a decision and act upon it quickly is a mark of a mind that’s intent and goal is survival. Once a situation is understood action without hesitation is required. 

Avoiding the Denial, Deliberation and Decision Loop

Visual Assessment

I don’t know much about American Football (coming from the UK I grew up with “Soccer”) however I do know one thing about the sport and that is the Quarterback – the person who throws the ball forward to his teammates in the hope of scoring a touchdown – has to make some very quick decisions whilst under immense stress and pressure; he has the opposing team attempting to take him out of the game before he makes the throw.

He needs in one glance to be able to assess the state of the field in front of him and assess which players are in the best position, all whilst waiting for some 250 LB giant to bear down on him and prevent him from throwing the ball. He certainly doesn’t have time to weigh up the pros and cons of each potential decision rather he must look, decide and then act. His visual assessment immediately determines his decision, in the same way that many emergency personnel immediately seem to know what to do when they turn up at a fire, a train wreck etc. One look at the situation will tell them what “type” of fire it is and what they must do to combat it – as the fire develops they may take in the new information available to them and adjust their plan but in the initial instant they know, just like the Quarterback, what they must do.

A computer has beaten a human at chess: IBM’s “Big Blue” beat Gary Kasparov, a Chess Grandmaster. However no computer program has ever been written that can beat a person at either Backgammon or the Japanese game of “Go” (a game where players attempt to change two sided disks to their color by trapping a line of their opponent’s disks between theirs). Chess differs from these two games, in that it is possible to make predictions and comparisons based on different plays. “Big Blue” beat Kasparov by comparing all the potential outcomes of a particular play and evaluating it against all the other ones available to it. Kasparov said he was only able to do this for one or two moves ahead and that he normally had a gut feel for a play based on the way that the board looked i.e. he’d seen the pieces laid out in an identical or similar way before. In Backgammon and Go, there are no “set outcomes” as such; every decision has to be based on the way the board “looks”, where the pieces lie etc. In Backgammon/Go the layout of the pieces do not result in any predictable outcomes; any computer attempting to run comparisons of plays would end up getting caught in an infinite loop – each year a large cash prize is offered to any programmer who can write a program that will defeat a top Go player.

When doing crowd surveillance, a security professional is presented with the task of identifying any potential assailant that may be in a crowd of possibly tens of thousands. It would be impossible to assess and compare every individual’s behavior and actions to ascertain if they represent a potential threat or danger, whether to others around them, such as at a sports event, or to a particular individual, such as a politician at a rally or similar. Any identification of such individuals must be done by looking at the crowd as a whole, in a similar way to a Quarterback who looks at the field in front of him and let’s his eyes be drawn to a particular player who is in the “best” position. The Quarterback knows what a “Best Position” looks like because it’s stored in his memory from previous experiences. He probably couldn’t even explain why one player is better positioned than another rather he just knows what looks right.

A Security Professional may never have seen an assassination attempt first-hand before – he will probably have been shown footage of previous assassinations as part of his training however these will have been caught on film from a cameraman’s perspective. Despite lacking a firsthand visual memory of such a thing, he’ll know from experience what a peaceful crowd attending a political rally etc will look like, and what behaviors people in such crowds engage in e.g. flag waving, clapping, smiling etc, he’ll also be aware of how people in such crowds move; whether the majority stand and wait, how those wanting to get a better look move through the crowd etc, etc. Whilst he scans his eyes over the whole scene, he will wait for his eyes to be drawn to the person whose movement, actions or behaviors are out of place and don’t adhere to the “normal” picture of a healthy crowd.

Just as a Backgammon, Go player or Quarterback can take in the importance of what they see in an instant and make a decision based upon it, so can the security professional. He though works from what seems out of place as opposed to what looks good and in place. Most of us have had that experience of walking in to a bar or pub and feeling that something was wrong; something that we couldn’t actually identify or put our finger upon. This is our fear system alerting us to the presence of danger by identifying that what we see before us doesn’t marry up to all our previous positive experiences of bars or pubs. This comparison of images is a bit like trying to do a “spot the difference” puzzle, where we can see that the two pictures/photos we’re meant to compare are not the same but we’re not immediately able to identify the five actual differences etc.

Our fear system works like a “behind the scenes” security professional, comparing situations with previous ones. If everything looks the same as a positive experience, then no alert is given. If it matches a negative experience an alert is given - likewise if it doesn’t match a positive one. Once this alert is given we must make a dynamic risk assessment.