Not only am I proud of my parents’ great effort to recover the pool table, I’m also excited to begin practicing pool again and doing so using the deliberate practice methods Anders Ericsson has spent years researching, and which he explains fully in his outstanding book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. This type of deliberate, focused practice, with immediate and unambiguous feedback works great for things like pool, but how does it apply to the messier world of Intelligence Interviewing?

Festina lente, meaning “make haste slowly”, is an oxymoron with roots back to the Roman Empire, where Caesar Augustus used it to admonish his generals against rashness. In the 15th century, the philosopher Erasmus wrote extensively on the phrase as a means of reflection and controlling passions. I do not remember exactly where I first came across it; but I do remember being struck by how applicable it was to the crime scene work that was my primary responsibility at the time. And now how applicable it is to the world of interviewing.

I do not intend to make this blog just a recounting of what we cover in our courses and course books; rather, I want it to be an extension, to discuss and explore new ideas and research. One topic I do want to discuss at some length, and which is central to our methodology, is rapport. I want to talk about it because as prevalent as the concept of rapport is, when I see interviews go off the rails it is most often because of a misunderstanding of rapport and a failure to attend to rapport correctly.

I don’t profess to be smarter or wiser than you, it’s simply that I love sharing knowledge and I love working with other people to help them find the very best in themselves and to become the best at whatever they are pursuing. I have spent much of my career, amid the investigations and travels to far flung places, figuring out how to do this and look forward to sharing through Pyxis Academy what I’ve learned.