Jesse Stanley: Brain science behind disruptive behavior

Jesse Stanley has held nearly every position in the loss prevention/asset protection space. He started out as a plain clothes security guard in college and slowly worked his way up through multiple organizations.

Jesse was an Investigator and Director for a division of the Limited, Inc., worked as a Loss Prevention Regional Manager for Lowe’s Home Improvement, and as a Director of Loss Prevention at Gadzooks. He also spent nearly a decade working at Walt Disney World as Sr. Manager, Security Operations, seeing them through 9/11 and the radical security changes this necessitated.

The spectrum of disruptive behavior

Before delving into what’s happening in the brain when someone is being disruptive, Jesse needed to define what is meant by disruptive behavior. Disruptive behavior encompasses a spectrum of actions. Here are some types of disruptive behavior, from mild to serious:

• Manipulation, like ignoring someone, profanity, and rudeness
• Intimidation, both verbal and physical
• Violence
• Extreme violence

The four Fs:
fight, flight, freeze and film

When someone is afraid, they often resort to the two Fs: fight or flight. However, this is an oversimplification, and Jesse suggests there are actually four Fs: fight, flight, freeze, and film. The first three occur in the amygdala, and it is here where you need to plan how to deescalate things.

This explanation led host Cathy Langley to ask about how to position yourself as a loss prevention/asset protection professional to avoid the more severe forms of disruptive behavior.

“You can’t get a person out of a position that you occupy and you can’t get them into a position that you don’t. I sort of took that as you can’t take somebody and get them out of an angry or agitated state if you already are there, if you’re occupying that space, right? Do you agree with that?” ~ Cathy Langley, Senior Leader, Asset Protection – Major Accounts, Solink

Jesse agreed in principle but was quick to point out that liars and manipulative people can also assume a position. This led into ways that loss prevention/asset protection professional can deescalate disruptive behavior.

First and foremost, as leaders, it’s important to model helpful action, in both formal and informal situations. While security guards previously relied on “freeze” with shoplifters, for example, sneaking up on someone in hopes of scaring them into freezing, this could also put someone into a fight posture. For that reason, perhaps we should discourage senior managers from telling the old ‘war stories’ that could lead to more dangerous behaviors.

The Palmer Rule

This leads to the importance of the Palmer Rule. The first part shows that insufficient directions lead to unexpected results. However, the second part states that those results will not be what you want. If leaders want loss prevention/asset protection specialists to deliver exactly what they’d like to see, then clear directives and sufficient training are both necessary.

“Think about something called the Palmer Rule. The Palmer Rule is simple. It basically says, if a leader fails to state their expectations, their team will always deliver. Sounds like good news, except the rest of the Palmer Rule says, but what they deliver is highly unlikely to meet your expectations.”

~ Jesse Stanley, Managing Principal, Strongside Principles

Jesse uses the ibex to illustrate exactly how loss prevention/asset protection leaders can present their expectations in a way that they can be confident they’ll get the results they want.

First, loss prevention/asset protection leaders should expect their staff to do things that are very difficult.

“Then, the last thing is that the ibex do really hard things. It seems impossible because it’s really hard. And again, as leaders, we have got to call on our people to do what seems hard. Yes, there is compassion, there’s empathy. We can say, we know it’s hard sometimes dealing with these people, and they can really treat you like trash at times. They can be very disrespectful and it’s difficult to navigate these inter-relational streets and roads. But we expect you to do hard things. We expect you to do it well and go right back” ~ Jesse Stanley, Managing Principal, Strongside Principles

Cathy Langley:

Welcome to Solink in the Cloud, where we are talking to industry leaders about topics that matter. I’m Cathy Langley, senior leader of Asset Protection with Solink. Solink’s mission is to protect people, places, and profits, which is why we’re bringing together thought leaders within the loss prevention, asset protection, and retail security industries to share their expertise and passion. With me today is Jesse Stanley, founder of Strongside Principles. Jesse, for those listeners who may not know you, can you give us a little bit about your background and what led you on the path to do what you’re doing today?

Jesse Stanley:

Hi. Thank you, Cathy. Yeah, and it’s great to be with you today. I’m one of those typical stories. I never had career aspirations of getting into asset protection. While I was in college, I started catching shoplifters for a department store and ended up getting into management, graduating college, becoming an investigator, just that normal career path. I became a director and then ended up spending about a decade at Disney where my career was a little different. It was kind of my second career within AP. Prior to Disney, it was retail loss prevention investigations. Disney was much more safety oriented, especially post September 11th. Then in 2009, I actually started Strongside Principles. I really started it to take some of the stuff that we did at Disney, the advanced security stuff out to the marketplace.

Jesse Stanley:

But you know how it goes when you kind of start a venture and you may have plans but they don’t always go the way you think they’re going to go. I ended up spending a lot of time in the disruptive behavior space, the threat assessment space. And I would say that in that time between 2009 and today being in those spaces, it has developed a real passion in me for people and how they’re treated, whether it’s the customer and how retailers or healthcare providers treat them or whether it’s the people working within retail and how they get treated either by leadership or customers. That’s a quick run through, but that’s how I got here.

Cathy Langley:

Thanks. You know, I always find it so interesting. I’m not sure how many of those within the asset protection industry had the intention of doing what we’re doing today. Right? That’s right. We all just stumbled across it. But Jesse, you and I, we’ve worked on several projects together in regards to disruptive behavior, but I don’t believe we’ve ever discussed what happens in the brain during these events. We’ve titled this episode Brain Science Behind Disruptive Behavior because we really wanted to dig in deeper into the disruption and how the brain science impacts the target. I recently attended the Lost Branch and Foundation conference down in Charlotte, and when asked what keeps you up at night, which is a pretty much a common question in our industry industry, right? What keeps you up at night? Most of the participants that spoke up mentioned safety concerns. Again, not necessarily a huge surprise, but there was some great discussion between the type of violence, or I should say the what caused the violence. So \ I guess my question to you is there a difference between the violence that occurs from the disruption from an external theft offender, aka a shoplifter, or the disgruntled customer from poor service or slow service? Both of those can be disruptive. Is there a difference?

Jesse Stanley:

Cathy, that is a great question. At the core, at the very core, there’s no difference between the upset customer wanting respect and service and the dishonest customer who is actually in the commission of a crime who’s engaged in deviant behavior. They both have a demand that’s not being met, and they both have been willing to cross that line into harming someone else in order to get that demand met. Now, most of the time, for both the dishonest customer and the regular upset customer, they’re not crossing the line to violence. It’s emotional. It’s other types of harm that they’re trying to instill in someone. But, when you have the customer who’s engaged in theft, they are most likely to cross over into violence whenever they think they’re going to be caught or somebody’s trying to hold them against their will. Not to say that customers who get upset don’t ever get violent, but it’s very rare, more rare than even shoplifters who cross over into violence. So yes, they’re different but not at their core.

Cathy Langley:

Thanks. So, and also we say the group, right? We use the term disruptive behavior, right? And, just to clarify doesn’t always mean violence, right? It can be shouting, it can be throwing things, there’s a lot of activity that goes into that umbrella.

Jesse Stanley:

Yeah. In fact, there’s a spectrum there that we use the disruptive behavior spectrum where it can be relatively low intensity things like ignoring you. If you think about it, why would somebody ignore someone other than to inflict some type of emotional harm to suggest that you don’t matter, right? Or you don’t matter as much as you should. It can elevate into using profanity. It can elevate into you know, rudeness, profanity up through physical and verbal intimidation and threats, and then into violence, and then into extreme violence, which is where someone is unhinged. They’re willing to harm lots of people. So, you know, planting an explosive would be a form of extreme violence because you’re not controlling your violence, you know, specific to one target. An indiscriminate active shooter would be extreme violence. So that whole spectrum occupies disruptive behaviors.

Cathy Langley:

Okay, thank you. I want to make sure we clarified the umbrella that we’re talking about here. Just a quick disclaimer before we continue. Neither Jesse nor I have psychology degrees. We are simply two AP professionals with over probably 60 years of combined AP experience. So, Jesse, as we walk through what happens in the brain as, as you hit a pivotal point, maybe where you say, at this point, maybe we could change behavior, right? Right. That’s what I’m looking to help the audience, help our listeners have a takeaway. So, we know that this activity comes from disrespect, unmet demands, et cetera. At what point can we make a difference?

Jesse Stanley:

Well, I am going to say, Cathy, that we’ve already given them one takeaway, because when you say that there’s combined 60 years experience, one of us has only been in the business for about 15 years. So I don’t know if you meant to expose your age or not there, but I think there’s a takeaway, <laugh>, alright? Sorry! Those are fighting words right there, aren’t they?

Cathy Langley:

Nicely played! Nicely played!

Jesse Stanley:

So, yeah, we, and I would add to the fact that we’re not psychologists. We’re not all that, we’re not researchers. But what we are is we’re explorers, right? We are, and, in fact, our entire industry, is an industry full of people who explore things. We learn about things that we never thought we would learn about in order to solve a problem. That’s what we’re doing here with this brain science. So I’ve been working on trying to understand the brain science of aggression. For years. I’ve been reading articles and, you know, I incorporate into my presentations and my courses in the last, I’d say three to six months, it’s really peaked by interest. And you and I were talking, I had just gone through something, read something, listened to something, and we were talking about this podcast and you said, ‘hey, what do you think about this’?

Jesse Stanley:

And what could we, and remember, I was excited. I was like, oh, we’ve gotta talk about brain science because this is going to make a difference in our industry. Now with that said, I just as an explorer, you know, I have lots of notes, I have lots of stuff that I’m kind of wrestling with. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to just really bring it down to something simple and then let’s start there and and see where that takes us. I’ve got my little my little chart that I’ve been creating about how the brain works in relation to aggression. One of the first things that it does is that we need to understand we’re our brain is taking in information, right? So it’s taking in sights and sounds and touch and feel, and it’s thinking and applying things to past experiences.

Jesse Stanley:

What’s really interesting is that as the brain takes in sight, as it takes in sounds, it’s doing it through separate channels. So this part of the brain that’s in the limbic system is taking all this information in through separate channels simultaneously, and there’s nothing we can really do there with it being independent. But I find that very fascinating. What does affect us where we can impact people is we can impact what the brain takes in, right? So if you think about it, if the brain is taking in this information in order to be processed in just a millisecond about whether there’s a threat or not, we actually at the very front can present ourselves in a way that is not threatening if we don’t want somebody to react as if there’s a threat. In fact, if you go back to our days of interacting with shoplifters…

Jesse Stanley:

I don’t know about you, but I grew up in the business on the west coast and in the LA area, and there were people who would teach things like ‘when you approach a dishonest customer, what you do is you come up behind them and you get in front of them really quick and you gotta take them by surprise.’ Because that way they don’t have time to think. Well, the reality is, all the information we just gave them said threats. Now sometimes, and their argument would be well, yeah, we want to present ourselves as such a threat that we paralyze them, and we all know if we’ve been involved in the business and investigations long enough, that can work. But it’s that very same amount of information that can actually put people over the edge and they go not into freezing.

Jesse Stanley:

They go into fighting, right? And we’ve all heard the two Fs, fight or flight. They’re not all the same. They’re not all coming from the amygdala, which is another part of the brain, but there are four Fs we really look at. There’s fight, there’s flight, there’s freeze, which is what that strategy is all about, and then, this is going to sound funny, but there’s filming, right, which is a whole other discussion. I don’t know if we’ll get there, but those are the four Fs. Anyway, that first part of our brain, it’s taking in information, then it’s sorting this information, and if it sees something that is a threat, it’s saying ‘is it immediate or is it potential?’ If it’s a potential threat, what it does is it goes to the next phase, and this is in the cerebral cortex where it’s basically applying rule sets.

Jesse Stanley:

It’s saying, ‘okay, I remember this. I experienced this. I can navigate this way. If I do this, if I do x, y will happen, and that’s how I’m going to process this threat. Is it really a threat? What should I do?’ It’s really just your brain going off of experience and saying ‘now how do I mitigate this potential threat?’ However, if your brain sees this as an immediate threat, it bypasses the cerebral cortex and goes straight to, there’s a bunch of different words for this, but the autonomic system kicks in. You’ll hear talk about the amygdala. There’s some other parts and pieces that they’ll talk about depending on the researcher. But probably the one that’s most familiar to us is the amygdala, right? Sometimes we call it amygdala hijacking, where your amygdala gets hijacked.

Jesse Stanley:

We’ve all experienced this. We’ve been fearful or something, and we’ve said things that we wish we could take back. Or we reacted in ways that we never even put thought into. Sometimes you see it come out in the form of aggression and anger, and it’s a hijacked amygdala. So the brain takes in the information, says ‘threat, immediate or possible. It’s immediate. I’m bypassing all the parts of the brain that really think, and I’m going straight to the amygdala,’ which is where we get fight, flight, or freeze. Film isn’t coming from the amygdala.

Cathy Langley:

So, not to oversimplify, but essentially something happens and I say, ‘is it immediate or potential?’ And if it’s potential, I go through my normal decision tree based on my experience. If it’s immediate, I react.

Cathy Langley:

I’m just simply reacting. Okay?

Jesse Stanley:

That’s right. That’s good, and now you’re dealing with that aggression, right? And now this is where you’re starting to see the escalation or the escalation is making a big jump, and now you’re in the deescalation process. So the ways we can impact. We can impact the information that they receive, you know, don’t present ourselves as a threat. In fact, one of the principles that we push on a lot is people are less likely to attack an ally than they are an enemy. I’ll say it differently. People are less likely to attack and hurt you and do something to get you mad at them if they think you’re going to help them than they are if they think you’re going to hurt them. So we want to present ourselves as not a threat. We want to present ourselves in a way that we’re not pushing their amygdala to de hijacked in the sorting process.

Jesse Stanley:

Now, this all happens pretty quickly. Actually, in some people though, there is a delay, you’ll see that they are processing. We can sometimes distract their processing. So especially younger children, we all know where we’ve seen children begin to escalate and we can distract them and get them off of that escalation. People who are inebriated with alcohol can be distracted with long-term questions. Get them doing long-term memory recall, and they have a harder time thinking through other things. They have a one track mind. They can only occupy one track at a time, but anybody if you are willing to try is distractable. So we can give them the information we want them to have so they don’t see us as a threat. There’s distracting them from jumping over that cerebral cortex into the amygdala. If they get to the amygdala, now we’re in full deescalation mode right now. This is where we have to kind of undo what we’ve already done. We have get them to wind down, and now we’re in a whole deescalation discussion.

Cathy Langley:

This leads me to a question or a statement. So recently I heard the statement of, I hope I get this right here. You can’t get a person out of a position that you occupy and you can’t get them into a position that you don’t. I sort of took that as you can’t take somebody and get them out of an angry or agitated state if you already are there, if you’re occupying that space, right? Do you agree with that?

Jesse Stanley:

Yes. I kind of agree with the statement and I completely agree with you and your take on the statement. The reason why I kind of agree with the statement is that you and I have been with plenty of people who didn’t occupy a space but were able to get other people to occupy that space because they were liars, right? <laugh> They were manipulators. And so that is a real thing, and we’ve experienced that quite a bit. On the other hand, when it comes to the way you took that statement and paraphrased that, it makes perfect sense. In fact, the principle there is that behaviors are contagious. When you’re engaging with someone and you’re escalated and you’re asking them to deescalate, it actually defies logic just on the face when you think about it.

Jesse Stanley:

But we know science will tell us that that behaviors are contagious. In fact, you know, again it was probably about four or five weeks ago I was reading something along that where there is actually a part of the brain that it is designed to do that. I think they’re called mirror neurons or something like that, or the mirror neuron network, something to that effect. But it has to do with mirroring. And it’s a part of the brain that is designed to actually mirror what they see. That’s part of why behaviors are contagious. Plus the whole other element, when we escalate, we tend to treat people with disrespect, which is a universal demand, and we’ve just started that whole cycle with them. So yeah, I think your take on it is right.

Cathy Langley:

Makes sense. So if I’m a practitioner, asset protection and loss prevention practitioner, regardless of whatever vertical I’m in, what can I do to protect my team, my store associates? is there anything I can do to help them? What can I do?

Jesse Stanley:

My inclination is to start giving you tons of detail. I know that’s not what we’re necessarily doing here. So let me give you a couple of high level thoughts. Obviously, a lot of people listening to this podcast are going to be leaders. If they’re not formal leaders, and if you’re in the asset protection world, you are an informal leader, right? People look to you during certain times for certain things without a doubt. So one of the things we can do to protect our team starts with us as leaders. Think about something called the Palmer Rule. The Palmer Rule is simple. It basically says, if a leader fails to state their expectations, their team will always deliver. Sounds like good news, except the rest of the Palmer Rule says, but what they deliver is highly unlikely to meet your expectations.

Jesse Stanley:

If you don’t give them expectations, they’ll give you something. It just won’t be what you want. So one of the things we can do to protect our team is to be clear about our expectations. How do we expect them to interact with people? How do we expect them to, and this gets into rewards and consequences, which has a lot to do with how the brain works. But what are the rewards and consequences for cooler talk? Do we encourage the ‘war stories’ where they are telling ‘war stories’ about how they use behaviors that we know would actually escalate tensions and escalate behaviors? And we’re like, yeah, that’s great. Or do we discourage that type of ‘war story’ sharing where in fact they’re modeling behaviors we wouldn’t want them to use. The second thing, again, is leadership oriented. It’s based off of Strongside’s unofficial mascot. The unofficial mascot for Strongside is the ibex, which is a mountain goat in the Middle East. Long story short, this mountain goat, the ibex can walk up and down and along cliffs, and you’ll see pictures of them on a dam where they are out in the middle of a dam on a quarter inch piece of concrete, you know, just the lip. They do what seems absolutely impossible. They’re amazing creatures. In our world, that’s what we’re asking people to do as well, right? And so as leaders, how can we mirror the ibex? Well, first of all, we know that the babies basically are able to do these things because they know a better way, right? Their parents have taught them the right paths, because there’s always a path that they take, just like leaders in our industry can actually teach people the path to take.

Jesse Stanley:

Again, it gets back to the cooler talk, the rewards and consequences. We know that the baby ibex follows success. And this is where us as leaders need to model what we expect. We need to model what would actually work. We know that the ibex is taught to watch their steps. In fact, they are adapted to be able to see what’s going on. They have very big eyes. They see a lot. They may not be able to see far and in detail out there, but they know what’s going on right here in an amazing way as they take all these dangerous steps. Well, as leaders, we can make sure that we remember a couple things. Number one, not everyone’s cut out for our role, right? Not everyone is cut out for this industry, and that is an important part.

Jesse Stanley:

That’s not just, oh, they can do the job or not do the job. In today’s world, if you can’t do the job, you are actually working against safety, right? We have have to be situationally aware. We need to be the people who actually are ready to make some difficult calls when bad things happen. Then, the last thing is that the ibex do really hard things. It seems impossible because it’s really hard. And again, as leaders, we have got to call on our people to do what seems hard. Yes, there is compassion, there’s empathy. We can say, we know it’s hard sometimes dealing with these people, and they can really treat you like trash at times. They can be very disrespectful and it’s difficult to navigate these interrelational streets and roads. But we expect you to do hard things. We expect you to do it well and go right back up to the Palmer rule. These are our expectations, and we expect you to follow them. Those two things, if our leaders in our industry adopted those two outlooks, that would actually help make people a lot safer. Now, everything beneath that, we start to get into a lot of detail on how to do things and what to do and not to do,

Cathy Langley:

Right? So that takes us into the boots on the ground, right? The whole training, e experience, affirmation of good behavior, so to speak, or doing things right. So all of those things fall into the training aspect, right? So that’s, thank you so much. Awesome discussion. You know, we joked when we were prepping for this call that you and I could talk forever about our industry and, but we do have to wrap this up here <laugh>, because we could go on forever. In closing, in our professional lives most of us are in this constant state of evaluation and improvement. So I’ve always enjoyed using ‘stop, start, continue.’ One thing you’re going to start, one thing you’re going to stop, and one thing you’re going to continue. From a personal aspect can you share a start, stop, and continue with us?

Jesse Stanley:

It’s a great question, Cathy. That’s a a hard one. So, I think like all of us work and personal are intertwined quite a bit. And this is a hard thing to say, but as a practitioner, one of the things that I’m really poor at and I need to stop doing is I need to stop taking projects that actually distract from far more important projects. I’m extremely blessed. I have the ability to work with companies in ways that really can make an impact in people’s lives. But I also tend to have a hard time saying no to, especially the smaller companies that may have a project that’s just not necessarily what I do. It’s, I can do it, but it’s not where I’d like to spend my time or where I should spend my time.

Jesse Stanley:

So I’ve got to stop taking those projects and start giving those projects to other people who maybe could use that business. And that would be a nice thing for everybody involved. But yeah, I turned it right into business, and you wanted a personal so start. I’ve got a start. You know what I have to start doing? I have to start making time to take my 15 year old camping. He reminded me recently that I haven’t taken him camping since he was, I don’t know, he might have said two, but it was probably more like eight or something like that. And that’s a long time, especially for somebody who loves to camp. So I’m going to start taking my son camping or hunting or something along those lines. Next, continue. How do you answer that? You’re going to have to help me with continue, Cathy, because, any way I say a continue it’s going to sound like I’m braggadocious. I’m going to continue being a great guy!

Cathy Langley:

Well, that might work. That might work. It might be something that you started a few years ago and you’re like, you know what? That’s working for me. Like for me, I’m sitting right next to what I call my dream board. It’s my goal setting, but I used to write goals and then I would stick them in a drawer and now I put them on a board so they’re in front of me all the time. So that’s something that works for me and I’m going to continue doing it, okay.

Jesse Stanley:

I’m going to continue… You know, I used to read a lot, like personal reading and then just with work stuff, again, the profession that goes through seasons of occupying you <affirmative>. But in the last year, I’ve been really making a concerted effort to read something that has nothing to do with work. That is actually enriching to me, and it only happens about once every two or three weeks. But, I’m going to continue doing that.

Cathy Langley:

There you go. See, that’s perfect. So Jesse, thank you so much. Again, we’ve enjoyed this friendship for years now. I just really appreciate the time that you’ve spent sharing your knowledge with us our listeners. So really I appreciate you. Thank you so much.

Jesse Stanley:

Thank you Cathy. And thanks for inviting me on. I sure wish this podcast a ton of success.

Cathy Langley:

Thank you!