“The essential thing is action. Action has three stages: the decision born of thought, the order or preparation for execution, and the execution itself. All three stages are governed by the will. The will is rooted in character, and for the man of action character is of more critical importance than intellect. Intellect without will is worthless, will without intellect is dangerous.” ~Hans von Seeckt

The Professional Reading Program is intended to save leaders that most precious commodity - time.

This post was inspired by a post at the Business Insider: General James 'Mad Dog' Mattis Email About Being 'Too Busy To Read' Is A Must-Read The General was asked by a colleague about the importance of reading for officers who often exclaimed they were too busy to read. The general’s response:

Three officers respond at 3AM to the call of a disturbance. When they arrive, there are three people present, two males and a female. One male is intoxicated; I will only focus on him for the purpose of this example. Intoxicated male is spoken to by responding officers. They tell him to call it a night and to go to bed and sleep it off. He says he will and turns to go into the house. The officers continue gathering information for the incident report.

“It’s a proud day to be a Boston police officer,” Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis told his force over the radio moments after the arrest. “Thank you all.”

I had a discussion on facebook that centered on the question; how can a law enforcement organization gain “world class” tactical proficiency? This posed an insightful question from my good friend Marshall Wallace, What is "world class"? Is there a definition or metric that would allow an officer to know that he/she was approaching that level? I thought to myself that, my friend is the question? What is “world class” and how do we measure it?

“Confronted with a task, and having less information available than is needed to perform that task, an organization may react in either of two ways. One is to increase its information-processing capacity, the other to design the organization, and indeed the task itself, in such a way as to enable it to operate on the basis of less information. These approaches are exhaustive; no others are conceivable. A failure to adopt one or the other will automatically result in a drop in the level of performance.” —Martin van Creveld, Command in War

“…organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together.” ~Peter Senge

We must become more deliberate, more disciplined, and more thorough in our approach to learning and teaching

As cops, we often cry loudly about the lack of training in our profession. I am guilty of it myself.

However, while we whine about the seemingly lack of interest in ongoing training, we also miss the opportunities to train and learn from the everyday lessons available to us.

Those lessons that come from every call we respond to and every shift we work.

There’s No Magic Here

Through the Boyd Cycle is how we gather and process information and make decisions in our day to day law enforcement duties. We utilize this process of observation-orientation-decision and action to see the world around us, orient to what we perceive is going on and then based on this observation and orientation we make decisions and take actions to accomplish certain objectives based on what our goals or intent is.

“If you light a lamp for someone else it will also brighten your path.” ~Buddha