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.

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.

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.

Research on New Year’s Resolutions shows that more than 50% of people set aside their resolutions by the end of the first month.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time looking at the research on how we can best attain our goals, or in the current case, our New Year’s Resolutions. Here is a quick summary of what some of the research tells us.

What is it about airplane crashes that so completely draw our attention and why are so many people so uncomfortable with flying? Blame it on our need for control and on some predictable cognitive biases.

The recent and still unsolved murders at the University of Idaho are horrifying and as much as I’m generally loath to use current, and tragic, examples, the investigation and public discussion highlight well cognitive biases that can slide unnoticed into our thinking and skew how we view a situation. Perhaps in this instance, where we are not the primary investigators, it doesn’t so much matter. But in the case of the investigators, it does, and in situations you face every day in your business and life it can matter a great deal when cognitive biases negatively impact your decision processes.

We are faced every day with information of uncertain quality, and we must make decisions with only partial and often ambiguous information. That’s not a problem, it’s just a fact of life. The problem comes when we decide to use this information and we fail to appropriately incorporate any uncertainty judgment into our thinking.

How could such iconic brands and anchors of our culture simply cease to be? I am fascinated by the decline of these brands…Radio Shack, Blockbuster, Blackberry, Pan American, Borders, Tower Records (true loss there), and Kodak, to name a few. It is true some of these exist still as online ghosts of their former selves, but for the most part they are gone.

Part of that is capitalism. The old make way for the new, whether they want to or not. But could the old not become the new? With the right insight and right information all of these brands could have adapted, innovated, and survived.

I was reading this morning about self-healing composites, materials that can repair themselves while still in operation. Picture an airplane wing healing its own cracks while you search for your seat. Pretty cool. I’ve also recently learned that porcupines are self-healing. They get a bit over adventurous, creeping too far out on weak tree branches, and thus often fall from trees. The result is they jab themselves with their own quills. Fortunately, the quills are coated in a natural antibiotic, so they heal quickly from their self-inflicted wounds.

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we and our organizations could be similarly self-healing, especially so when our wounds are self-inflicted. And as far as corporations go, research seems to show that most wounds are self-inflicted. I believe, with the right mindset, our organizations can be self-healing, and in the process we can avoid inflicting further damage.

Last week I had the opportunity to teach a two-day Cognitive Interview course in DC and then to spend the next three days working with the same fantastic group on Credibility Assessment, this time with the addition of Aldert Vrij and Sharon Leal, two of the absolute top researchers on deception and amazing people.

The research into deception detection is a fascinating field and has been progressing at an exponential pace over the past decade. Professor Vrij has very much been at the forefront of this wave with approximately 600 papers and 25,000 citations and Professor Leal is not far behind. The pace of the research is awesome, yet also leads to some challenges. I want briefly to mention some of these challenges, and I’ll then jump to discussing some real-time deception detection methods that do seem to work.

Imagine, on a whim, you have proffered $44 billion to buy a social media platform, have a large fortune of your own at risk in the deal, and now are wondering if this was such a good idea. And you are sitting across the table from the social media executives, negotiating the deal, and trying to make sense of whether what they are telling you is true or a lie. How many bots really are on their network? Are they not making eye contact? Are they fidgeting? Do they appear nervous? Are they stumbling over their speech a bit? Are they looking up and to the right?

Guess what? Not one of those things are relevant to whether they are lying or telling the truth. Of course they are fidgeting, stumbling, and looking away…