Understanding The Link Between Workplace Aggression And Insider Threats

Hello and welcome to the Australian Institute of Insider Threat. This is week 3 of the Global Insider Threat Awareness Month, known as GITAM. Hello, my name is Boaz Fischer, and I'm the founder of the Australian Institute of Insider Threat. Today we have a special guest, John Lyons, the founder and chief researcher of Atrium Group. Welcome. Thank you. We also have a colleague, Peter Nadra, who's shared on many videos about human and risky behavior. And in this session, we'll be discussing workplace aggression and why it is a critical issue that impacts health, safety, and productivity of employees and organizations. Unfortunately, despite its widespread impact, workplace aggression is often not handled effectively. leading to serious situations and consequences. So today we are going to talk about it in more details. So again, welcome to you both. And John, if you could give us a little brief background of who you are, your little bit of experience, so the viewers can gain an understanding of where you're coming from.

All right. Well, first of all, thank you for inviting me, and it's a pleasure to be with you guys. First of all, I started out as a police officer at 19 years of age with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and I was stationed in Western Canada to start with in a much— in the uniform side of the organization. We were doing the contract policing for the entire province. So I was stationed there for about 7 years working in highly dysfunctional communities in the north. First of all, in a town, it was a railway center for the north where all the miners were hired on and went north and they came back. And it was also their playground when they were away from work. And so it was a kind of a really robust rumble tumble town. Miners work hard and they play hard, right? So, and then we had a large First Nations reserve just across the river with it. Combined with it, it was a perfect storm for this wide-open town. So, so basically, it was the kind of environment where we only had 6 or 7 guys. It was in time before even we got— we didn't get overtime at the time. We were often working 7 days a week. Oh, wow. Sometimes 30, 35-hour shifts. Like in one case, if we got somebody that was on alcohol withdrawal, We would have to put them in our car and drive them for 7 hours to the medical— to the mental hospital in the south and be back for our next shift. So it automatically meant a 36-hour shift.

Yeah.

But we were, we were young and, and, and it was, you know, it was when you're young and single, you're fine. But there were times when we'd all lose it. You know, you're trying to do the right thing for people and there are times when you explode. Because you're just tired and worn out and environment triggers aggression. And to the point where it was the kind of town we had a young Indian girl murdered there. And we were very, very shocked when a Royal Commission accused us of being racist. Okay. At the time, we didn't even know what that meant. And now I know from the research that it wasn't about racism, it was more about implicit bias. Your negative experiences over time build up as biases. Yeah. But we were also out there arresting a lot of these people and locking them up to save them from being beaten up. Because if we left them on the street overnight, they would— they were victims.

Yeah.

So it was a very, very confusing time being accused of being a racist when you're out there and trying to, trying to help them as well. And one of the only ways you could protect them was to lock them up overnight.

Yeah, yeah.

So that's where I really, I sort of really was shocked by that. And then from there I went to another community in the north where they used to fly me into Indian reserves and leave me by myself for a week. My closest backup was about 5 hours away by aircraft. So you learn to get along with people in a hurry. And that was an entirely different culture and far less aggressive. So And from there, I went on to major investigations and on to Interpol in Ottawa, which I ran the operations there for about 10 years.

Wow.

And, and that was my line of work, working with police departments all over the world. So from there, I retired and worked in insurance fraud for about 5 years before moving to Kingston, where I am now. And I worked in the healthcare sector from there.

Okay.

But in all of this, I began to research for a project. It was on identity documents. I started to research the behavioral science and how the brain processes information because I had to develop a program for trying to pick up on deception at the point of service. So that's where the dive started into the science, and one thing led to another. So that's how I got started at it. And I've been researching behavioral science now for about About 10 years. And I think the real mentor for me is Robert Sapolsky from Stanford. I referred you to his book. It's an amazing book on, you might say it's evolutionary human behavior.

Yeah.

Right. And it is tremendous insight.

Yeah. I've got it listed on the— sorry. Yeah. I've got it listed on the book section for the website.

It's jaw-dropping actually.

Yeah. Okay, fantastic. John, it's amazing to listen. So let's start by what, from your perspective, what do we mean by workplace aggression?

Well, I sort of crafted a definition here. I'm saying in its simplest form, I mean, I think aggression is a physical or verbal behavior to commit a harm against somebody else, or preventing that harm if you're on the other end of the— on the other end of the aggression, just like animals do. You have predators who aggress.

Yeah.

And you have prey who aggress to, you know, to save their lives. Yeah. So it comes from both. It comes from 2 ends. And, you know, so that's what— that's how I would define it anyway. And, um, and interestingly about it, in some contexts we love it as human beings. We'll go to a, we'll go to a rugby game, or for us it's North American football.

Yeah.

And we know guys are risking serious injuries, but we love it.

Yes.

But in another case, like, uh, it might, like the Vietnam War, for instance, it was morally irreprehensible to, to, uh, aggression.

Yes.

So really it's all about context.

Very much so.

Context of aggression is important.

So the outcome of aggression, I mean, obviously when you go and watch a rugby game, you're not looking to see people being harmed, but it becomes an aggressive sport.

Yeah, you're willing to risk the harm, the damage to watch the aggression and we cheer it on. So it's like it's into the genome almost. It's part of our genome almost like it's a trait.

Yeah, interesting. What ways, I'm looking for the different ways that people can harm others or what type of aggressions are there from your perspective?

Well, there are 2 types that they talk to. I'm trying to think if there's, I call them explicit and implicit, but there are more technical terms. There's cognitive aggression. where you plan to aggress. And then there's what I would call implicit aggression, which means that it's triggered from below levels of conscious awareness when a button has been pushed.

Yeah, yep, yep, yep. All right.

So I think that there are 2 distinct types of aggression we have to clearly define between the 2. Like, for instance, you might say that Cognitive aggression would be somebody who plans, deliberately plans to aggress. He's been offended or hurt in some way and they're reacting back and they cognitively plan it out.

Yeah, I was just thinking from a perspective of you got the physical aggression and then you got the verbal aggression.

Yes. Okay.

But you also have, and I'll get Peter to maybe say a few words, psychological aggression, passive aggression, and even sexual aggression. Is there anything that you wanted to add or sort of define in that area, Peter, from your perspective?

Look, one of the things that I see is that there are refinements, if you want to call it that way, that I've seen displayed in aggression. Obviously, the aggressive slash intimidation is probably the most visible one. But then you also have the passive aggressive where, you know, people basically express their aggression in a way that can't be, that can't be, quote unquote, faulted. But then you also have microaggressions where people, I think here in Australia, we call them snide remarks.

Yes.

And, you know, a lot of these things, they go under the radar, but it's a death by a thousand cuts where the aggregate of it all suddenly becomes, or at one point, I think, you know, the term being used sometimes is there's a tipping point. And then the goal is to go to the person who's being, or the the person who's being intimidated into doing something that's overt and now they're the bad guy. So there's lots of little games that are being played there as well too. But yeah, it's an interesting spectrum of behavior.

It is indeed. John, as a follow-up, why is it important from your perspective again? Why is it important that it needs to be addressed?

Well, I think I'm trying to— when I read policy and guidelines, or I looked at policy and guidelines in the police department, they had all these policy and guidelines. And when you got in the— if you were a new recruit and you got in the car with your trainer, he'd say, what, all that stuff? Forget it. That's not how it works. And now I start to understand that we create linear policy and guidelines in our corporations and in policing and others. But that has nothing, very little to do with the nonlinearity of human beings. You have to think of a human being as a dynamic complex system in the same way you do a weather system or the same way you do every other kind of system in nature. So like The math of, uh, the math that we use to build buildings and, and the math we use as business people to run our businesses is linear. It's Newtonian, linear. Where if we want to start solving these problems with human behavior, we start to have to look at a different type of math. And that's the math of chaos. That's the same math they use to figure out weather systems. It's the same math they use to say, well, when there's noise in a system, if you don't get at it, it'll amplify into a storm. Well, it'd be the same with insider threats, that if there's noise or discontent in the system and you don't get on top of it, say in a workplace or an office, it'll start to escalate.

Yeah, correct.

So I'm, I'm saying that what we got to get better at is identifying that noise in offices early on And get on top of it before it gets out of hand because it will get out of hand. It's just a natural, it's just a way that they, that's the way people and all these dynamic systems work.

Peter, did you want to add something?

Yeah, I totally agree with that approach, John. And the, you know, the, it's easier to actually approach something in its infancy stage, if you like, than it is when it's turned into a full-blown behavior that becomes much more harder to manage as well. So yeah, identification early on is a really, really key

Yeah, because when we look at sanctions, I mean, I spent a career around sanctions, the criminal law, you know, and, and the assumption that we always had as young police officers, and it's still out there today, that arrest and prosecution is a deterrent.

Well,

there's absolutely no evidence of that at all.

Okay.

That it's a deterrent. Yet that's the main tool. Well, it's the same in business. If you're main tool is sanctions for punishments for, uh, going offside or not following the rules. Having those rules and thinking they're a deterrent is likely the same, probably not.

Yeah, look, from any sort of threat, you having sanction could make things worse too.

Yes, yeah, and I think it's got to be kind of a, a balance of the two. You need to have the rules there. I mean, people have to know what the rules are. They have to know how the game is being played. But it's how you reinforce those rules that we have to change. I think we've got to get away from the linear approach and get more into the, like I said, the environment and the culture that causes the problems.

Yeah.

Because when you look at the behavioral biology side of things, human, Environment is singularly the most significant influence around human behavior. And so that's what we have. That's where I think we in the next generation of security will be looking at that very closely.

Yeah, certainly. John, I know in many conversations that we've had, you mentioned that aggression is innate or evolutionary. Can you sort of Explain that in, in some detail.

Yeah, I'll give you some practical examples. Like, examples like even, uh, now on human behavior, etologists spend a lot of time studying other primates, right, and how they behave. And, and it's remarkably similar to how we behave. It's just that we have, we have, we have the ability to reason.

Yes.

Where they, they don't. But I'll give you an example of why I think it's innate. For instance, like if somebody feels really, really offended and really hurt, it's a— think of yourself when you've planned revenge in your head, right? And you're thinking about what you're going to do to this person or whatever. It actually releases oxytocin that excites the pleasure center of the brain. In the same place drugs do. So, so, uh, researchers are saying, well, that it's innate because it's a, it's a, it's a chemical, uh, it's a react— it's a biological reaction in your body that's been inherited. And so therefore it's, it's, it's, um, it's a, it's a trait that we naturally have. So now, so I say, so with that stuff, so yes, we plan revenge, but it's a different step to carry through with it.

Yep.

Right. And so when I start thinking about this stuff, so I say, okay, so you're really upset and your executive center checks in and saying, you're not going to go there, buddy, that you're— that's going to be bad news, right, if you do that. Because it has a— it, it, it, it— the executive center in the front of the brain takes a bigger look at— has a more complete picture of everything, and it talks to you, back to you, and says no. But it doesn't always work. Because you're so enraged. Like, for instance, that's where Pete— when an emotional, prior emotional experience has been so damaging, it will hijack that frontal area of your brain. So with revenge, it's the same thing. So we all plan it, but then we have to get better at saying, well, why do people lose it? Why do they— why can't they control it? And there can be genetic reasons. You just weren't genetically as resilient as other people. It can also be a depletion of your emotional resilience over time. Like we talk about environment over the time, it can wear you down. And that's the— so that's the kind of— I think that's the kind of stuff we have to look a lot more carefully at insecurity and insider threats and figure out how, what, what we can do in the environments to, to sort of, to sort of keep that in, keep that in check.

Yeah. Would there also be a reward mechanism in there for some person who has suddenly broken the, the, the, the barrier and gone out into the real world to do it? If they've done it once successfully and gotten away with it, would there be a reward mechanism of feedback that would keep going that allows them to breach that dam over and over again?

Yes, yes. And along with that, Peter, if you've, if you've been brought up in an aggressive environment, there's a much higher chance that you will aggress, uh, as an adult if your button's pushed.

Yeah, absolutely, because that's, that's the way it's been done always, so to speak.

Yes, yeah. It's under— it's getting to understand this stuff that, that— so what I'm really interested now in saying, okay, what What in, what in the environment, what kinds of things in the environment push people's buttons? What kind of things trigger people? But then it's all about context because it all depends on, on that, on that individual's genes and, and, and, and traits and the way they were brought up. And we're all unique. We're all different. So there's no such thing as a cookie-cutter solution to this stuff.

No,

highly complex.

John, These, I'm assuming, also are catalysts or triggers to make things even worse. So if, you know, if we're talking from a context point of view, if the person is under influence, let's say they have drunk too much alcohol, their level of aggression can be exponentially increased very quickly.

Yes.

What are other triggers that you've seen that That raise the level of aggression really quickly.

Okay, now with alcohol, it doesn't trigger aggression. Alcohol gets rid of your inhibitions so that if you're a naturally aggressive person, you have it under control and you drink, yes, you won't have it under control. So that's one thing about alcohol— doesn't cause aggression. Alcohol sort of dulls the brain's ability to be able to control it. That

is

exactly the opposite. Where something like cocaine is a stimulant, so it gives people a sense of, I don't know exactly, omnipotence, and it sort of pushes the other way. It sort of will contribute to aggression.

Yes. Peter, a question to you. How much does a person that may have some form of predisposition, let's say some behavior, some maybe health challenges, mental challenges, could something like maybe that they didn't get the role or didn't get the bonus affect their level of aggression suddenly being spiked up?

Yeah, look, from what I've seen, aggression usually has, there's a purpose behind it. And that purpose is to, I didn't get this, you know, throwing a tantrum to my personal space is being invaded in some way, shape or form. And it's hard to tell because it revolves around anchors. Anchors then create the triggers. So for instance, you might have an anchor in a particular song. We might be listening to the same song. For you, it might mean nothing for me, it might mean something either traumatic or not traumatic.

Right.

And it's really hard to pick up on what those, what's anchored that reaction, what's anchored that trigger. But yeah, it's, you've got to be able to understand the individual in a certain way and obviously watch behavior. So behavior can come from all sorts of different areas, not necessarily from And as John says, the substance and the mental side of things can create an inclination towards certain things as well too.

Yeah.

And you talk to somebody on the street and you go, hey, that's a nice person, but you don't understand that there's no unpacking of the mechanism that goes up to make that person up.

Yep. Yep. John, is it— sorry. So go ahead.

Well, I can think of 3 things right now that trigger aggression: fear, frustration, and overcrowding. Overcrowding is another thing that triggers aggression. And yeah, so there are a few others, but they have been identified and we can certainly chart them from the research.

Okay. Is there a difference in the level of aggression between someone For example, with low self-esteem compared to someone with high self-esteem?

You'll see different types of aggression.

Okay.

People with low self-esteem and those with high self-esteem. So, um, somebody with low self-esteem can be truly offended, and they're more, they're more, they're more likely to react emotionally. If you have self-esteem, their, their, their reaction will be, uh, come from their unconscious and, and, and it triggers something and they lose control. And it comes out in aggression. Where somebody with high self-esteem, like say Donald Trump, if you watched the debate last night, Kamala Harris pushed his button and he went through the roof because she attacked his self-esteem, right? Because he's a narcissist, that's a big deal. Yeah. So she, whether by accident or by design, she knew exactly what she had to do.

Yep.

And so, yeah.

Okay. Okay. Peter, have you got anything that you would like to add from your perspective?

Yeah, I guess from what I'm seeing is that human beings can be a lot more complex, especially in a workplace environment. If you take the setting of a person in a workplace environment, you're putting them into previous experiences that they may or may not have had. And all of that starts coming rolling forward when it looks like, smells like, sniffs like it's gonna go this way again. And to many, in many instances, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because in their mind, that's the way it's tracking. So their behavior then lines up toward it tracking that way. And, you know, voilà, there you have it. It's tracked that way. And I think part of where I'd like to come from with You know, when I'm talking with people is where, how do we see the signs of that happening so that we can gently unpick that, you know, change the railway tracks from that direction to a slightly different direction to another direction. And I guess that's a skill. Right. That's a skill that, and even just getting an awareness of that is the most important thing.

Yeah. So we know that organization's culture defines what constitutes, let's say, their accepted behavior or risks. Is there a clear line that defines or distinguishes by what intentional aggression compared to impulsive aggression from your— where does it sit?

Were you just triggered? Is that—

oh, you know, is there, is there a sort of a line, like a line in the sand that says, okay, what we know is this is intent or this is non-intentional or impulsive? Where, what's the difference?

Well, if, if you have a, if you, if you have a trigger, If you send something out there, that it'll depend on the context of that individual person. It will depend on a whole lot of things. And because people will— individual people react differently. Yeah, that's kind of why the linear policy and laws are not very effective, because people are not homogeneous. They're not the same at all. We're all different.

Yep.

And so, and if you read Robert— when Robert Sapolsky analyzes a behavior, he traces it back, boom, boom, boom, through several steps, right, right, right, almost at the beginning of time, going to the different levels. What, what went on in somebody's mind a second before, uh, they, they went outside? What happened a few days before? What happened a few weeks before? What happened a few months before?

Yeah.

What happened? And it is extraordinarily complex. And, and, um, yeah, so, um, now, so you could have, I mean, some people don't get offended about a, say for instance, a manager walks up and says something to somebody, they may not be offended, but somebody else will be, right? So there's not, there's not even a way you can say this is what you should say all the time. Yeah, because everybody's different.

Yeah, I suppose what maybe what I'm trying to say or the question I'm trying to ask Is there sort of like a, a path where they're, they're going through, let's say, from a non-physical aggression to a physical aggression? So maybe from— there's an impulsive aggression to, to, to do something, and then there is an intention of, of causing harm, and there's 2 different sides.

Are you talking about a physical sign?

Well, it could be. It could be. Where is there a line? Where's the point or line in the sand that takes someone, for example, from being maybe just verbal or psychological to someone that takes it over the line and says, okay, we're going to go physical? We've seen, for example, demonstration. Where's the line where they call a peaceful protest that eventually turns into something that becomes quite violent?

Well, that's an amazing— this is just a topic that really fascinates me in that because when I was in Ottawa, I was on the riot team, like, you know, the guys with the face masks and all that sort of stuff right at the center of it. So they would deploy us out to these crowds. And it's amazing how many crowds start out as protesting.

Yes.

Right. Everybody's fine. And then you'll have people come in from the outside, anarchists, and start to throw things. And it's amazing how the crowd picks that up. And so there's a lot of theory called tipping point theory.

Yes.

Okay. Rwanda genocide is a good a good example where there have been social unrest for years and years and years between the 2 cultures. And then all of a sudden, one incident and boom, it's gone over that tipping point and away it goes. The same with— I've seen that in the Baltimore riots and the Ferguson riots in the United States, where noise inside the system, like whether it were for Ferguson, it was a case where police were being forced to over-ticket everybody. And the public was— they were trying to raise revenues and the public was getting more and more upset. And all of a sudden it just took off.

Yeah.

And it was the same in Baltimore when Freddie Gray was murdered in that they were aggressively trying to stop street crime and locking a lot of people up. And The people in those neighborhoods didn't like the way that they were being treated, but they were putting up with it. All of a sudden, one incident and it blew up into a riot.

Yes.

And that's the same thing that when you read, when you look at the chaos theory, you can see why it happens because chaos is all about noise inside the system. It's about chaos is the math of most things being deterministic, but highly sensitive to initial conditions. So what happens, and we're part of that, we're part of nature, we're the same. So that's sort of, they're getting and they're doing a lot of major research in that area. But so like, so to me it's the same in a corporation. What is the noise in the system? And we gotta get onto it before it builds into that tipping point.

Okay. Yeah.

It's

a

whole different look.

I like that idea of the noise. I like the idea of the noise in the system because I like the idea of the noise in the system as being, I guess, the canary in the coal mine type analogy. Yes. One of the things that is really interesting is to see, you know, people have had an incident happen in their workplace and everybody's running around shocked and bewildered and, you know, the forensic investigation takes place and they backtrack it to this. But What you're saying is that there are signals in advance that if they would have been picked up on, could have been used as indicators to cool certain things or to change a course of action and that sort of thing. I find that's a very fascinating part, right? That, you know, rather than what happened to how, what's happening, I guess, is the focus that really fascinates me.

Yeah, I think that's And I've been on, even in the Pawl Manitoba when I was there on a Saturday night, we could just feel a night when things were going to happen because there were 3 bars

there

and they were all empty onto the street at the same time on a hot August night. And, um, you know, and so everybody's mingling around and they're not, they're, they're drunk.

Mm-hmm.

And you could just feel, you could feel the energy, you could feel that something was going to happen. Then, then a big fight would break out. And, um, and we only had 2 or 3 of us working, right? Oh. But that's a funny story. We used to, we used to cover 2. We used to, we used to, and this is back in the '70s, '60s. Yeah, '70s. We would, we cover, we usually had 3 sets of handcuffs and we just handcuffed people to parking meters until we could get straightened out because we had no backup. There were only the 3 of us. That was it. You know, so, so, uh, but you could, you could feel it. Um, you could just feel the energy. We could say that something's gonna happen tonight.

Yeah, yeah,

yeah. And as it builds and builds and builds. So it's the same in an office, I think. If you're not on top of the environment, if you're not on top of the discontent, even to the point where you can say, for instance, I've said this before, like, somebody might think, well, the way to send a message is to walk somebody out with their box, give them the perp walk sort of thing through the office with this box and And that's sending a message to them. Well, if that person is well liked and the staff don't think he's been fairly treated, you're creating noise in the system that's gonna escalate and it's gonna get worse and worse and it's gonna affect job performance. It's gonna impact a whole bunch

of

things.

Yeah. You can't be mindless about this stuff.

Yeah. So here's a question to both of you. What are the dangers and repercussions of this prolonged negative behavior if it's manifesting in an organization, both to the individual and the organization?

John,

what do you think, Peter?

Well, I'm looking at it from an organizational perspective. If you have a culture where the, you know, it's a catalog environment, out there and everybody's, you know, everybody's biting everybody else and the person in charge is just sitting back and watching all of that happen, you're going to have all of your energies expended on aggressive behaviors and not on actually the purpose of what you're trying to get or what the organization is trying to do. But at the same time as well too, those organizations can implode pretty quickly. And you see often, you know, if you look at the job market, you can see it's the same old companies doing the same old thing, asking for the same old people. And you go, hmm, what's going on in that place? So, yeah, so there's lots of repercussions and obviously the human repercussion of the people that have gone through that mill, they'll come out the other side scarred, wounded, and, you know, very wary.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. There's really complicated in that, Um, I even think, say for instance, that, um, I read some research by Holly Wong Hang out of the University of BC where they did a bunch of research and they found that on trust, and they found that people's perception of the company they worked with really stopped at their immediate supervisor and at most their immediate manager. That was the perception of the company. So you could have a guy that was a real driver and get work out of people But if he's not skilled at dealing with people,

you

know, in the long run, it's gonna be more costly.

Yep.

Yep.

Right. And I think that gets to the point that people are, people who are good at what they do on the coalface often get promoted to points, to areas where they now have to manage people. But their expertise is the coalface, not necessarily people management kind of thing. So they're being asked to do jobs that they're not really talented for in most cases.

Very true.

I think there are 5 basic skills in emotionally intelligent people. Like,

I

think there are 5, I think it's, or no, 4 that we originally identified, 4 different forms of emotional intelligence. And we're all on a sliding scale on each of those components. Right?

Yeah.

So people that are are are good at picking up on other people have high empathy, and and they and they apparently they can even pick the kids out in kindergarten that have high empathy. If some kid gets hurt and they go over and they they see it's just natural, right? That they emotionally connect with other people, and it's like it's it's like it's like a it's it's it's it's it's inherited trait. Now the one difference between IQ. And EQ, they call it emotional intelligence. You can get better at emotional intelligence where you can't at IQ.

Yep, absolutely. So, and, but the thing is, we don't train people. We don't give people the tools to be able to do that training to skill them up in that area. And it's almost, you know, like, you know, dropping a race car driver into a 747 and saying, here, you can fly a race car. Let's go fly this thing.

There you go.

Yeah, well, exactly. And I mean, where, where I get a lot of the obstacle courses in policing because it's such a high aggressive area, high aggressive, uh, highly aggressive, uh, trade. And, um, and I'm still shocked that with all the research in my— and, and, uh, emotional intelligence since the 1990s, that they haven't caught on the idea that we should— we, we teach police officers how to shoot. We teach them to stay in great physical shape, but we don't bother to help them manage their mind.

Yep.

Like, I just don't understand why this day and age they're not into mindfulness training, you know, like, uh, uh, meditation and those sort of things to keep this thing healthy too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Way behind. Now, the guys in the C-suites are all doing this stuff, but are they paying for their employees to do

Yeah. And they're very good at the C-suite in many instances. I'm not saying all, but in many instances, they're very good at practicing that amongst themselves. But on the shop floor, it becomes a different story a lot of times.

Yes. And, you know, and now we have a highly educated workforce. They're not satisfied just working for the man anymore like they were 2 generations ago, right? Just happy to have a job.

Yeah.

So if you're not treating your employees with dignity and respect and not having them being excited to work for you, and there's this whole thing in science called reciprocal cooperation. I don't know if you followed that at all. That's amazing research on that's how, that's how everything in nature works. And, and, and so to me, if I was running something, I would be saying I would want to make sure that That if I want my employees' cooperation, I've got to cooperate with them in return.

Yeah. Yeah.

Right. And the interesting part about that study, there was one on, it was game theory back in the 1970s, trying to think of the name of the guy that ran it all, but they were looking at all these different game theories and like on tit for tat, which is reciprocal cooperation, reciprocal altruism. And the one that won out every single time in the game theory was forgiving tit for tat.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

We should be applying that kind of those concepts. We need to think about that in terms of managing our offices and that sort of stuff.

Yeah.

And look, there's a lot of schools of thought still out there, whether that's trained or not, where it's almost a militaristic kind of a top-down approach where you're, you know, the person in charge is the biggest aggressor and then you take it down to below. And I think the time for that has changed. You've put your finger on something really spot on that we now no longer have an uneducated workforce out there. We now have people who've, I mean, just go to YouTube. I call it the University of YouTube. You can learn anything and a lot of people do. So they walk into a workforce with much more information under, in their gray matter than many people used to.

Yeah. Even back in the 1990s, there was, I'm just trying to think of Stephen Covey, Highly Effective People. I think he wrote a few others, but one of the, I remember one of his comments, he said that people have never been better educated and less listened to.

Correct.

Oh, you talk about the frustration level going up. Yep. And then the insider threats go up.

Yeah. And around about that same genre, what was it? Catch people doing something right.

Ah, yes, yes, correct.

Which, I mean, it ties in with that whole emotional intelligence and forgiveness and that sort of thing. And I mean, just if you say it like this, you know, you get what you praise, you get what you Apply energy to. From that simple perspective, it's a no-brainer.

So, Christian, is aggression easily observed? I mean, if it was physical, someone sort of physically intimidating, then it's quite easily observed. But how would someone know that they are being targeted if it's not physical aggression? How would they know they're being targeted or someone else is being targeted?

Well, a good case, we should be looking at things like workplace sabotage, right? In that, like, okay, so how would you know? Well, there's nonverbal behavior, verbal behavior, you know, you know, you can— somebody's verbally aggressive, that's pretty easy to tell.

Yeah.

But, but even Yeah, and some people talk about facial expressions and watching all that kind of stuff and watching the body language. And I'm not so sure about that because all the research I've done on body language is that— and I know I'll give a very practical example. We were doing a murder investigation in Manitoba, and this guy came in, and he is suspect, and he did a polygraph examination, and he flunked it. So we, everybody thought that he was the guy that, uh, had committed the murder, but he hadn't. His brother did, and he knew it. So his stress level went up and, um, and, uh, registered on the machine, but that's because he knew who did it, not because he did it.

Yeah.

Um, and, and the same with if in the, in the training that I've designed for frontline people who depend on documents to make business decisions. Some people are trying, trying to teach people, watch for the body language, watch for the facial expressions, watch for this, watch for that.

Yes.

But the problem is, I could ask you a question, uh, Boaz, and, and it may trigger something in your long-term memory that has nothing to do with that question.

Yeah.

Yep.

And that's what will generate that behavior. So when we get into that nonverbal and verbal behavior stuff, that's That makes me nervous.

Yeah.

And look, you said something before, John, about, you know, you were working in a town and you just knew that that night something would happen. Yeah. And you translate that into a workplace. And I guess we've all had the situation where we really, you know, you can't put your finger on it, but you really just don't wanna be there. be around this person. And while that's a very subjective measure, but it, that gut instinct level should tell you that something is a little off. What to do about it is often a bit more hazy. But to your question, Boaz, how do you know when something is— And you, that's where the emotional intelligence comes in. Like you said, you know, you can feel it.

Um, and if, yeah, a lot of that's from information being processed before lower levels of consciousness. Like, what is it about you? 80, it's 90% of most of all the information we process is visual.

Yep.

Yep. And it's going on, it's going on below levels of conscious awareness.

Yep. Visual, kinesthetic, the whole thing. And we call it intuition, which it may be, but, you know, there's a lot of that component in there.

Yeah. Well, I think the stuff— I read a really good research book from Belgium on intuition. And it— what they claim it is, it's based on your emotional experiences, right? And so we have all these emotions, latent experiences, and memory.

Right.

And that I mean, I think, I forget the name of it. Gladwell wrote about it in his book, but it was pretty high level, like pretty for the reader.

Yeah.

It wasn't really technical about how the brain thin slices across all of those memories because they have positive or negative valence and the intensity is also registered in these memories. So that, so that Depending on the intensity of that emotional experience, uh, has a lot to do with when and how it's recovered.

Yep, absolutely.

It's really, really complicated stuff, right? It's like, that's why I say when we look at— when I look at security and security policy, it's too simple for a very complex problem.

Yep.

And until we get people to rethink about this stuff,

yeah.

They're not gonna be effective.

Exactly. Exactly. They're not gonna be effective. Also, you know, something you touched on before, if you're locked into a rules-based guideline, then those nuances, they fall off the plate. They become missed in a lot of instances if you're just doing check, you know, checkbox checklists, that sort of thing.

Yeah. It's a whole different dimension I think we need to explore. That's for sure.

Yeah,

absolutely. Absolutely.

Speaking of dimensions, what are some of the positive interventions that can potentially reduce the sort of risk of aggression taking place?

Well, I think we have to— that's where we step into and look at the environments and the cultures. Is our culture one that reinforces the kind of behaviors that we want? And is there anything in that culture that triggers aggression, right? That, and the same with, yeah, and the same with workplace environments. You do go in and do an environmental risk assessment related to the kind of environment is that either is reducing the risk of, insider threats or contributing to it.

Yeah.

Because if people are upset, and they're— and most people have a moral code, they're decent people. So they have to rationalize or make excuses for their behavior, or it causes cognitive dissonance. So you got— I think you got to go in and say, is there anything in here that we're doing that people, if they do get offended, can rationalize why they're going to workplace sabotage or even worse, the worst, the most extreme is workplace violence, an active shooter. It's been so pissed off inside, so upset, it actually comes back and kills people.

Yeah. And I think a lot of these eruptions where everybody says, oh, how did that happen? you, there's always going to be somebody who's close by who, who, who we, in hindsight, we say should have seen something, could have seen something.

Correct.

And in a workplace environment, I think that should be empowered. So the power of having, you know, the guy sitting next door, the buddy, whatever you wanna call him, who's tapping into what's going on for Billy Blogs down the road or in the seat next to him. I think that should be empowered where people are saying, hey, here in Australia, we have a campaign from the mental health people where they basically just encourage people to say to somebody that might be in trouble, are you okay? Which then can open up a conversation and can start, you know, defusing or taking the heat out of a certain situation. And I think that's something that that is very, very valid and it doesn't happen necessarily from the top down. It happens on the peer level. It happens on the guy sitting or the guy or the gal sitting next to you and saying, hey, what's going on? What's happening to you today? And sometimes just that ability to vent is a really good thing.

Correct.

Yeah. Well, exactly. People have to feel that they're being heard and listened to, right? Yeah. Oh, exactly. I mean, especially in the info, especially The world we're in now. I mean, high stress is unbelievable for people in the workplace.

Absolutely.

Yeah. John, so from your many years of experience being around, how well do you see that organizations address workplace aggression?

Well, I think, If they understood a little bit about how the mind works, how our biology works, how we're not much different than other animals, although we have the ability to reason and check it. But a lot of our behaviors are the same as chimps. And in fact, that's an interesting story. Like, I don't know if we got time here, but chimps, chimpanzees, the females have to leave as adults because even nature's figured out that you can't have inbreeding. And the male chimps are all brothers and cousins. Yeah. Right? And so they pass down their genes through their brothers and cousins. So they don't have to compete like lions do, who, you know, who They, they had, you know, they're a whole different culture. But so anyway, so chimpanzees will work themselves into a frenzy and then they'll go patrol their border and kill chimpanzees from rival troops that are encroaching on their border. And it's interesting, in our military, we, we create bands of brothers.

Yes.

We're not natural brothers, so we use psychology to create that kind of brothership. Brotherhood, right? So, and, and of course, baboons are exactly the opposite because it's a matriarchal society. But when you look, you look at all this stuff and say, my God, we're, we've got so many of the characteristics of these animals with just the ability to be able to think and, and, and maybe control some of it.

Yeah.

Yeah. I think the only

difference

and, and to, to, to, you know, to about 98%, you're quite right. We are, we are still mammals and primates in the bush. But one of the things I think that, that bears bringing forward is the concept of choice. And as you're, as the responsibility level rises, the choices become more and more critical going forward. So the free will slash choice concept has to be looked at as well too. That's what separates, I guess, us from the chimpanzees who are basically just acting out their biological drama. But you said before, you know, you can have a revenge concept in your mind, but whether you then go out and do it or don't go out and do it is an act of choice. It's an act of will. And the ability to do that should, I think, well, it is, it is the defining element, what it is to be human and being able to or being aware. Not many people are aware of that either because they just said, oh, I just went and did it as if they had no choice. But the reality is by not making a choice, they did make a choice.

Of course.

So, you know, addressing that and looking at it from that perspective is, can provide some guidelines as to how we're gonna make that happen, how we're going to move forward. And I think you know, on a grander scale, um, you know, we, we could look at that almost as an evolutionary driver as well too, because that's what separates us. Now let's see what we can make of it.

Yes. Yes. Like, like, suppose he makes a pretty compelling argument is there's no such thing as free will. He, he, he says that, um, that we, we were, we were convinced that, uh, by classical economics that man is a rational actor and always always operates in his own self-interest. Yeah, that myth has been dispelled, right? That we're not necessarily rational. We're rational some of the time.

Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree. We all have moments of in clarity.

Yeah. Some of us are less rational than other people.

Yeah.

Touché.

Touché. Last question there, John, and I'll ask it to you both as well. What is the key takeaway from what we've discussed so far?

I think the takeaway is that we need to understand how the cognitive functions work, right? And we need to understand how the emotional functions work better and how they intersect with each other. Like, we can't leave them in their silos. We have to bring them together. And then figure out how all of that works within the context of the environments and the cultures that we create.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I would agree with that also from a business perspective or from an organizational perspective. Awareness is the first key that I would probably put down and then environmental awareness, awareness of the environment. So, you know, when you're at the coalface in an office situation, your environment is your desk, keyboard and the customers or the people that you interact with. But as you go higher and higher up the management tree, your environment just expands. And then being an awareness, having an awareness of that environment and then having the tools to be able to do something about it, I think becomes more and more important, which, you know, from what we're looking at, that's something that we can address from the institute side of things as well too.

And that's This is why it's called the Global Insider Threat Awareness Month. And, you know, bringing a topic like aggression or workplace aggression as part of the discussion is so important. Um, from my perspective, I've, you know, it gets often swept underneath the carpet for many reasons because, uh, majority of the cases that, um, from what I've seen is organizations don't know how to handle They don't have the tools and the trade of how do we handle certain situations like that. Yeah, I think that's why this discussion about workplace aggression is so important.

I'd just like to say, close with that area that I worked in, that city. I mean, most of us police officers were going for Once somebody was going to outpatients every week and, and lots of fights and lots of rolling on the ground and lots of— we had 5 murders in a town of 10,000 people on top of all of this stuff. And 5 were murder manslaughter. They weren't, you know, it was crimes of passion and that sort of stuff. If I had understood this stuff, then everything was happening out there would have been really logical to me.

Yep.

Right. I can understand why it's happening. It's logical, everything. And like, like Sapolsky is— my favorite quote of his is, evolution is a tinkerer, not a builder. And with that comes a lot of nutty wiring.

Fantastic, John. Look, with that, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure to have you on this session, this essential critical topic. Peter, also thank you very much. I always love your comments. Yeah, very much appreciate what you're talking with

you too, John. Very, very great.

I watch your stuff all the time. I make sure I watch it all. Yeah, get something out of every bit of it.

Yeah,

thank you.

Yeah, cool. And if you've got any comments about this video, please reach out to me or to my team. And with that, thank you. Bye.

Okay. All right. Thank you. Okay. Night, guys.