Episode 8 – Toby Darby & Josh Wofford: Using Tactical Decision-Making Exercises to Improve Leadership

Jon Becker: My name is Jon Becker.

For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units. As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations.

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

Welcome to The Debrief!

My guests today are Lieutenants Toby Darby and Josh Wofford. Toby and Josh are both lieutenants in a Southern California police department.

Toby is a 27 year veteran of law enforcement with 20 years of tactical experience as an operator, a sergeant, and a lieutenant. He's also a board member for the California association of Tactical Officers.

Josh is an 18 year veteran of law enforcement with experience in patrol, homicide, street level crime, K9, and SWAT. Josh has a doctorate in applied leadership learning and organizational theory from Vanderbilt University. Josh is a black belt in brazilian jiu jitsu and a current SWAT commander.

Josh and Toby are responsible for creating the CATO decision making exercise, or DME program. And guys, I appreciate you being with me today on The Debrief to talk about it!

Toby Darby: Thanks for having us, Jon!

Josh Wofford: Thank you, Jon!

Jon Becker: So, Toby, why don't we start with you. Talk to me about your involvement with CATO. You're a board member with CATO. How did you first get involved with CATO?

Toby Darby: So through my career has been a lot with narcotics and SWAT, SWAT pretty much my whole career. And it wasn't until we were doing a SWAT competition, I think actually with Aardvark at RTAC and CATO had a booth. And at the time I was reading a lot of stuff from sit Heel field command, sound doctrine.

And I walked up to the booth and they were all like the founders of SWAT. There was Sid there, Tim Anderson, I think RK Miller was there, a bunch of people that were very influential at the time. And I'm like, hey, this is some good stuff, except someone needs to break this down for layman's terms, for stupid guys like me. And I would love to do that.

Now, with that, I was approached and then invited to be part of the strategic leadership program for CATO, which was a one and a half year program. Not realizing that going through this program, I thought it was just going to be something. I get some leadership training, but at the end of it, they're like, hey, welcome to CATO. And by the way, you now have all of these duties as well.

One of which they said, we have a board member position coming open, and we would like for you to apply for that and test for. And which I did. And ultimately, here I sit as a board member. So with that, you know, we now. I now facilitate a year and a half long program with CATO, with SLP.

I'm involved with CATO doing critical incident management training, and then now with this decision making exercise program that my partner and I, Josh, work with to take it and bring it, not only for people in California, but pretty much across the country and eventually, hopefully across the world.

Jon Becker: So give me the origin story for the DMEs first. Like, how did it start?

Toby Darby: So it started specifically for me. Like I told you, I was a sergeant at the time when I went into SLP, I was sitting in one of the class or the presentations in the strategic leisure program taught by Sid Heal. And Sid presented us with a problem, and that was a decision making exercise where he said, hey, this has just happened in your city. What are you guys going to do now? I was in a room with eight other sergeants and lieutenants and deputies, all of which have a lot of tactical experience, all of which I thought I did, too, until I was presented with this problem.

And I was told to make a decision on how I'm going to prioritize what I was going to do, what I was going to do, what was my thinking about doing it? And I was just thinking, hey, man, I'm just a SWAT cop. I know which door to kick and go downrange. And it's a surrounding call out, or it's a dynamic entry. And when I was presented with that, I realized, hey, there's a deficiency in my own expertise that I need to work on. So how can I start getting more of this experience by doing things like this?

Now, fast forward, I got that. Probably in 2017 or 18, COVID comes around. We have the George Floyd protest, we have the COVID incidents going on. And I'm brought on a CATO as a board member, and we're looking at ways to continue our training for our members.

And I remember walking into Josh's office one day, and I can tell something was wrong. And I go, hey, what's going on, partner? And he said, hey, I'm getting my doctorate degree now, and I need to find an organization or a corporation to do my doctorate capstone on. And I'm having a hard time doing that now.

At the time, I'm like, hey, this is a great opportunity to not only take a deep dive into CATO, but also this decision making exercise idea that we had at the time, and that got the ball rolling with Josh and I.

Jon Becker: So your perspective on it was a tactical one. Josh, you're in the process of doing a doctorate in organizational theory. Talk to me about that and how this kind of evolved.

Josh Wofford: I think the whole purpose behind the decision making exercises for me was to use them as a form to learn from. The decision making exercises allowed us to take a real event, a critical incident, but embed people in it in a way where it's ripe with the ambiguity. It's got all the uncertainty and the dilemmas that are present in a real incident.

We always grounded them in something real, not telling the participants that up front, but allowing them to walk through the incident, learn from each other, collaborate, and ultimately come to a resolution of how they would address it, and hopefully taking advantage of all that, that learning that was going on in the room through those conversations, through that collaboration, and setting them up that way.

Jon Becker: So, Toby, why don't you walk me through, like, how does a DME work? Give me the whole format. How many people, you know, what do you do?

Toby Darby: Yeah. And so this is great. And this is always still in the workings. I take a lot of the stuff as we do one DME, and it would be a, we say, DME class or session, we will assess whether it was successful or not and kind of bounce everything up. And he'll use all his research and say, hey, we might want to tweak it a little bit, but typically, we would have a tragic event that would occur, one that we think that a lot of leadership lessons or a lot of decision making ideas should be implemented and taught, and we will take that incident.

Now, it could be an incident like San Bernardino or borderline, or maybe it's just as simple as an incident that happened with patrol the night before that we can go back and get axon video body cam footage and play it out for the officers, for everybody, learn from.

So we'll get the incident and find out what is it we want to share or teach to our officers or sergeants or lieutenants. And with that concept not getting too far in the weeds, we typically just want to keep it simple, where, for instance, if we want to take one elements of the five characteristic of a crisis, say, hey, today we're going to learn about uncertainty.

And in uncertainty, we're going to play this out, and this is what's going to happen. You guys just had this incident happen. As you guys are briefing back to us, let us know where these elements of uncertainty is or anything such as, you know, the principles of war. Or maybe it is a policy issue that your department is having. And you can say, hey, we want to focus on this policy that we implemented five years ago, or our policy about pursuits. Let's talk about it as we're going through this.

So with that, we will usually break it up to two to three questions, two to three segments, so to speak, and then give them the first initial part of it. You know, you're on patrol when you see a suspicious individual standing at the corner of walk and don't walk. The suspect or the suspicious person appears to be a parolee. It's. We've been having a lot of burglaries in that area. What are you going to do?

And then typically, they'll break out into little sessions, discuss what their. Their plan of attack is, so to speak, come back and then share out. Now, at the very end of it, as they're going through all this, and they're all answering, by the way, and sometimes we'll get one group to disagree with another group and state why they did it, what they did.

We'll bring everybody back at the very end and say, well, you guys just played cognitively into a scenario which we now say it just happened, or it happened in Ventura county or it happened in San Bernardino, or it happened in Dallas. And with us today is this person who was there, and it's going to share out. So they got to play what they actually did with the actual scenario that occurred to see if their ideas worked or didn't work.

Jon Becker: So if I understand correctly, you're going to take a group of people. How many? Like, what's a good class size for DME?

Toby Darby: Say 15 to 20?

Josh Wofford: About 15 people.

Jon Becker: So we take the 15 people, we split them up into three groups of 5?

Josh Wofford: Usually about groups of 3. And that's only because we want participation from everybody involved. So we're hoping to rotate those share outs amongst the group so that each person gets an opportunity to speak, but that also provides buy in for the class, because they know if I'm going to address this DME, I'm going to be the one that's going to have the opportunity to speak.

And so I'm going to be engaged with my partners while I'm in that group, making sure that I understand what's going on, how I want to share this out. So it puts a little bit of social pressure on people to participate.

Jon Becker: Got it. So the three of us are in a group we get handed a set of facts. We break out into a breakout room. If it's online or physical room, we have a little discussion and then we come back and go, this is what I want. Or this is my. Depending on the question. We come back with our answer. We brief the group. Everybody briefs. There's a discussion about, well, Toby wanted to go to walk and don't walk, and Josh wanted to go to, you know, Main & Main. And then we play that out. And then now there's a. We get now a second evolution with more information. Is that.

Josh Wofford: Yeah, because you're trying. What you're trying to do is you're trying to explore the problem both individually and as a group. That way you come in with it, with all your assumptions about how you should deal with this incident. And then you talk to your partners about it. And either there's a conflict there or maybe it just adds to your thinking that's already on it. That way you come out now you can integrate those ideas, bring those out to the larger group and go through that process again.

And hopefully you're taking what you knew and adding that to what you just learned and then applying that to the problem. That way we're not getting stuck in a rut as far as our own thinking, our own assumptions, and applying to the same problem over and over again. It goes back to the corporate intellect.

So you have this room full of people. I may be in a group with a person that has 1000 call outs. If we're talking about a SWAT incident, maybe I only have five, but I get to get in a group with that person and come in with my own understanding of this event, but also balance those ideas off somebody that has a lot more experience than me.

So you have that idea of, I get that master apprentice relationship. But also, even though the split may not be equal as far as who's learning what he's still gonna learn, he or she's still gonna learn something from me. Right? Even if it's a small, small amount of knowledge, as opposed to the 80% that I'm learning from him.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I see. Where – if the group gets too big, then the most knowledgeable guy in the room is going to be the one that takes control of the group. By keeping the group size small, you force this interaction. And it isn't just, you know, Toby gets in and tells us, hey, no, you guys are wrong. It's this way. We actually have a discussion. How many times are we going to run that iteration before concluding and briefing the actual incident is that, like three iterations?

Toby Darby: I would say we've been successful with three. When you start getting past that, you start losing the audience and, you know, you want to actually, at that point, I'm like a kid at Christmas. I want to present the actual person who was there and say, this incident happened, and check out. Now we're going to be doing a debrief of what happened so that they can do it.

So three is about right. It's, you know, sometimes even with time constraints, too, they'll start getting in discussions. And if we have three, you know, written out, but we only get to two because of time constraints, we're good with that.

Because ultimately, when we see success in this DME is when, you know, for instance, on an active shooter, there's one group that says, I'm going to make an entry, and there's one group that says, we're not going to make an entry, we're to contain because we're not hearing these things. And then we get into topics such as priority of life, and we get into probability of success, and we start talking down the road on that stuff. And ultimately, at the end of the day, people walk away with those concepts. If we only did two, but if we got to three, great.

Jon Becker: What I like about this concept is it's so much of tactical decision making is paradigm based decision making, right? It's looking at a situation and applying your prior experiences and drawing inferences. So it strikes me that this is a way to share paradigms and for people to live through the event without having to live through the event. Josh, talk to me about the science of this. Like, how does this actually, from a learning theory standpoint, how does it work?

Josh Wofford: So it's a constructivist learning theory, which means that a lot of the learning is embedded in the social environment. And so we try to create a social environment where people are willing to talk, willing to address conflict, willing to challenge each other, but willing to build upon ideas. And the science behind it is first with that cognitive presence, which is part of the theory as far as giving them that triggering event that says, here's this event that happened, and here's the first portion of it. And this event's ripe with ambiguity. It has dilemmas embedded in it. Break out into your groups and let's talk about this.

And we do it in a way where they have to explore that they can't just come to the most time. They're not going to come to the table and be like, oh, I have the answer. Here's the perfect answer. For this, because with tactics, you're never going to have a perfect answer because it's too complex. There's no perfect answer.

So it's so complex. But that's what we want to happen because we want them to first come in, they're going to explore by themselves. When they first hear it, right? They're going to run it through their brain and go, okay, this is my understanding of how I would address this event.

But then they're going to have to bounce those ideas off their partners when they do that. That's when the learning takes place. That's when they're able to either challenge their own assumptions on it. They came in with this idea of how to address it. But now I have this 30 year vet, a SWAT over here, and he's saying, I've done these a lot. And my experience with this type of event is we do this and this is why now it's updated his thinking or her thinking on how to approach this event. And now they can take that and they can apply it to the rest of the room.

And hopefully that iteration occurs again where they're going through that, we're addressing them with a problem, that triggering event ripe with ambiguity. They're exploring it individually and as a group, they're taking those ideas and they're integrating that new thinking and applying it to the resolution to that problem.

Toby Darby: Right.

Josh Wofford: And that's the process that we're trying to get them to go through. And that's the definition as we used it in this problem. For the critical thinking aspect, you wrote.

Jon Becker: Your capstone project, which is, for all intents and purposes, a dissertation on the science of this, basically, right?

Josh Wofford: Yes.

Jon Becker: And like, I see a lot of. A lot of upsides here, being able to experience things and all that. How does, Toby, how does this help an agency to retain corporate knowledge, to share experiences with. With people that are maybe not ever had those experiences?

Toby Darby: So we see it in our agency right now. I think a lot of agencies see it across the country, and that is attrition, you know, with retirements or people either promoting out of a certain rank and then young officers promoting up the rank to, you know, whether it be field training officer, sergeant, lieutenant, captains. We see a lot of young supervisors, a lot of young managers. I remember I came on my field training officer was some 50 year old officer that was teaching me how police work was done.

Now we're doing it with officers who may have four to five years on the department because we're such a young agency with most agencies having the same problem. So I think with the DME thing, we have some certain agencies that have a lot of work and then certain agencies that don't – And that being said, if there are something we refer to as low frequency and high risk events, which tend to happen when Murphy pops his head up on a weekend graveyard where these officers or sergeants are going to be more likely working with very little seniority, you're able to now have that corporate knowledge taught to those officers.

So when you ask somebody to a sergeant, hey, how many officer involved shooting investigations have you been a part of? Or how many have you been in? And some may say, I've never even done one. But if you've done a decision making exercise cognitively, you've already done one. You've already experienced that.

So now you know what to do in the event, and you're actually used. You're able to take a modeling of what happened that was given during the DME and use it with your thought process. And we do this in our critical incident management class where we give them decision making exercises, but we also give them resources and tools that they can refer back to in the event they had that low frequency, high risk event to kind of trigger some of those things and anchor some of those things.

So, but the good thing about it also that we see is we're bringing in officers, sergeants, maybe even a watch commander into these DMEs. So you're going to have different levels of experience. You're going to have different levels of, obviously, roles and responsibilities. And when they're into that role and they're into that, the decision making group, and they're told to brief out on what their decision was.

The lieutenants can have a different perspective than the officer, but now they're also going to understand which each person's role is, so that when a sergeant or a lieutenant gets on the radio and says, you know, break, break, break, you know, one Lincoln 95, I have command of this incident. The officer is going to be like, oh, he's slowing things down right now.

So now I know what his role is, his or her role. So that's how they can get that corporate knowledge, share that corporate knowledge. But then again, this contemporary issues is not just in your specific agency. You could take it across the country or even across the world with incidents that make newsworthy events that have those tactical concepts that we can learn from.

Jon Becker: It's interesting as you talk through it. I played ice hockey as a kid through most of my childhood, and I had a coach that liked to create weird situations. Five on three scrimmages, you know, four on four. And he put us into these all. You know, we're pulling the goalie.

We're doing this during practices, and you didn't understand why he did it until you got to the game. And you're like, oh, we've seen this before. This strikes me as a way that we can scrimmage complicated multi thread events and let people experience that. Josh, like, is there like, an experiential learning theory or situational learning theory here that's in play while you're going through this?

Josh Wofford: Yeah, there is situational learning theory. It's that whole master apprentice perspective. It gives people the opportunity to see how the more experienced people do it. But there's also that learning going back and forth, even though it's gonna be weighted towards the apprentice.

The new officer watching, the more experienced officer, the more experienced officer still going to get a benefit from it. They're still going to learn, because there might be some kind of innovative idea that the less experienced officer has that the officer that's been around for a long time with the same assumptions.

Again, we're trying to challenge our own assumptions. We're trying to challenge our own truth by incorporating more perspectives into what we're doing. And just going back to what Toby said about that common operational perspective, again, when you've gone through these incidents as a management team, as a SWAT team, as a patrol group, again, you're starting to build that trust that comes with knowing what your partners are going to do and what they're capable of.

And when it comes to delegating tasks, when it comes to confronting these critical incidents, those are the things that you want to know. I want to know that Jon is capable of this because I'm going to delegate that task to him, and I'm going to trust him to do it.

I know Toby's good at this. I'm going to delegate that task to him because I've already been through this incident. Even though it was a decision making exercise, I've been through it. I know his expertise. I know what he's capable of. And so in the organizational context, that's what it builds.

Now, that doesn't really necessarily carry over to the classroom context where you have different agencies, but with the organizational context, you get that added benefit of that common ground, that operation.

Jon Becker: And it does in a mutual aid. Right? So if I'm working, you and I are working for adjacent cities. We both go through a DME together. We show up at the same scene. We now have a shared experience, even though it was a classroom experience, it's a real emotive experience where I can say, hey, this is just like the DME on. So you create a linguistic shorthand that allows you to communicate within your agency, outside of your agency that didn't exist.

Josh Wofford: Previously because we scrimmaged already. We had a scrimmage game.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And I can say, hey, this is like that practice last week when we were five on three. Right. It allows us to communicate, and it allows me to know that you know what I'm talking about. Right. The one thing you see with very experienced teams, and I don't care whether it's in a tactical environment, in a work environment, what makes an experienced team effective frequently is the shorthands. Right? It's the linguistic shorthands. The fact that I know where he's going to go before he goes there. The problem is, there's no formal mechanism for us to teach that.

One of the things that I like about DMEs is you're creating an environment where we can take this exercise and put everybody in the agency through it. And they all have a common framework. As you said, they have a common operating picture.

Talk to me about the differences between. I could see doing this with a homogeneous group, you know, three guys, same agency, same team, but I can also see doing this with a heterogeneous or, you know, a diverse group. What's the differences and benefits with those two?

Josh Wofford: The difference is you have to focus a lot on the social presence aspect of this. So the social presence is just creating that environment where people are willing to communicate, where people are willing to challenge each other's ideas. And that's where Toby comes in, because he's usually the facilitator. I'm a facilitator also.

But Toby takes that lead, and we role, and his job is to make people feel comfortable talking, make people feel comfortable challenging each other's ideas. And, you know, acknowledging when somebody has a well thought out point or acknowledging conflict in the room and getting that cross conversation to happen, that's a big component of it. And that's where the theory works. Right?

You have the teaching presence, which is the facilitating, creating that environment, that social presence, which is necessary for that cognitive presence. The critical thinking aspect. Because with no talking, with no comfort, if people aren't challenging each other or if people aren't building on each other's ideas, you're not going to have that critical thinking aspect. And that's what Toby does a really good job at of embedding. Both online and in the classroom.

Jon Becker: So it's really this moment where it sounds like a lot of the benefit here is not only you're handing me your paradigms and I'm handing you mine, we're disagreeing about who you know which paradigm is correct. And it's admittedly an ambiguous situation. There is no, you know, there's no right answer to it. But it's this moment where I'm saying, you know, I use the analogy of, you know, the first guy that found a rattlesnake probably picked it up and got bit. If he doesn't share that information with the second guy that finds a rattlesnake, he also gets bit.

And if you look at, you know, tactical situations and you go to as many debriefs as we've all gone to, there is a recurring, there are recurring themes in those things, and the themes seem to pop up at every one. This strikes me as a way to wargame, picking up the snake, being able to. It's a rattlesnake, okay? We both know it's a rattlesnake.

I can now take a junior officer and put him through the rattlesnake exercise, and he knows not to pick it up. And he also knows what it is and can articulate to somebody else, say, don't touch the snake.

Josh Wofford: Yeah, and it goes a little bit further than that too, in the sense that, you know, we deal with confirmation bias and that's that cognitive limiting state where you, you're only going to gravitate towards information that already helps already is evidence of your current assumptions of how you would deal with something.

Jon Becker: You can see that in what we watch on the news.

Josh Wofford: What you watch on the news, right. So we gravitate towards things that are like us. Oh, that like minded people, this and that. And the only thing to do with that sometimes is to present your yourself with people that challenge you. So if I talk to you and say, hey, this is my idea on this, and you challenge me and go, hmm, I've been in business for a long time. I don't think I would do it that way. And this is why, right?

That's that metaphorical mirror to my thinking that I need so that I can bounce out of that cognitive limiting state of confirmation bias. If I don't have that in an environment, I'm just going to proceed down the same path. I'm going to keep on picking up the rattlesnake and getting bit and wondering.

Jon Becker: Every time why you got Bitde. Because that's part of you see it in society now where everybody watches their news channel, they listen to, they have their Facebook group, and they become so insular and isolated that then something happens and you look back and you're like, God, that was really stupid. How did that make sense? And what I like about this is it's transplatform, right? Like, you can do this online, you can do it in person, you can do it across the country. It gives you the ability to share that information and that critical thinking.

And although each group is going to be different, each group, you're going to get something. I mean, if you sat down in the same DME with two different groups, you'd walk away with different learning each time. But there'd probably be a base of similarity between the exercises, you know, interesting.

Toby Darby: Interesting with that is we don't repeat bad behavior. So we learn from incidents that went bad, and we come back and say, hey, I went through the DME and this was identified as probably not the best way to do it. I probably don't want to do it that way. Doesn't mean you probably will. You could do it that way. Another incident, but I probably won't do it that way.

So in one of our decision making exercises, we were challenging in each group and doing it in a safe environment and doing it very respectfully. One of the individuals was disagreeing about making an entry or containment. And we broke for lunch before we actually gave the actual debrief that happened.

And I asked, kind of like the guy who was overseeing everything for CATO in the class, and I said, hey, what are you thinking so far on how the class is going? And he says, this is really good stuff. I just hoped on the surveys, it doesn't say that fistfights broke out because people were disagreeing with each other. And I go, that's what we want. Not to the point where. Point where fistfights are breaking out, but we want them to disrespectfully disagree with each other so that they can kind of argue their points.

And we're seeing that with problems across the country. You know, if you interview or you do a team that's here in California and then compare it with the team back east is probably gonna have a different culture, different mindset, different tactic. But to bring those two groups in and give them that same problem, because it's all going to be the same problem. If it's a Texas tower or Vegas, if it's the incident, New Orleans or Christopher Dorner say, hey, this incident happened. How would you guys deal with it?

Ultimately we want to take it across the world and ask how other countries would deal with that same problem to learn different ideas. But also so with our giving climate, with the media, with our giving climate with the courts to look and say, hey, we keep doing things like this is because we've always done it that way. How can we improve upon that? And that's going to be done by, you know, not going dynamic on something that should be done as a surround, a call out of, but getting that message across the country by doing DMEs and sharing that type of stuff.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, we deal with countries all over, teams all over the world. And the way that a team in Florida versus a team in Texas versus a team in New York, team in California, a team in Paris, France would solve problems is dramatically different. The way they talk about the problems is dramatically different.

Part of the reason that when Bataklon happened, we brought in Brih was to let our local teams see this is how a European team solves a problem. I mean, they're wearing way more armor. They're carrying way more armor. They're moving much more deliberately, which in that case worked because as you remember, they got shot a lot and only one guy got it in the hand.

But it is, we tend to be insular, we tend to, as you said, surround ourselves with like minded thinkers. And I think the combination of that with the fact that we punish pioneers now, right, if you deviate from the status quo in your thinking and it's wrong, we're going to prosecute you, we're going to persecute you, we're going to punish you and you're going to lose your job.

Whereas if you do what the status quo is, even if it's wrong, you're safer. I, and what I like here is it allows kind of explorational thinking where it's a safe environment to make a stupid statement or to ask a stupid question. Is that from a learning theory standpoint, is that kind of what you've seen play out?

Josh Wofford:Yeah, you're safe until you fall on the wrong side of history. So you continue with a tactic that maybe you've never been challenged on. So nobody's asked you why. So a lot of learning, right? We start out where we memorize things. Like, so I can give you Phil command or some other book and you can memorize.

The question is, have you comprehended it? Because that's the next step. Do you comprehend what the book is saying? After that, it's like, well, can you apply it. Can you apply the concepts that we find in sound doctrine and other books to a scenario, to a tactical engagement? And after you apply it, can you analyze it? Can you look at, okay, why did we do it that way? Can you explain to me why you do a certain tactic? This has come up with dynamic entries in the past and people will say, every warrant we do is dynamic.

And when you ask them why, a lot of times the answer is, that's the way we've always done it. It's safe, right? That's the way we've always done it. You hear that all the time. Until you're on the wrong side of history, where you're doing dynamic warrants and it doesn't fit the context, which is.

Jon Becker: Where we are now. I mean, it's – That is a current nationwide debate.

Josh Wofford: Yeah. And that's what we're trying to do with this is get people to the point where here's the incident, and yes, it's ambiguous, and yes, it's uncertain, and yes, you don't have all the information and that problem's embedded in. And then when they come out and they do that exploration again, that thinking both individually and as a group to go, okay, why do I want to do it this way? Why do I want to use this tactic?

And hopefully there's people there to sharpen that blade and say, I agree with you and give them the confidence that, yeah, that's the appropriate tactic. We would use this and that's why. Or, whoa, okay, we have a lot of experience with this. We wouldn't use that tactic. Let's talk through this. Let's challenge each other. Because it's one thing if you have two ideas and they're very close together. It's another thing if you're this far apart. That's when the dynamic.

Jon Becker: Non dynamic.

Josh Wofford: Yeah, that's when the discussion needs to happen. Like if me and Toby, a lot of times me and Toby will have a discussion and we'll be really close. I don't care what the final answer is because we're so close, probability wise, it's going to be a good decision. But when we're this far apart, that's when we need to stop and have that discussion. That's when that learning actually takes place. That's that critical thinking element that's really going to help you address the problem and learn in the process.

Toby Darby: Also in our profession, when we're going through that, if that sergeant or lieutenant or even officer never had that experience, in other words, never took part of a DME or never actually responded to an active shooter, they now have that tool that they can go back. And if they make a decision or they're, you know, let's just say we say indecisiveness is one of the biggest problems when it comes to critical incident management.

We all face it, right, because of people being uncertain about their outcomes or their circumstances in the situation. If we have that knowledge, they can go back and say, hey, the reason why I made this decision to go or not is because we went through this in a DME, and I saw that LAPD did the same thing and it worked for them in that one.

So they're able to go back and grab those experiences and share out and then have it when they get called on the carpet on why they made a certain decision. That's the reason why is because I have experience in a DME.

Jon Becker: So, Toby, it strikes me that a lot of what people are getting from the DME is the why to make a decision. And what gets lost in an environment where we are trying to pound 100 classes a year into guys heads is we teach them the technique. We don't teach them the why. And especially in your line of work, the why matters. Shooting somebody is either legal and constitutional or a crime. And the only thing that separates those two is the why. So, Josh, why does this teach the why?

Josh Wofford: Well, I think it teaches the why behind it, because it makes you articulate why you're doing something. You're not just taking the training and saying, I learned this in a class one day, or I read it in a book, and now I'm going to apply it. It gets down to why are you applying that specific tactic? That specific strategy, what is that embedded in? What's it grounded in? Why are you doing this versus something else? Where did you come to that conclusion? That's the best technique to use, and it's not only using the why, but it's using the when.

Like, what is the circumstance that dictates whether or not you use this tactic? And that's what we're trying to do with them when we embed them in the DME is, yes, you have this tactic, but that tactic also has to be applied in the correct circumstance. All circumstances are different and unique.

So making them go through that process of we use it over here, but now we've changed the circumstance. It's a different DME. What would you use now and why?

Jon Becker: You're shifting the problem slightly..

Toby Darby: And that's life. And that is a tactical incident. You have to be constantly shifting. You know, if the suspect comes out and gives up or it gives up the hostage, are you going to switch? You know, are you going to shift from getting ready to do a dynamic entry or now we have a barricade because we now have the hostage. You're constantly shifting.

And the challenge of doing that, I mean, with the concepts of principles before procedures and something we talk about, you know, explaining why you're going to do it, defining that end state to know what that is. And then from there you'll get to the when, the what, the where, the why, the I'm sorry, the how, how you're going to do it all. That's important by having that why.

In other words, if you are asked, you know, I'm going to send five officers in on a barricaded suspect who is, you know, armed with this gun. And we're talking about probability of success or priority of life. Why is it you're going to do that? Do we have at least a 51% chance of succeeding?

All that stuff is, it surfaces in that class, in that discussion. And you'll get some people in that class that start talking about tactics, you know, and they're sitting there talking and you'll see their hand go up in certain classrooms and you're like, oh, no, let's get away from the tactics. They're not about going left or right, but what are we going to do and why are we going to do it? I think that's a real.

Jon Becker: So it's really more at a strategic and operational level than at a tactical and technique level.

Josh Wofford:Yeah. It's critical incident management. This is not critical incident tactics and strategy. Right? We want people to look globally at the incident and say how they would apply things. And just going back to the why, when you establish a good why now you can delegate authority to different groups as you have command of the operation. Because they know the decisions I'm making are based on the why that the commander is giving me. So they have to know the why embedded in that. I think that's very important when you're talking about addressing a critical incident.

Jon Becker: One of the things I try to do leading an organization is when I make a decision, when I set a course to explain the reason behind my decision, right? To provide a commander's intent, but also to provide, you know, a clear logic to that intent, because there is that point. You know, I always use the analogy of teaching your kids, right? You can tell your kids, like, oh, in this circumstance, no, you have to tell the truth and saying, well, you know, they gave you too much change. You give it back. You teach your kid that lesson.

If you then follow that with give it back because you shouldn't take things that don't belong to you. You've now given that kid a lifetime paradigm that they can apply to other situations. Right? And that's kind of the difference between learning a technique and learning a tactic, is this is how you open the door? This is why you open the door.

Josh Wofford: Yeah. When you have, so, I mean, it doesn't matter if it's business, it doesn't matter if it's critical incident management. You start with a plan, right? No matter if it's a hasty plan or it's a plan that you thought about for a year, you start with that plan. But as soon as you make a decision, you're acting on that event, you're changing it, you're bringing complexity to it.

So now you're going to have to improvise because your plan maybe doesn't line up to what you had when you first started. And you go through that process of improvising those iterations, improvising again, changing, so that by the end of the whole incident, it looks nothing like the plan that you started out with.

But if you have that, why behind it? Everybody knows, like, where do we want to be with that end state? Doesn't matter if the things change, if circumstances change, we still know where we're going. So you can delegate that authority to your different people in the organization because they know the why behind what you're doing. They're going to get you to that end state.

Jon Becker: So talk to me like, let's go through the mechanics of it, of actually facilitating a DME. How do you pick an event? How do you pick a good event for a DME? What types of incidents are good?

Toby Darby: I think what we like to do is look for incidents that have some sort of conflict in our profession, maybe something that is getting some negativity in the news, something that recently happened where it's fresh in everybody's mind, so that when, you know, ultimately, if they see this, this on the news, they're going to say, hey, if that were to happen in our city or county, this is kind of how we would do it, and then you present them with that problem.

So once we have that, that issue that is presented, and it may be something too, we don't want to be going back and talking about incidents that happened in World War 2, World War 1, or whatever. Maybe we do, but we want to have stuff that's contemporary stuff that is applicable, because what happens is they're going to be able to see what their decisions are play out with the actual incident.

And maybe it's still in litigation. Maybe it's still being broadcasted on the news. Maybe it, you know, it affected somebody emotionally, psychologically from that agency because it was a neighboring agency. Or maybe, again, it just might be something that's in house and you were dealing with an increase of problems of people going fast during pursuits, or you're dealing with a problem of not reporting. Right?

So you can look at that and say, hey, we're gonna use a DME based on really hitting home with this policy to make sure that everybody understands that if we're gonna use a pit maneuver, this is the reasons why. So it depends on what the given climate is that we can decide to use those. And then again, too, sometimes it is also about availability of the presenters. And do we have that video, or do we have someone to come in and talk into our classes and say, we were there, this is what we experienced, and it becomes more real that way.

Jon Becker: What I think is interesting just to that regard is this is so inherently scalable that if we can get to the point that you've recorded these things, at least, that afterward debrief, this is something that you could write up, teach someone to facilitate, and now scale. Is that an accurate way to read that, Josh?

Josh Wofford: Yeah, because you can bring anything to the table. You can teach the facilitation, which we're already doing with some of our partners at CATO, because you bring them an event and you just explain them. We're looking for events that are uncertain, that have an element of chance to them, that are ambiguous, that create dilemmas for people. And we embed these in the decision making exercise, and we don't give all the information up front because we want people to have to go through that process. Just like if you were a critical incident manager of I don't have all the information.

I'm going to have to make a risky decision here because I don't know, probability wise, if this is going to work out, because I don't have all the information. And so we're taking them through that circle of, again, that triggering event, that ambiguous situation, that exploration, that integration of knowledge, and applying it to a problem. We can teach people to do that.

Again, this is not the old sage on the stage type format, where Toby gets up there and he just pontificates everything about tactics that everybody needs to know, and then they go out in the world and they apply it perfectly. No, we know we're all limited by our own understanding.

We're all limited by our resources and everything else. And so it's even better if you have a facilitator that is not Toby or me applying it, because they're going to come out with their own perspective, their own paradigm, and they're going to be able to take that into a new arena with new perspectives.

Jon Becker: Well, it's almost socratic, right? It's almost a socratic learning method where it's like, here's a problem. How do you figure out the problem? Rather than one of the things that I like about this versus just a straight debrief is a debrief. You hear how somebody else solved the problem, and if you take the lessons from the debrief and you go home and you discuss them in your team, with your circumstances, you can extend that learning.

This forces you to solve the problem first. You know, this is. This is. Here's the jigsaw puzzle. Put it together. Okay. Now, here's the picture, which. Which I think, from a learning theory standpoint, would be a much more effective way to learn.

Josh Wofford: And it puts you on the hot seat and not as bad as, like, you know, I know a lot of law schools, they teach the socratic method, where it's like, it's your day, you're on the hot seat. You're gonna be the one getting all the questions asked that day and asked to solve the problem.

Jon Becker: Been there, done that.

Josh Wofford: Yeah. It's you. Right? Right. It's you. This is a little bit safer where you have that safety of those three people so you can rely on your partners to go, hey, this is how I would approach this incident. What do you think? You're getting people to reach out, and Toby's going to say, no, that's a good idea, but I would also do this, or that's a bad idea. I think we should do this.

And you're hoping you have that kind of conflict, that disagreement, that conversation, and it allows people to do it in the safety of that three. But then you can't hide. You got to come out and you got to explain that to the group.

Jon Becker: Well, and what's interesting, I see where, like, one, you're going to start to develop, you know, a love language for the agency, where we establish a way to critique each other's events and. And challenge each other's thinking without it turning into a fistfight in the parking lot. You're also going to stress test the entire chain of command. If you do this right, because everybody that's involved in this problem now is going to have to come up with a solution.

And you're going to see, wow, you know, lieutenants Wofford and Darby really can't get along and they probably shouldn't be running incident together, or you're going to see, oh, my God, Toby and Josh are fantastic together. They're yin and yang for our agency. Those are the guys we want running the problem.

Josh Wofford: Yeah, that goes back to, if you're playing football right, when we, you know, whether it's the Buccaneers, the Rams, there's that common ground, that common operational perspective that those teams have where if you put a team of Pro bowlers against them, the pro Bowlers are probably going to lose.

Because Tom Brady knows his running back. He knows his receivers, he knows what receivers work well together. He knows what running backs can do, what you know, so that he has that common ground, that understanding. You bring that to the table in a management meeting, on a SWAT team, in a patrol group, that changes the dynamic of how you address these critical incidents.

All of a sudden you have trust in people, and it goes deeper than just that common ground because you need trust to delegate. And if you're not delegating, you're not addressing the incident in the most efficient way possible.

Jon Becker: That's interesting! It brings back a memory for me. I helped facilitate a command and control exercise with Sid, probably 20 years ago. And the agency brought it in. Their chief brought it in, said, hey, we want to run this. We want a real operation. We took a timeline that was an actual firestone event and ran it, and their command staff came apart. I mean, shouting matches in the room, this is ridiculous. This would never happen.

And the captain that was the incident commander walked out and had a tantrum and ended up being relieved by the chief at the exercise. And I remember saying to Sid, like, my God, that was horrible. He goes, that wasn't anywhere near as bad as it would have been if it had been an operation.

Toby Darby: Correct. And people's lives at risk as well.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it does create that, that kind of stress test where you really see the mettle of people in a very friendly environment. As far as the roles in the DME, what are the essential, who are the essential players here? Explain to me. We talked about the small group format. You have a facilitator. What's the facilitator's role? Kind of break that down for me.

Josh Wofford: So part of the theory, and again, is the community of inquiry theory. That's the theory that we're working with. And again, that's a theory that, based on talking to CATO, their leadership, and working with the virtual environment at the time, and Zoom was the best theory to apply to this.

So all theory is just a general way of approaching something, because we understand, like, this is how people learn in this context. With that comes an element called teaching presence, and that's the facilitator portion of it, where that's the job of, we're going to focus the discussion on this. In this case, it's a DME, right?

Once we focus that discussion, we're going to point out where people agree. Where people disagree, trying to keep that dialogue going both within the groups and the larger format. So we're trying to get that interactive, collaborative environment going so that the knowledge that's in people's heads is getting out into the open, so that everybody understands and learns.

It's not trying to win an argument or anything else. It's more about, we have a lot of experts in the room. That's the difference between adulthood and adult. When you're educating adults versus children, there's expertise in the room, right? Children, they're learning whatever you're giving to them. But we want to get that expertise that's in the room, out in the open, apply it to a problem and understand it. The facilitator's role is key to that, because without a good facilitator, you're not going to have that interaction, that social presence that leads to that cognitive presence, that critical thinking element.

Jon Becker: It's interesting! Years ago, we worked with a Sof unit, and their commander gave me kind of a. It was a tier one unit, and their commander kind of gave me a breakdown of what their planning cycle looked like, and it was a rank off. Planning. Everybody has a seat at the table. There is no rank. There is no, you know, you might have more experience than I do. Everybody has a voice.

And the rationale from that was, you harness all of the brain at the table. We don't allow rank structure or experience to override the one guy that raises his hand and goes, hey, did you ever think about this? I immediately implemented that in my business life and have a very specific example. I take our marketing materials and hand it to people that have nothing to do with sales.

One of our warehouse guys came walking in very sheepishly, and he handed me back to catalog, and he's like, did you intentionally misspell the company name? You're kidding, right? No. Right there on the COVID We'd misspelled our own name. It had gone through 20 sets of hands. And here's the one guy that's not in the forest that can go, hey, that tree looks wrong. And it feels like this is going to kind of create that environment almost unintentionally in the agency. Because if we've sat through DMEs together and we've challenged each other's thinking, it's going to affect our culture, isn't it? Yeah.

Josh Wofford: Because you want that deference to expertise, right? You don't want to. Just because you're an expert in one realm doesn't mean you're going to be an expert in another realm. So it's humbling, but you got to show deference to the people in the room that have the most expertise. Now, that could be a tactical guy or girl, or it could be a manager, right? Depending on what circumstance you find that in, you've got to gravitate towards the person with expertise in that realm.

The other part of it is, we've talked about this before, innovative ideas usually come from the outside. Outside can be whatever your perspective is. It can be outside command staff or it could be outside the organization. But those innovative ideas are usually going to come out of your core little element because a lot of times now you're just with your like minded people sharing the same ideas over and over again with no elements coming in that are going to challenge your ideas and have that metaphorical mirror again to your thinking that you need, or else you're just going to be subject to that confirmation bias, that cognitive limiting state.

Jon Becker: Well, you talk about cognitive limiting states. We've all had the experience of, you know, there's the gun guy, right? Every agency has the gun guy, and everybody marginalizes the gun guy as the gun kook. And what you do in the process of marginalizing the gun guy is literally take the most knowledgeable person on that subject and push them out of the tribe.

And it's easy to do because Toby knows way more about it than I do. And so I don't want Toby to challenge my thinking too much. So we're going to marginalize Toby. The problem is Toby's the guy we need at that incident. So it almost feels like it's going to kind of counter that. What, what have you seen in implementing this? What have you seen? The effect on the culture has been.

Toby Darby: So I saw specifically on one DME that we did for our SWAT team, we made it known. And the facilitator, the biggest part, I think, for the facilitator is to make sure it's a safe environment and to encourage the younger officers or whoever may be the less ranking officer or deputy to be the one to speak out and be the first one to kind of brief out to the group so they get them involved to break that. Hey, I'm just gonna sit in the back and let this person with the most experience do the whole job for me.

We saw that as we started having our younger SWAT guys or SWAT pups briefing back. We both looked at each other and we were like, oh, my gosh, this guy's got so much knowledge and experience. I didn't even know he was smart. And it identified that, and it actually boosted that person's ego, too, because we're like, I didn't know you were smart. And we went up and kind of talked to this guy, but the whole team saw that, so we were able to draw that out.

So then now everybody in the room got to see what that person's expertise is. And I don't want to get in the weeds and talking about highly reliable organizations, but we got to see what everybody's talents were, what their. And maybe it was a gun guy, maybe it was somebody who was really good, smart wise.

As you're saying these things reminds me of the Osama bin Laden raid when they took the rank off. We take rank off and planning and take the rank off and the debriefing in our teams. And we said, at the Osama bin Laden raid, they said, well, what next? And it was the youngest seal in the room, I think, is when I heard it said, we can crash a helicopter in the front yard. So they came up with a contingency plan for that. But it was that Seal who said that. And if they would have had just the admirals and then the, you know, the team leaders making the plan, they would have missed a lot of things.

So we saw a lot of benefit from that. I mean, there are times when you'll have people in a group, maybe, like you mentioned, with the command staff having that melting down, they disagree. Or you'll have. Sometimes everyone's like, oh, yeah, that's a great idea. I'll go with it. The facilitator needs to see that, identify that as they're walking around and listening to the different groups and then say, hey, listen, this is getting a little too easy, right?

So everyone's kind of agreeing with each other too much. So let's argue. We have a little form, and we have a form that we're going to provide to also that we'll give access to from our CATO website on how you can fill out, you know, your problem, but also say, hey, listen, have your visual aids.

So I'll put a picture up of where the problem is. Maybe it's a map, or maybe it's the front door of a house. Maybe it's like a big group area of, like a protest, but we'll have the visual aids. But then I'll have this little section on the side that says chaos. And when I start to see that, I'm like, let me throw some chaos in there. Oh, guys, by the way, this just happened.

And so now it's like, okay, well, let's see if I can get. Because I kind of see what these two are agreeing on, but I see a little hesitancy here. Let me see if I can find a little chaos section to throw it in there without getting too far into it to get some more discussion happening.

Josh Wofford: And on that organizational leadership side. Right? So, you know, when you find out that somebody's good at something, it builds trust, especially when it's in these repeated acts when you're doing a decision making exercise. I've noticed that Jon is good at this five times, because five times in this decision making exercise, he's articulated why he would do something.

My SWAT team leaders, I trust them. Why? I've worked with them for 15 years. I've seen them perform over and over again and perform well. We don't always get the opportunity to see that in our organization, with our people. But these decision making exercises expose us to people that maybe we never saw before.

So operationally, I can trust them. That means I can delegate to them. I can delegate authority to them and allow them to go off and do something, because I've seen, okay, this is not just based on. I'm not being risky here probability wise. I know that they're going to be able to go out and perform this and perform it well, because I've already seen it in a context within a classroom.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's interesting because people are so multidimensional that I've had experiences in my own organization where I'll assign something to somebody or we'll sit down and have a group discussion, and all of a sudden you realize, wow, Toby is a savant when it comes to picking shoes. And all of a sudden, now we've got a shoe problem. We got to find Toby.

And I would say my job as a CEO is to harness 100% of the processing power in the building, not to be the guy with the right answer, we got to get the right answer. It's not my job to have the right answer. It's my job to get the right answer. And the most likely way for me to get there is by harnessing all of the processing power. But if you don't even know it's there.

I mean, I've had so many experiences in my career where I've had a conversation with somebody in a meeting and thought, my God, that person's really good at that. And literally have transformed the organization. I mean, I've created jobs around skill sets that were revealed in kind of casual discussion where this person's like, oh, yeah, no, I know a lot about this. I always think back to the story of tactical diagramming. Sid creating tactical diagramming. That happened because of an argument with a scout on an operation where he's like, the kitchen's right here.

And Sid said, no, it's not. He's like, what do you mean? He's like, no, that's not the kitchen. The kitchen's over there. He's like, how do you know that? Well, because that's a gas supplying event. Well, how do you know it's a gas appliance? Well, I'm a contractor. That changed the way they scouted houses forever.

Toby Darby: We were having this discussion this morning about our team leaders and our team members, and the conversation came up, and it's like, you know, we have guys in our SWAT team that are 240 pounds of straight, you know, straight muscle. You know, purple belts, brown belts, and jiu jitsu. Shoot really well, teach post approved SWAT schools.

And then we look at other people who we recently started bringing on that have other great talents, and it may be we're looking for thinkers. That's what we want on our teams is the thinker part. But it may be something, too. With technology and the implementation of technology.

First of all, explosive breaching school is not easy to get through. You got to get that Cal Osha approval. That's not easy to go through. And if you get a guy that's really good at lifting weights and not saying that they're going to be the ones that couldn't complete this, but that's not a mongo joke. We have some talented, very smart guys, too, but you have those ones that are thinkers. We have drones now, right?

And the ones that maybe when you think about a person racing drones or an RC car, you're not thinking about the 280 pound muscle guy. You're thinking about somebody that just graduated high school and, you know, games all day long, they may be our great drone guy or our robot guy, or it may be somebody, too, with the explosive breaching, that they can do the mathematics and say, no, you're completely wrong on that. But that discussion came up this morning, and it's interesting that it gets brought up again.

Josh Wofford: And it goes back to, again, what we're talking about here. It's that critical thinking aspect. Why? Why are you picking this person for the SWAT team? I know they're big. I know they're strong. I know they're fast. And we have a lot of guys on our team that fit that, that mold, but they're also smart. We had the why behind it. We picked them for a reason.

And whenever you're putting people through a school or anything else, you want people to get past the surface and start telling me again, why? Why are you picking that person? What do they bring to the table that somebody else doesn't organizationally, whether it's a SWAT team, a business, or anything else that helps you to manage towards people's strengths? Because people ask me all the time, why did you put that person in that spot over there? Because he's the best person for it.

I know, but over here, he doesn't get along with this group. I know, but over here, that doesn't affect it. He's the most productive person in this role over here at this time, with the circumstances that we're facing right now, and that makes it for a better, more optimized organization. Doesn't matter if it's SWAT, doesn't matter if it's dispatched. Doesn't matter if it's a business.

Jon Becker: Yes, it doesn't matter. I mean, it's. I always say, like, you know, thoroughbred horses frequently bite their trainers. I run an organization of thoroughbred horses. A large part of my job is to keep them from biting each other because they're passionate, they're smart. They've thought through their side of the equation, the accounting and logistics argument. They're both very passionate about it.

And my job is to ultimately be the one that makes the decision, but also to give them both voice, because the minute I shut down one, I eliminate that. And it strikes me here that this is something that could be run throughout your organization. And the decision making might be tactical, but it might not. It could be a fire. Like, what kinds of, where do you find inspiration for DMEs? What are the kinds of things that you would look to?

Toby Darby: I would say that any incident that can potentially help us as a profession prevent being, you know, tragic event on the evening news prevent the loss of life of an officer or maybe somebody that's innocent, learning from past incidents and say, this happened and officers died because a decision wasn't made here because they were indecisive, or the wrong decision was made because they were shooting from the hip and not really using any of the why behind it.

And I know right now that we're. We're currently talking about with our other entities in our city, with the fire department and public works, and dealing with a large scale, citywide incident and sitting down and having those discussions where I'm able to go to public works a couple things, too. And kind of going back to what you're saying earlier, is now I have that face to face with that public works guy. He knows who I am, and I know who he or she is.

So if I need something, I can get that from him at that given time. Fire department two, they understand the roles and responsibilities. I'm now learning about what they're all about, what their talents are, what their capabilities are, having that discussion, breaking out into a group and then being able to solve a problem or give that insight to it. But any incident that could potentially affect our citizens, our profession, our officers innocent lives, anything.

And I kind of, when I start the class off, I explain how personally I was impacted by an incident that happened, that I looked. An emotional attachment, so to speak, is that I got a debrief of an incident that occurred at an agency where the incident commander on scene didn't really do what he or she should have been doing, and it ultimately led to the death of two additional officers because a decision wasn't made, and it impacted me.

And when I explain stuff to, like, how to facilitate this type of thing, look for those instances where there's an emotional attachment to somebody so they won't forget it. You know, I mean, we walk around, and we see, like, an outlet right there. And babies walk around, and they're thinking, okay, it's just an outlet. But it's not until you touch that outlet and get shocked that you realize, oh, crap, I'm not gonna touch that outlet again. What's the incidents that are happening in your city or county or across the world that are creating an emotional response in your agency or in our profession in a whole?

Jon Becker: Well, and you use the analogy of having kids, and I think anybody that has kids has had the baby proofing expedition of locking every cabinet and take, you know, oh, man, I didn't know I had, you know, poisoned that glow on the ground. And I think the same is true here. Like, this doesn't have to be a catastrophic event. This could be a close call. This could be body worn camera that an officer says, man, that almost went sideways on me. Great, let's take the body worn camera and instead of doing a 1 hour, two hour DME, let's do a ten minute DME with just the motor officers and watch this body worn camera and talk through. How could we do this differently?

Josh Wofford: It's just a way of thinking. It doesn't even have to be something that's big as a critical incident. I mean, think about a tactic on a SWAT team. You know, something, you traverse a hallway and somebody gets shot with sims. Okay, well, what happened? Or what's our problem? Well, somebody got shot in the hallway. Okay, let's talk about it. Let's first get in groups and explore. Like, why do you think this person got shot? Okay, let's integrate our ideas as far as, like, how could we prevent this in the future? It avoids the solutionitis too, that whole idea of, like, coming up with a solution before you've even explored the problem. Right?

Somebody will be like, gotta use a shield. Well, yeah, maybe that might be the tactic that you use, but that's something you should come to a conclusion on after you've done that problem exploration. Otherwise, the solution might not fit the problem. So it can be used in everyday life, whether it's a small group dealing with a business problem or a critical incident that we want to do a decision making exercise on.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it strikes me, when we went through ISO certification, which is quality control standard, the auditor sat down with me and said, are your customers happy to? Yeah, they are. Well, how do you know that? Well, because they tell us. Well, do you think they would tell you if they were unhappy? How do you measure it? And everything that we asked, it was like, how do you know? How do you know? How do you know?

And I finally said, like, God, we just like, what's the deal? What's with all the, how do you know? And he said, if you're not measuring it, you don't know it's happening. If you're not stress testing it, you don't know it exists.

And so it's interesting that this is a way to constantly, they say people do what's inspected, not what's expected. This is a way to force that process in ten minutes in a briefing, or over two and a half hours over a large critical incident. It's a way of thinking that I think, you know, is part of the reason that I wanted to have you guys on was I really, there's something here.

Josh Wofford: And it challenges the way you measure things, too. Like your measurement has to be aligned with what your goal is. So again, I don't have a problem with dynamic entries on warrants, but if there's been classes where it's a, you know, we do dynamic warrants on everything. Well, how are you measuring success? Well, we've never failed. Well, what does that mean? Well, we've taken the suspect into custody every single time. Have they shot back? No. So how are you measuring success? I don't care if someone does dynamic warrants, we use them. Right?Depending on the circumstance.

But it's, again, if you're measuring success because it worked every single time, well, you just haven't. You haven't experienced a failure yet. I think it was Matt Hughes, one of the UFC fighters, that said, if you're undefeated, you're just fighting the wrong people. Right. So you're always trying to challenge yourself, like, you know, am I really measuring, am I using the right measurement for the goal that I'm trying to reach?

Jon Becker: Well, and we do tend to default to measuring things that are directly measurable. Right. So we look at it and, you know, well, the SWAT team is qualified because they can all shoot a qualifying course that doesn't always pan out. The measurable is not always, you know, the directly measurable is not always the critical thing.

Josh Wofford: And define a great shooter. Is a great shooter somebody that's on a stagnant line, you know, on a range with nobody shooting back at them, or is a great shooter somebody that can address an adversary and win that conflict? So it's, again, how are we measuring success? How are we measuring failure? How are you measuring aptitude? That's really got to be a conversation also.

Jon Becker: I love that! So, guys, where can people learn more about DMEs and kind of how to do this?

Toby Darby: So a couple ways. One is that we do currently teach a critical incident management, critical incident leadership class where we give a lot of DMEs in the class, and we teach the people in the class on how they can facilitate a DME. Secondly is maybe there can be a link on this, on this show about where we can go to. Go to our CATO website where we'll have a section in there specifically on DMEs.

And then that it's going to have a format, a couple examples on, you know, DMEs that we've done in the past that shows the actual incident, the questions you can ask, the chaos points, the visual learning aids, I mean, if you're going to be using other things, have that stuff in the back of your presentation as you're putting it on to give you ideas on how you can make it best for your, for your DME.

But through that, read through some of those and then even have, I'll have a folder in there with different examples of real small patrol ones, maybe SWAT ones that you can use. But what I encourage you to do is if you do use this model, is to make it your own. Find an incident that happened that has impacted you or your agency or the country in our profession and implement that into your style.

Jon Becker: Josh, if we want to learn more about the learning theory here and the science behind this, what's the best vehicle to do that?

Josh Wofford: Simplest way. Go on Google scholar. Look up designing virtual learning environments for the California association of Tactical Officers. That'll give you the capstone. The capstone is about 72 pages, single space. It outlines exactly what me and Toby did on, on this project, how we did the DMEs, the theory behind it, all the literature, interviews with, with people that were, that took part in it, and that will give you a really robust understanding of how to approach the DMEs and what the value of them are.

Jon Becker: So we'll link to all of that in the show notes, including the CATO side. And if you guys can give us, you know, any, any other ideas you have as far as suggestions for reading all that, it'd be great. We'll just build it all out in the show notes and share it.

Guys, I can't thank you enough for being here. It was fantastic, and I learned a lot!

Toby Darby: Thanks so much for having us!

Josh Wofford: Yes, thank you!