The Illinois Model

from the catwalk above a live-fire shoot house facility Arguably some of the best police tactical training is held inside a live-fire shoot house. In such a venue, the walls are bulletproof, the ammunition is real, the decisions are quick, and The Pucker Factor is high.  Whenever running live-fire shoot house training, I sense anxiety in the student attendees, my fellow instructors, and   myself . Imagine doing dynamic team movements that must be trusted with loaded firearms behind you! Whether veterans to such exercises, or first-timers, each person experiences some level of fearful anticipation. And that's a good thing. Fear can surely limit growth and learning. But it can also bring tremendous focus and concentration. When the bullets are flying (quite literally), you have to remain in control of your emotions, your body, and your mental processor. In the shoot house, we keep very low tolerances for mistakes, oversights, or missteps.    We acknowledge fear. An

"...when acting within a rigid or essentially a closed system, the goal seeking effort of individuals and societies to improve their capacity for independent action tends to produce disorder towards randomness and death. On the other hand...the increasing disorder generated by the increasing mismatch of the system concept with observed reality opens or unstructures the system."   - COL John Boyd,   Destruction and Creation   (1976) As a police instructor, I am continually tasked with developing instructional curriculum, writing lesson plans, and delivering training. For a dozen years, I believed more structure would equate to more efficient learning. For the last three years (and more specifically the last year), after realizing I wasted much of my time organizing the unorganizable, I've been destroying what I had built. Why?  I wrongly thought that structuring my   teaching   would equate to structured   learning .   Lectures, PowerPoint, course flow, exerci

"The planning fallacy is that you make a plan, which is usually a best-case scenario. Then you assume that the outcome will follow your plan, even when you should know better."   - Daniel Kahneman Since the 1890s' Industrial Revolution, much of business has focused on scaling their operations through the most efficient methods - cutting costs, producing more, more quickly. To do so, managers have standardized every conceivable process along the way. They've exploited the least skilled of the workforce to perform the simplest of isolated tasks...ensuring the worker is as easily trained (and  replaced !) as possible. Do not misunderstand what I am saying. Some of these modern workers are highly educated and talented. They are also likely hyper-specialized. But what I   am   saying, is that it's possible that someone is trying to figure out how to replace you and me with something or someone cheaper or faster. Maybe a computer program, a robot, or a grou