Philosophy

Welcome

I recently had the honor of recording a podcast on rapport with my friend Kevin Feldis. Kevin was the Criminal Chief at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Alaska during my tenure with the FBI in Anchorage and is now a partner at Perkins-Coie. Perkins-Coie has put together a fantastic series of podcasts and it was a pleasure to be asked to be part of this. The podcast can be found here.

I’m quite excited about the podcast so want to share it now. In a future post, quite soon, I’ll talk more about the research on rapport I discuss in the podcast but for this first installment of the blog it seems to make sense to introduce myself and the philosophy behind this blog.

I am passionate about learning; about learning everything there is to be learned (though some of the things to be learned e.g. fluid dynamics, seem rather beyond my grasp, which is quite frustrating). I’m also about applying learning and figuring out how to take diverse strands of work and synthesizing them into a new and hopefully better way of doing. This is what I hope to share here – the research and the application.

I don’t profess to be smarter or wiser than you, it’s simply that I love sharing knowledge and I love working with other people to help them find the very best in themselves and to become the best at whatever they are pursuing.  I have spent much of my career, amid the investigations and travels to far flung places, figuring out how to do this and look forward to sharing through Pyxis Academy what I’ve learned.

Our focus at Pyxis Academy is to continue to develop the Intelligence Interviewing protocols we started at the HIG. To be clear, when I say we developed these, we relied on a broad array of researchers and brought the research together into a training program to help interviewers excel at their craft.  As I’ve said hundreds of times to different audiences, this is not Colton’s great ideas about interviewing. This is about the science behind a complete paradigm shift in interviewing.

While many interviewers feel confident in their ability to navigate complex interpersonal dynamics, there are many more examples of interviewers getting it wrong when they rely on outdated, and non-science-based techniques. Those who get it right, do so generally based on intuition and their personality, which is helpful, but not always. If this is you, I am certain you can think back on many instances where it didn’t work as you’d hoped or as you felt it would. I know I can.

At Pyxis, and in this blog, if nothing else I hope to accomplish two things: 1) helping you to understand why some interviews didn’t work and 2) communicating the science behind this evolution in interviewing so that we can do things intentionally rather than through relying on intuition or someone else’s idea of a good interview.

A quick note on terminology. When I say Intelligence Interviewing, I mean the art of talking to other people to gain information. This may be a witness, an employee, a subject, an informant, or any other scenario where we need information, or intelligence, and someone else has it. Within the U.S. Intelligence Community there have been many terms applied to this, including debriefing and interrogation. I feel those terms to be too limiting and they bring to mind outdated ideas of communication; thus, I’ve chose what I see as a more broadly applicable term with Intelligence Interviewing. However, please substitute in whatever term works best for you.

Finally, as I’ve said, I want to share the research as broadly as possible, in the blog and in the courses we run through Pyxis. I will do that by providing direct links to the research whenever I can in the reference notes. For example,  a former colleague from the HIG, Christian Meissner at Iowa State University, with others, has written extensively on the topic of Interviewing & Interrogation and more specifically on comparing the efficacy of older methods of interrogation with those being developed through the HIG and through the researchers working with the HIG. (Meissner et al 2017)  Wherever the research is publicly available, I will hyperlink the reference to the research, as I’ve done here.

You may not always agree with me or the research. That’s cool and fair(and also is where understanding and learning comes from, on all sides) and that is why I have the comments turned on. If you have any thoughts, please feel free to share them and to discuss them.

Thank you.