Minimize what someone did, and they'll confess — to the minimized version. The confession comes. Just not to what actually happened. And with it goes everything else: how it happened, why, what led to it, who else was involved, what else is out there. A confession to something that didn't quite occur. Which leads us to the question…what are we missing when we drive every interview toward a confession? We are missing most everything. We’re focused on the tree (or in the case the Norwegian troll) while missing the forest.

Standing in the woods with a buzzing chainsaw and sitting across from someone in a quiet interview room seem to have almost nothing in common. They have almost everything in common. I've spent more than twenty years doing one for a living and the other to stay warm (and sane), and somewhere along the way I realized each skill makes me better at the other skill. Both come down to the same discipline: be absolutely present and adaptive, or fail.

Look at the image (full image in article). What is happening here?

Give it a real answer before you read on. Who are they, what is passing between them, where are they, why is this happening, and how does it end? You have a story now, and it feels like the obvious one. I have run this exercise for hundreds of people and never once collected the same story twice. Same picture and a different account in every head in the room. That gap, between the image in front of you and the story you build on top of it without noticing, is where teams quietly go wrong. It is also where the difference between a reactive team and an adaptive team starts.

14 micro-expressions. Out of 700 observations. Split evenly between truth-tellers and liars.

That's the entire empirical foundation for a growing industry of AI-powered deception detection tools.

A recent deep learning paper on micro-expression recognition is genuinely impressive engineering. The researchers solved a real problem. But the frame around it is dangerous — and it's the frame that ends up in procurement documents, training curricula, and courtrooms.

The technology measures whether a computer can replicate human labels built on Ekman's theory. That's not ground truth. That's a theory being tested against itself.

And even if the classifier works perfectly — disgust at what? The question? The interviewer? A memory from last Tuesday? No algorithm closes that gap.

You've been in this situation: You need someone to tell you the truth, but they have every reason to lie or stay silent. So you try to extract a commitment: "Will you be honest with me?" They say yes, but it means nothing. Or you apply pressure, and they shut down. Or you try to guilt them, and they resent you. None of it works because you're fighting against how human psychology actually operates. Here's what I learned from a hate crime fraud case about creating conditions where truth-telling becomes the path of least psychological resistance – and why cognitive dissonance is the tortured architecture underlying every difficult conversation you'll ever have.

Every day we are bombarded with data and snippets of information and we are either told by someone what it means or we try our best to assign meaning and understanding to it.  The problem is that we often do this without grasping the context of the information. Or worse, we're operating within someone else's narrative without realizing it. The other day I heard four different stories that were technically accurate but fundamentally misleading. Here's what happens when we ascribe meaning to out-of-context information and why it matters for the decisions we make every day. #intelligence #analysis #thinking #intelligenceanalysis

The next time you're in a conversation that matters, pay attention to what you're doing before you speak. Chances are you're mentally rehearsing your response, building your argument, preparing your solution. That's the moment you lose them. The hardest skill in difficult conversations isn't what to say - it's shutting up long enough to understand what they're actually experiencing.

I've spent decades conducting high-stakes interviews and training others to do the same, and I've watched the same pattern destroy even the best-trained professionals: the moment their core values are threatened, their training disappears. This article walks through that mechanism using a deliberately difficult law enforcement scenario, but the psychology applies to anyone navigating difficult conversations — negotiations, conflicts, performance reviews, family disputes. Your values and beliefs filter everything you hear, accumulate threat signals below your conscious awareness, and eventually trigger a defensive response that destroys your ability to actually listen. Understanding this mechanism is the only defense that works.

We talk constantly about "getting to the truth" in investigative interviews – but can we ever really access objective truth? And should that even be our goal? After 22 years as an FBI agent developing the HIG I&I protocol, I've come to believe that chasing "the truth" is epistemologically impossible and operationally dangerous. It leads to confirmation bias, confession-seeking, and wrongful convictions. Instead, we need to recognize interviews as relational spaces where understanding is co-constructed. We need to focus on building the strongest possible investigative foundation from multiple subjective perspectives. This isn't just philosophy – it's a fundamental shift in how we approach intelligence interviewing.

I’d asked AI to help me with a relatively simple problem – finding an exercise related to thinking. What ultimately emerged was a conversation about thinking and a discussion of why human thinking still matters in the age of AI. The irony wasn't lost on either of us. What emerged was a real-time demonstration of exactly why human judgment, embodied experience, and metacognitive awareness remain irreplaceable—even as AI capabilities grow.

Everyone in your company knows something that you do not know. The question is whether you're asking the right questions, in the right way, to access that knowledge. When you make decisions based on partial or partially accurate information, bad things come of it. Let's look at how this happened to one of the most successful corporations in American history and how you can avoid the same mistakes

Every day in organizations worldwide, employees identify problems and approach their managers seeking collaboration and support. Too often, instead of partnership, they encounter skepticism or blame. This is not because the managers are bad people, rather it is because the managers have not had sufficient training in how to deal with problems that fall outside the norm and that fall into the realm of uncomfortable and difficult.

The predictable result is that the employees withdraw, find less productive ways forward, or they escalate into conflict. However it unfolds, it is not a pleasant day for either side. But it does not have to be like that.

As a former FBI agent who developed science-based interpersonal communication protocols now taught to over 10,000 people, I recently experienced this dynamic firsthand during what should have been a relatively routine request for help. Let’s look at how it played out and how it could have played out better.

In the realm of analysis, where the core focus lies in processing facts and information to make objective sense of complex and evolving situations the concept of nurturing creativity may seem counterintuitive. However, I advocate for the integration of creativity into our analytical endeavors when tackling complex issues. We need the creative ability to fluidly adapt what we know to evolving problems, to connect disparate ideas, and to combine information with models borrowed from outside our domain of expertise.

Borrowing from Philip Tetlock’s work, I stress the need for analysts to be more adaptive foxes rather than dogmatic hedgehogs if we want to understand complex situations and figure out how we can more positively and effectively impact those situations.

I argue that the lessons learned from men’s soccer are directly relevant to corporations. How corporations choose to develop or not develop their employees has direct ramifications on the performance of their teams. The U.S. has failed to invest in the development of younger soccer players, leaving that role to other’s not directly associated with the national teams. Similarly, American corporations are highly reluctant to invest in their people; rather, they rely on the skills the employees learned elsewhere and brought to the role. We fail to develop the team and instead tend to rely on the stars and hope for the best.

The expanding prevalence of science-based investigative interviewing is truly rewarding for me, yet the mechanics of interviewing are only half of the equation. We need to put more emphasis on mindset and understanding the right interviewer mindset. I look at this through the lens of a case that is, for me, a horrific fail at both of these by the FBI.

I train teams on communications, internal and external communications, based on the decades of work and research I did on this with the FBI where every day of my life was an exercise in difficult communication. I knew Starbucks had set on a path to revitalize itself, but my NC experience made me think perhaps Starbuck’s plan wasn’t quite working, and made me wonder how the Starbucks executive team was communicating that plan. Not very well it turns out. Let’s have a look at why.

Uncertainty means we don't know exactly what impact an action will have or which factors will mitigate or amplify those effects. Ambiguity, though often conflated with uncertainty, is fundamentally different—it's when we don't know why something is happening and cannot determine which of many possible explanations is correct. Today we're focusing squarely on uncertainty and how we can manage uncertainty without throwing our hands up in despair.

We too often label cataclysmic events as Black Swan events, i.e. as unpredictable events with significant impact. rather than what they truly are…Neon Swan events. With Neon Swans there is a giant (metaphorical) neon sign telling us what is coming, and we choose not to pay attention to it.

For a variety of reasons, we choose to ignore the neon sign and forge ahead until we are caught off guard by a world changing event. Here we look at several recent events lablled as Black Swans and analyze the cognitive biases that led to their being missed.

Why does it matter the difference between uncertainty and ambiguity? It matters because we face both every day, especially in our professional lives, and they do mean different things and they have different solutions. So being clear on which of these we are experiencing will drive how we approach them and mitigate them.

Ninety-three percent of us believe that we are above average drivers. Of course that is not statistically possible but it is the wonderful thing about being human, persistently experiencing a world in which we are above average.

Another great thing about being human is that we get to create our own reality. Rather than experiencing an objective reality, our brain takes in loads of data and molds it into a reality that aligns with our mindset, our beliefs our past experiences, and our expectations.

This makes the world a much easier place to navigate, but it does also have some downsides. One downside is that very often it makes us worse at communicating with other people.