Podcast – Learning through Failure – Kevin Cyr at Tactical Trauma 2024

Welcome to the St. Emlyn’s podcast. I’m Iain Beardsell and I’m Liz Crowe and you are joining us at Tactical Trauma 24 in Sundsvall, Sweden. And it’s an absolute delight to have Kevin Cyr with us. Kevin, why didn’t you explain who you are and what you’ll be talking about today and at this conference?

Certainly, so I’m with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, I’m currently the commander of one of the emergency response teams, which would be, in American terminology, a SWAT team. So we work just outside of Vancouver, we’ve got a service area of 2. 3 million residents, and I’m not sure how many, Tens of thousands of square kilometers.

We work a very wide area and we’re probably one of the busiest and biggest SWAT teams in Canada and North America. In fact.

Can I just say when Kevin first came in and said, he’s a Canadian Mountie, we all went, Ooh, like that is that’s something out of a TV show. So it’s very exciting for me to have you here.

And Kevin, you’ve come because you had something happen in your service, which you have had to lead your team through. And I think you’ve got quite a few learning points. Would you mind sharing with us what it is that event that led you to be here and has led you to all the things that you’re going to talk to us about today?

Certainly. So I’m tremendously proud of the team that I get to work on. They are one of the highest caliber police special operations units that I’ve come across. I would put them toe to toe against any team anywhere in the world. They’re literally top tier. but the route to get to that is not easy.

And, we face, difficult circumstances under time pressure, that have high consequence. They’re asymmetrical risks to the downside. And we just know that, no one can operate in that environment over a long period of time and win them all. And, so we’ve had a number of events in our, in, in our,existence that have been failures. We didn’t win. We failed. And, some of those events, I call them canon events, they resulted in transformative change for our team. So what I’m going to be speaking at the conference today is essentially how our team approaches the concept of failure when we just, when we don’t get things to line up the way they should and how it’s actually a necessary part of achieving high performance.

Working in healthcare, we probably think we fail on and off most days with not being able to provide the care we need, I know that when we’re talking about some of the instances with you, the failures are significant, not just to your team, but they become international or national news.

Could you just share some of those things with us? So we get an idea of what’s been going on in your service and you’ve had to lead them through.

Sure. So I’m going to be speaking . at this conference on one particular event. and again, I use it as an example when we’re talking, but really it could be anything, the principles are the same, but, several years ago, our team was called to a hostage taking and, pretty familiar story where a deranged gunman takes his ex spouse hostage, putting a capstone on a, ,on a relationship marred by years of abuse. And in that circumstance, after several hours, the situation would come to an end because the suspect yelled out of the bedroom where he was holding a hostage that, the police have five minutes and I’m going to kill her. And we call that a countdown in hostage takings.

And they’re very high risk because they mean that the suspect wants to force a confrontation with the police and that he’s going to do whatever he needs to do in order to make that confrontation happen. So at that point. You usually know that negotiations are going to be futile and you have to affect a more dynamic entry to do a rescue attempt.

And so in this case in particular, during that rescue attempt, the police, we, one of our team members actually shot and killed the hostage, which is the absolute epitome of failure. Now look, it was an incredibly difficult situation. you had, dust from explosions, you had cluttered rooms, you had, the suspect holding the hostage in human shield and pushing the hostage towards the police.

You had just, in any event, when you line up so many different variables and you have two or three of them go wrong, you can have a tragic outcome and that’s what happened on that day. And as you said, it, it’s not a private failure. It’s, it’s made known to the world,and it’s the news and word gets out in the, the operation community.

So we’re getting calls from contacts saying, ‘what happened? How did that go down?’ And you could probably run us through that scenario another thousand times and it would never happen again, but on that day, that’s how it happened. And, that’s, in our world, killing a hostage is the epitome of failure does not get worse than that is a failure of the highest magnitude.

And I think it’s worse than just, oh, my best wasn’t good enough today, and I couldn’t, I couldn’t win. It’s no, our actions actually caused the failure. We did the opposite of what we were trying to accomplish. And it hit the team really hard. And, and it reverberated for a very long time.

What a devastating thing for the whole team, like heartbreakingly devastating. Do you then also like it’s public knowledge, but do you also have all those internal forces like we would in health where there’s investigations and people taking statements so that people feel like they’re being scrutinised and judged, I guess, for want of a better word, by their own in those internal processes. Is that part of the struggle for you guys as a team as well?

 In any case, really, we’re exposed to four different oversight processes whenever there’s a fatal police use of force for anyone, whether it’s an inevitable outcome of, something, or in this case, an innocent person getting tragically killed.

 There’s a criminal investigation. So the police actually get . investigated and if we found that you dramatically acted inappropriately, you could face some criminal consequence. There is, an internal agency review. There’s a coroner’s inquest, and then, there could also be,some civil liability court cases stemming from it as well.

Now anytime our agencies or our team is involved in a shooting, those four things come to bear. And so it’s a different thing. Like we’re used to it where it’s we know we did the right thing, but there needs to be transparency in this process and we respect that and expect it. But you still feel like, Hey, I did the right thing, I put my life on the line, and if I had to, shoot a bad guy, that’s, sometimes that’s how things happen. Now, why am I getting questioned? That’s difficult, but this is different because it’s like the thing that happened isn’t what you want it to happen. You didn’t do the quote unquote right thing. Like you, you did the right thing, but that’s not, it’s not, it was not the intended outcome. So I think it has a different, when you fail. It has a different flavor than when you succeed in an assessed, it’s a failure in assessed. I think it has a, an extra bite to it.

Can I just take you back to when it first happened? In the moments after it’s happened, there’s obviously a lot going on. There’s a lot of noise. You’re leading a team. We sometimes have this in resuscitation when you’ve had somebody die and you’ve tried your best and you can’t look after them wherever that might be pre hospital, critical care, emergency medicine.

How did you manage the first four to six hours after this event has happened, particularly with the officer who’s involved or the team of officers? What’s the first thing you felt you needed to do?

 So to be clear, I wasn’t at that call, nor was I the commander of the team at the time. I came back to the team to command it shortly thereafter and was still dealing with the reverberations.

 When that call happened, I was working for the commanding officer of the division and my buddies on the team because I had been on the team before and I’d left just shortly before that. word gets around quickly what happened. So I found out about it. So actually the first thing we did is I grabbed the commanding officer and we went down to see the involved officers who at that time, still had blood on them from, the medical interventions that they had tried. It was, hours after the event, and they had already been working about 24 hours by that time. so I think the first thing is something we always try to do is just offer that unwavering support. The fact finding is going to come later, the reporting is going to come later. It’s like, how can you convince someone who, everyone knows what happened. How can you convince someone like, hey, we’ve got your back, things don’t always work out the way we want them to, but we’re not going to look for a scapegoat on this. We’re with you And you can do that. You can do that without it coming across as, trying to pretend nothing bad had happened, right? Like it’s a different thing, but I think that support is absolutely crucial. And here’s the thing you said between the four and six hours. Everyone knows hey, like how’s everyone doing four to six hours after 24 hours after 36 hours That’s when people start forgetting and what you don’t want is the one guy who’s involved who maybe you know He’s a single guy or something. He’s gonna go home to a quiet house and be by himself with his thoughts. After 48 hours the events over three other calls have come in right? We’re on to other things How do you maintain that perspective when, the, I guess the urgency of the freshness of it wears off. I think that’s the bigger challenge.

I think you’re right in that we’re very good when things happen aren’t we? And you just remind me, it’s not quite the same, but when you have a child, everybody’s all around you for 48 hours, aren’t they? And it’s two weeks down the line where you’ve had no sleep and the child is crying and you just want somebody to bring you a meal so you can eat properly. That’s the time you need people the weeks after things have happened. So you’ve managed the initial incident. You’ve been there beside your commander, you’ve gone and offered unwavering support. And I think in healthcare, that’s something we should be able to do better to say, we believe in you. We know you tried your best and did the right thing.

What happens two, four weeks later, all the other stuff’s going on. How do you keep that team going?

The difficult thing for a senior commander particularly as you go higher up in the organization, you’re more and more insulated from that traumatic event; new emergencies are coming across your desk, it’s easy to forget them. And I remember, just a little while ago, I was dealing with a team. wasn’t my team, it was another team. They had a significant shooting event and they were saying, Hey, this is like our third one in a few months. where’s our senior commanders?

They haven’t come by at all. And so I went to their senior commander who I know and I said, Hey, these guys aren’t feeling supported. And he said, I sent them an email.

Yeah.

It’s yeah, you know, but he’s busy. It’s not like he’s ignoring them. Like to him, that was a well, I sent them an email what, what more do they want?

It’s you need to,

It’s visibility.

You need to be there, invest in some time and it’s you don’t have time to do it. Nope. You absolutely don’t. You’re going to make time. You have to. So set your timer, set your appointment, three weeks, four weeks, six weeks, and you have to make that investment.

The cost, if you don’t make those investments are substantial to the organization. That’s how you start losing people, and I don’t have the studies in front of me, but my suspicion is that moral injury from organisational apathy is more damaging than the actual trauma of the events I’m sending my guys to because they’re trained for those things.

In fact, a lot of times they’re grateful. after a shooting. They don’t look for them, but they’re grateful for the opportunity to know whether or not they were up to the task because they’ve spent years training for it. It’s like they, so they’re okay with the event. It’s the thing after that’s the part where we’re losing people.

I have loved so many things that you’ve said. So some of the things that I’m going to pick up on is this visible leadership. Yeah, you’re busy, but it’s like people don’t understand that if you can give two hours on a Wednesday, it’s gonna save you in months of heartache when someone takes a worker’s compensation claim against you, or a psychosocial risk hazards legislation, or you lose someone who has been an invaluable talent and team player because they’ve become so disillusioned by what you have failed to do in the aftermath. Because I think what you’re saying is true, In your forces, just like in health, we train often for these events. They may not happen often, but when they do, people are trained for them. But what happens afterwards, like coming down from adrenaline, you cannot possibly expect these people’s partners, families, parents, next door neighbours to understand what was just asked of them or the way that they may make sense of them. That has to come internally, because if I have been trained to take out a perpetrator, if need be, and I have done that successfully, it’s unpalatable for people, for me to go to dinner on a Friday night and say, I shot someone dead and I saved lots of people and I feel really good about that, because people are going to be like, you’re a sociopath. but it’s that sense making. There’s a cultural sense making that I don’t understand about the Canadian Mounties, just like you may not understand that kind of thing for me. Organisational apathy is the word you used and the harm that it does, the moral injury it does because they are the one group of people who are supposed to get it and reinforce what you did.

 You can look at it two ways. Now I spent most of my career thinking this emotional support stuff was like, who has time for that? And let’s just get on with the job. It’s just not how I’m wired. I now realize the impact of it, but because I’m not originally wired that way, the way I can also look at it. and I think you need to look at it this way is on a return of investment. How much do you have invested in these specialty resources? And if they only stay for a 5 year career rather than a 10 year career. you’re having your return on investment. So even if you want to say you don’t care about that stuff, about emotions, which is fine, say that if you want, but you have to care about what the operational impact of this is going to be. And these are not mutually exclusive ways to look at it. You can look at it in both ways and they’re both equally important.

 I’m a big fan of debriefing to learn. Not psychological debriefing, but debriefing to learn. And so one of my hypotheses that is really hard to measure is that after an event in health, there can be some real distress.

We can feel really sad about outcomes or we’ve accidentally killed or harmed someone, caused them to go to ICU, or we’re just really sad we had to bear witness to something that was really tragic. But where a lot of that moral injury or angst comes from is this little thought in the back of our mind is if this had been a different team, this had been led by someone differently today, could we have had a different outcome?

And so for me, the debriefing starts with first of all, what the hell happened? Let’s get on the same page. Let’s make sure we’ve all got the same understanding, because we may have seen things from quite a different perspective. And the second thing is, is there something that actually went well in all of this, and how do we reinforce and grow on that?

And then where are the opportunities for learning? Because if you can, we call it name it to tame it, okay, someone has been killed. We all know that, that feels horrible, but the only thing worse than that feeling is that concern that we could do it again if we don’t deep dive into that and then actually put things in motion around that.

I’d love to know what you think of that process, about being able to say what needs to be said in a group that, that is not going to judge you and you can be honest.

You’ve laid out exactly what our standard debrief protocol is after every call. Did we achieve the mission, what went well, what could have we done better, those three things.

Now, when you have a significant failure, there’s a major impediment to getting to that process. And that is, and you just said it, you said, Hey, aren’t you guys put under the microscope on this. So you have all these processes in place. So we’ve got, an agency internal review, we’re getting looked at by the coroner’s inquest. We have all these processes and you have to, as the leader, have to protect your organisation. You have to be able to put hand on heart and say that you did everything you could to resolve it successfully. And it was the uncontrollable variables that determined the outcome. And in our case, that’s exactly what all of these, inquiries and analysis found is that, the tragic outcome of this event was solely because of the suspect’s actions.

 The easy thing to do is to hide behind that because now you’ve got this external review saying, Hey, look, we didn’t do anything wrong. We did everything right. it was just these uncontrollable variables. The hard thing to do is to say, Yes, that is true. Also, we let ourselves be more susceptible to those uncontrollable variables than we ought to have, and I use a hockey analogy, which I’m in Sweden right now, so I can do this safely.

 You can’t complain that you lost the hockey game because of a bad bounce of the puck in the last minute of the seventh game of the series, right? It’s like why did you leave it to the last minute of the seventh game of the series? Like you lost that game well before that. So what can we do to be less susceptible to these uncontrollable variables?

 I could be wrong, but the Canadian Mounted Police sounds like a pretty macho environment. Do you think the world is changing where men, particularly, are able to talk about this sort of stuff without fear of being laughed at by their contemporaries and this is more acceptable. You mentioned that in times gone by, you didn’t really see this as, as important as you do now, and I think we’re all trying to understand that talking about your feelings and admitting when things are tricky is okay.Is it okay in your environment to be vulnerable? How do you encourage that in that environment where vulnerability may or may not have previously been seen as a weakness?

I guess we’re lucky in that on our team because and I’m not saying that 63 guys all get along all the time and we’re all best friends, but we all trust each other. So it’s a high trust environment and we select for high emotional intelligence. And we select for humility. So I think, what we’re talking about is actually, The humility to know when to ask for help.

One of the exercises we run for a youth, there’s a little youth camp we do for, youth athlete teams, and I’ll give them a heavy sandbag, an unreasonably heavy sandbag, and there’ll be a team of four of them. And I’ll say, you have to run around, the football field four times.

And so what do they all do? They all each take one lap around carrying the bag. And it’s guys, why didn’t, the bigger guy take it for longer than the smaller guy? It’s because they don’t know how to ask for help, right? So one of the things we look for is the people who offer help to someone struggling, but the bigger trait is asking for help.

Because the person who asks for help is going to be coachable, they’re gonna be humble, they’re gonna be willing to take on various tasks, they’re the better teammate generally. So I think exactly what you’re talking about is if I’m struggling, I need to ask for help. And if someone on my team is struggling, I need to offer help.

 Our team is, I don’t know if it’s unique, but we’re very open about this stuff, like very open about. Hey guys, we had a bad call the other night and I’m going to be honest with you like it was just running through my mind all night long and all, and I haven’t slept and I need a couple of days, and that support is offered.

And if you dragged yourself to work and someone noticed that you. were bothered by that call and didn’t take the time off. They’re going to be upset. Not that you’re bothered, but that you didn’t take your time off and they’re going to push you for that. Now, having said that, I do think we must be careful.

I think we’ve raised a generation in our, in my environment of police officers telling people you’re going to be emotionally damaged by this incident. And you don’t

want to kiss you right now. Like honest to God, are we not teaching people not to cope? Like we are hardwired to cope and we keep saying to people You’re not going to be able to cope with this and so therefore they find it hard to do. I’m sorry I interrupted you but is the better way to approach this is like this could be tough. This could be tricky. You could have invasive thoughts That is all a completely normal reaction to an absolute abnormal event which is normal for your work.

That’s exactly it. Here’s what to expect and we expect you to get to work through it. Not be at work all the time, like you take the time you need, but at some point, you need to just get on with the job. Telling someone they’re going to be a victim, it, it’s not a good thing. Like it’s like we, we overcorrected, I think. And now I see in the last few years, we’re getting back. Yeah, here’s what you can expect. And that’s what we all signed up for.

So

yeah,

let’s go.

And for me, that’s the last part of a debrief. I go, okay, guys, let’s be realistic. This was bloody awful. This is confronting. This is beyond what we were expecting at work today. These are the things that I think might be normal. If you cry normally in an advertisement, you’re probably going to be very teary. If you haven’t cried for a long time, and you do cry, that could be quite normal. confronting and frightening to you, it does not mean that you’re damaged for life. If you find it hard to sleep tonight, I would see that as a completely normal response. If you’re a comfort eater, okay, be very careful how much chocolate and sweets and things you consume tonight. If you’re a drinker, this could be very tempting for numbing. None of these things work long term, If you’re still worried about this in a couple of days, reach out. But it means particularly with our junior staff, they get to go, okay, I don’t need to panic. They said this could happen. And so even that is calming for our brains.

That’s exactly the direction our agency has been going in. And I remember like in 2015, I was involved in a, in incident. We had a similar story, but different outcome was a guy, went to his ex wife’s house, shot her new boyfriend. He was bleeding in the house. He took everyone else hostage, but they were able to escape. And so we went in to rescue the injured boyfriend. And when we went in, two of my teammates who are right in front of me shot him and then he shot himself at the same time. I was like, that was interesting, like a very high impact event.

When they’re launching the rescue, you’re like, Oh, I wonder, we’re going into this house to get into a gunfight with a guy who knows we’re coming. He probably knows what door we’re coming into and he’s going to be hiding and waiting for us, which is exactly the case. So that night I went home and I didn’t know what to expect and so I’m gonna go for a workout. So I went and ran hill sprints until I, nearly puked. And my thought process was this will get this movie reel out of my head. But as it was explained to me, he’s no, you actually just managed to replicate, your physical.

You kept yourself in a high stress environment just physically.

Yeah. But I think this is important because I think, We’ve often got a toolkit, right? And to date, and I’m going to be very, stereotypical and say to date, lots of men would go, okay, exercise works for me. So I’ve had a bad day. I’m just going to run this out.

I’m going to

run it out, exactly run it out. I’m going to run it.

I’m going to run out all this pain. It’s just going to go away. and that might work for years. It can work under all sorts of circumstances and then this one case, and sometimes it’s not even a high impact case, it’s just something that caught you off guard or made you feel vulnerable or made you think about yourself in a different way and the running doesn’t work and you think. I got nothing else Oh my God. And then people start to panic. Whereas if I think if we can start saying to people, you’re going to need this whole range of tools to do this. And even having that whole range of tools at some point, you may have an event. For me, it was 2019. It put me on my arse. I had to go into therapy for the first time. I had to really think hard about, could I continue to work in critical care, and I got there, but it was a long process of hard work and I think I’ve come out more resilient for it, but I was lucky that I didn’t see a therapist who went, you’ve got PTSD and you’re screwed, get out and go and be a florist. I’m just lucky because I think we do have lots of people dabbling in this and trying to tell people like us who do very weird work in comparison to the general population, how we should be feeling when they actually have no clue about how weird our normal is.

So you hit on something that I think is very important. And I think it’s necessary to realise that some people, get into the work and they are going to be utterly destroyed by some high impact event and they’re not going to be able to recover. We didn’t have that on this event our hostage taking where we had lost the hostage, but we’d had on our previous event, and I’m going to anonymise this quite extensively, so I apologise if it’s a little, without detail, but we had a few of our operators involved in a shootout with a suspect, he was an armed suspect who was, like, shooting at police, and he was wanted on a range of murder files, and from that event, a couple of the operators were totally fine. Like they did what we expect them to do. They were like, I’m going to process this. I’m going to realise that this was an expression of what I’ve been training for at the highest level and we were successful that day if we weren’t involved in that shooting, that guy was going to kill other people. He had a hit list and he wasn’t through it yet. Another one of the guys was just like, I don’t want to say destroyed, but he left the team, he left policing and he never came back to it and it’s like, why the different results from people who all had the same training and I think the one of the answers to be found is in selection. So it’s a mistake to think that high skilled people all have the same desire for high impact events, right?

If I’m a really good hockey player, which I’m not, but if I’m a really good hockey player, I’m dreaming of having the puck at the end of my stick in the last minute of the game. There’s other people who are really good hockey players who are quietly praying that never happens. That the puck doesn’t come anywhere near them, but we’re in the same team because we’re both highly skilled and we haven’t selected for that.

And then when that person actually gets the puck on the end of his stick, sure he might score and be successful. That might still result in his emotional destruction because he went to, he had to go to a place that he was hoping would never happen. Yeah. And then if it’s failure, it’s even worse.

 So how are we selecting, how are we designing our selection process to eliminate the allure of the job and the glamour of it and exposing people to the actual reality of it It’s like people say everyone wants to be on the SWAT team until it’s time to do SWAT team stuff, you know It’s like at 3 in the morning when it’s been raining all night and you’re bored because most of our files nothing happens. Nothing notable happens. Like it’s not cool. Like it’s not fun at all. Yeah, so

and can be boring I think what you’ve just said is really important. I think we’re seeing this a lot in medicine to be a doctor used to be the most glamorous, highly, valued occupation in the world. And so lots of people wanted, I think, are attracted to it, but then the reality of what being a doctor and particularly in our systems, the way they are now When I first started in medicine, like if the doctor could come in and say, do this and people just did it, they were like gods. And now people come in and they’re like, you know what, doctor, I googled that and that’s not what it said. And my mother in law said, if I just ate more cayenne pepper, this would, like people are back chatting. People are swearing. People are being, like the whole thing has changed. And wanting to be in the job. Across the whole gamut of what that includes it’s not for everybody and that’s exactly what you’re describing

And so that’s it. It’s not for everybody So one of the things we focus on in our selection process which has about an 80 percent failure rate is how do we provide people the opportunity to remove themselves out like self selection out is the most powerful selection tool possible. How do you provide an environment where people can do that without any shame without any regret without any embarrassment?

And while we maintain the relationship with that person because they’re still gonna be a police officer In fact, they’re going to be our clients. They’re the ones who are going to be calling us when they need help with something So it’s that how do we get them to say this just isn’t for me? thanks.

I really enjoy being exposed to this and we look forward to working together in the future That’s hard to do because a lot of people want to create a selection process that elevates them to the highest and puts down anyone who can’t make it and it’s not it at all just hey these are different things and you’re not this is

and you can be amazing police officer in a different environment just like how you could be in a different area of medicine or still take those skills and transfer them elsewhere

Yeah, like i’m saying i’m sure if I wanted to be a doctor There’s a difference between being in the E.R. and being a research doctor.

Oh, yeah, how do you find the one that’s To you. I watched ER back in the nineties. So that looked super cool. I want to go do that. It’s probably not super cool all the time. It’s and

most people don’t look like George Clooney. Disappointing. Disappointing, but very true.

Kevin, there’s so much I’ve taken from listening to you talk, and there’s just one thing I wanted to just come back to . Your talk title talks about leadership and we bang on so much about leadership, but I think what you’ve been describing at points is followership and teamwork.

How do you think you select within your team for people who aren’t just leaders, but can also be team members and followers where they can work together? Because part of the time, I think we struggle to, to not accept that we can be followers. And that is good enough.

 Yeah. I think one of our tricks, if we have any, is that we differentiate between rank and role.

So we’re a rank based organization, on our team. I am the highest rank. That doesn’t mean I am always in charge. So if, the person in charge generally goes to whoever has the greatest subject matter expertise in that event. Like you want to delegate that, that down. Now look, I’m always going to be responsible for what happens, I’m always going to be accountable for what happens, but that doesn’t mean I always have to be the one who’s making all the decisions. And I don’t want to control my team as if they’re chess pieces on a chessboard and I’m the chess master moving them around. We want to grant as much autonomy as possible.

 One of the things I think is cool is, for our team that we’ve got, our team is comprised of essentially three platoons of 17. I will often see one of our for, just ’cause it’s easy, I’ll use the, it’s not what we call them, but they’re the team commander or the platoon leader, if you will, in charge of 17 people, work like the lowest ranked job, which you know, would be, and I’ll do it myself. I’ll go down and containment point. If I’m not running that call. I’ll be the guy in the back of the house. If he runs out, I’m with the dog, man. I guess I’m chasing a dog. That’s my job. It’s the lowest ranked job. No one really wants to do it. And I’m working for potentially one of the more junior members on the team.

So we differentiate between rank and role. And I think when you see people do that, like at the highest rank, it just becomes natural for everyone to do. And so it’s expected that. It’s expected that you do that.

I think, I could, we could talk to you all day, but it, we probably need to wrap up, but I think some of the real take homes for us in health,this whole thing about the culture, I guess what you’re talking about, the leader is, stay on the tools.

Stay close to the people so that you understand what they’re doing. If an event has happened, be visible, be present, make the time, doesn’t matter what the cost is because you’ll gain that back, that investment back a thousand times over, than if you don’t. You don’t make that investment and I said to you before, I’d heard the term like intelligent failure and I think, you’ve been describing that where, we, despite best intentions, failure is inevitable in these complex dynamic situations, and when things go wrong, it’s really, easy sometimes to blame those external variables, which we can also have.

 Intelligent failure and intelligent leadership and fellowship is about saying, okay, but where can we make the changes so that we’re not so susceptible to those external variables in the future.

So if I were to offer one closing thing and the biggest lesson that we learned from our event was that failure is a necessary part of growth. It’s not just something to get over, it’s something you get better from. And I’ll give you an example. Three years after our event, where we lost the hostage, we would be tested again. So it was a very similar story where a guy took his ex wife and toddler hostage, at gunpoint.

And the risk assessment was such that we knew he was not going to surrender. He was going to kill them and then kill himself and he just wasn’t finished prolonging the event for his victims yet. So in that event he had, after several hours he was actually tracked to a remote construction site where he was holed up In a a construction trailer.

I don’t know if that translates like a little temporary construction office that they’re using at the work site because he used to work there. And the team surrounded the, surrounded the trailer. They kept their position covert, but in that event, they were able to do things on that event, which resulted in the successful rescue of both hostages in a far more difficult dynamic situation than the original event.

And it’s it wasn’t just like the original event, except we did it right this time. It was the application of a skill set out of different order of magnitude. It was a fundamental transformational difference in the skill set that was brought to bear. But those skills would not have been developed if it wasn’t for our failure event.

And it really, you might want to get away with hoping you get lucky and never fail. You’re going to, if you’re putting yourself in difficult situations, but it’s going to be for the better in the long run for your program development. But that’s a hard lesson to, it’s a hard lesson to learn.

But surely it’s a harder lesson to have a failure, fail to learn and do it again.

That’s unfathomable.

Kevin. Thank you again for talking to us at St. Emlyn’s. It’s been an absolute honour and there’s so much to take from this. I’m sure our listeners will have taken huge amounts from it too, and we’re really incredibly grateful to you. thank you so much. Thank you.