Expecting the unexpected!
How SWAT teams operate in extreme situations.
Have you ever asked yourself how SWAT teams manage to react to unforeseen and extreme situations quickly and deal with peculiar or dangerous settings accurately?
For most of us, it is pretty normal that we have well-trained police forces who do their job even in unprecedented situations. When a dangerous situation arises we call these people. They protect us and others. They deal with novel situations that are too serious and unpredictable for most others to handle.
But we seldom ask ourselves what kind of people are under the uniform and how they achieve such feats.
Let’s take a look at it.
Situations that a SWAT team has to deal with are often very complex and dangerous and no situation is quite like the other.
We know it from movies: Heavily armed and well-trained officers arrive at a somewhat normal suburban house after an emergency call and while the car is still moving slowly down the road the officers jump out of the vehicle and each one carries out his/her task. One might think that the officers are communicating with each other in silence, noticing their precision in every move. Every action and every move has to be spot on; otherwise, it can have catastrophic consequences.
For a SWAT team, it is not just experience and training! The antecedents of their response lie deep in the organization and how SWAT teams perceive and train for their missions. In this article, we go into the organizational design that ensures that SWAT teams do their job professionally in any situation and appear prepared for the unexpected.
Every assignment of a SWAT team is distinct from the previous one. This means that a SWAT team is constantly confronted with new situations, even in more routine missions. Of course, planning is everything before every assignment. For example, the team will receive floor plans of buildings, photos or sketches of rooms, aerial photos, and other information to plan every operation meticulously.
But a SWAT mission is characterized by the fact that unexpected situations can happen even in well-planned operations. These are situations in which expectations and reality fall apart. And these situations can be so diverse that you can hardly prepare for them all.
Many sudden surprises can occur at one time. What if the floor plan of the building is wrong? How do you react when there are more individuals at the scene than expected? Or when a team member is injured unexpectedly.
In execution, though, speed and precision are required. The team members cannot discuss an alternative plan during such operations. They can only give each other brief and quick commands.
That's why one might ask: how do you react quickly and appropriately when you can’t discuss a new plan? How does everyone immediately know what the new procedure is after the shock?
Getting something like this done in a split second and under intense pressure requires an incredible amount of discipline, knowledge, and collaboration.
So let’s find out how SWAT teams do it!
A research team led by Beth Bechky and Gerardo Okhuysen has taken a closer look at the mechanisms that make this possible.
Role shifting
At the beginning of a mission, everyone on the team is assigned a specific role. The Marksman lies on the roof of an adjacent building, others secure the site at certain exits, and another team storms the building. The plan for how the building is stormed is also completely thought out. The floor plan is used to plan the order in which the rooms are searched, how the individual members move, who is in front, and who is behind.
So everyone has a very clear task to do. But what happens if someone suddenly can no longer do his or her job?
For example, the planned route through the apartment can be blocked or the furniture makes it difficult for the officers to secure each other's back. What happens if the first person to enter the house can no longer turn right because there is an obstacle and he cannot walk into the room without cover?
The SWAT team can no longer talk because every second counts. What’s next now?
This is where role shifting comes in.
The person who should turn right instead goes left and looks for a vantage point. The next one who now enters the house takes over the task of the first. He/she now goes to the right and is backed by the person who was supposed to open the door.
This quick adaptation to the new situation is only possible with extensive task knowledge. This means that everyone on the team knows exactly what the other team members are doing. Depending on the situation, roles in the team can be changed at lightning speed. The team adapts to the new situation pretty fast.
Reorganizing routines
We now know how SWAT teams keep the operation running if there are sudden obstacles in the way. Of course, more significant things can happen. An example might give a situation where a marksman fires a shot at a dangerous suspect. But that shot missed.
Immediately, this changes the whole situation. You won’t get any further here with a simple role shifting. What now? In this case, each member notices that the situation has changed fundamentally and updates their understanding of the situation. Due to the failed shot, the situation becomes more dangerous than before and quick action is required.
The SWAT team reacts to the situation immediately and the break-in team standing by in front of the house starts to storm the building. The team members remember previous training courses on storming targets and the new situation is clear to everyone.
The house is stormed.
Reorganizing routines is the ability to quickly notice and analyze the overall situation and changes in it. If you notice a significant change in the situation, you adapt the further procedure directly to the new situation and you do not need any further agreements in advance.
Reordering the work and bricolage
The dynamic adjustment of the SWAT team to unexpected situations, therefore, requires a good feeling for the situation and a great deal of knowledge about the tasks of the others. So these are two fundamental factors that enable SWAT teams to react well in any situation.
But there are also other social and cognitive aspects that help officers master special situations. Interpersonal collaboration and the shared understanding of the importance of the task play a major role.
These resources can only be used correctly if people have a shared understanding of the situation. Two important concepts play a role here.
Shared task knowledge and common workflow expectations
Shared task knowledge implies that team members know each other’s tasks and know how they carry them out. This is particularly important if a surprise occurs during a mission and an officer can no longer complete his or her task as a result. It is now easy for someone else to carry out the task without a preliminary discussion.
Common workflow expectation means that the team members are clear about the sequence of their tasks and know which tasks have to be done in order to achieve the goal. If an unexpected event occurs, the SWAT members still know what the goal is and can adapt their activities to achieve the goal.
Since they know what the tasks of the others are and also know which goal should be achieved and which steps are to be taken, the team can dynamically adapt to the situation.
Equipped with these two sociocognitive resources, the SWAT team can react routinely to surprises and achieve the maximum possible with the available resources.
How are these resources created?
But how does a SWAT team manage to develop these skills? How do they come about? To do this, we have to look at the processes that lead directly or indirectly to the development of shared task knowledge and common workflow expectations.
Three processes, in particular, can be traced back to the origin of these resources.
Drafting Agreement on the work
Drafting agreement on the work describes the process of intensive preliminary discussion of a mission. Not everyone is only informed about their tasks and individual goals. Instead, the SWAT team discusses the mission and all individual tasks as a team.
This not only strengthens the knowledge about the responsibilities of the others and explains the process. Team members also discuss the execution and how to best do the mission. So not only does everyone know what the other is doing, but also actively thinks their way into the tasks of the others.
With this approach, the members have already played through the mission from their own and from other perspectives. Everyone is therefore clear about the process and the goals of the mission. Through the discussion regarding the best course of action, the emergency services worked together on the planning and thus have a deeper understanding of the entire operation.
It is precisely this joint cooperation when planning an operation that ensures that resources are built up effectively.
Reinforcing and Elaborating Task Activities
SWAT teams not only discuss their assignments and the tasks that everyone has in detail, but they also train together, including the tasks of other officers. Of course, there are fixed responsibilities in SWAT teams, but in training, everyone sees exactly what everyone else is doing.
In addition, the entire team not only takes time for detailed discussions before and after an assignment, but also before and after each training and, if necessary, during the training, briefings are held again and again. Here the members exchange information about everything that can help others.
Individual special tasks are discussed in the entire team. Experienced members provide newer one's assistance and best practices are discussed. This gives all members a general understanding of the entire resources of the team. This strengthens the common workflow expectation and also the shared task knowledge. The SWAT team, therefore, uses a very intensive form of group training to forge a team of specialists.
Members know what others are doing and how do they do it. During deployment, the individual members can not only take on the tasks of others, they also know how other officers perform their tasks and how long they need to do so. In this way, they also know when others should be finished with their tasks and can therefore know immediately if something is not going according to plan and can adapt respectively.
Building Cross Member Expertise
In the next step, not only should each member know what the other is doing and how they do their jobs. The emergency services should also be given an introduction on how to do the tasks of others. Thus, the knowledge is increased by the tasks of the others.
For example, members swap weapons during shooting training. When a frontline officer shoots a sniper, he gets an understanding of the nature of a Marksman’s duties. In addition, he or she continues to get a sense of what it is like to handle another team member’s equipment and thus better understand how the other team member is performing the task and what the strengths and weaknesses of the equipment are.
One can also see more clearly why each team member is important and how all roles in the team fit together. In this way, each member can get a better picture of the situation and understand which resources are used and how to achieve a goal.
Sometimes it happens that individual officers receive special training. These can be specified for Marksman, paramedics, or explosives training, for example. Of course, not every member of the team will have this training. But when the member comes back to the team after the training, he/she will tell about the experiences from training so that everyone can get an idea of it.
In this way, the members not only stay up to date but also know which resources have been added to the team’s clout. This sharing of knowledge even goes so far that the members even adjust their vacation planning so that everyone is always informed about everything.
With these three instruments, the SWAT team ensures that everyone in the team is always aware of each other’s tasks and that everyone is familiar with the workflows of all processes during an assignment.
Having this knowledge, the SWAT team forms a unit in which all officers can support each other at any time. This also means that unexpected situations during an assignment can be quickly resolved and the goal of the assignment can still be achieved.
Since we now know more precisely how SWAT teams train in order to achieve their goals even under extreme pressure, uncertainty, and surprises, the question remains: Can we learn from this? Can other organizations, such as companies, use these principles to better prepare for crises and special situations?
The answer is yes and no.
The first thing we need to do is look at why this works for SWAT teams. What distinguishes a SWAT team?
A SWAT team has a lower employee turnover rate than a company. The SWAT members have known each other for a long time and are a well-coordinated team, while there is always a little more fluctuation in companies. In addition, the tasks in companies are separated from one another. The employees usually only have a rough idea of what the others are doing.
Further, while a company tries to avoid unexpected situations as much as possible, a SWAT team is precisely about preparing for such situations.
This is related to great time pressure and dangerous missions. This is another factor in which SWAT teams and companies differ, although this is perhaps where the greatest similarities lie. A company also works under time pressure and some investments might also be dangerous. By and large, however, this is about very different types of time pressure and danger.
SWAT teams have missions whose goals are always clear. Should a target be arrested? Should a hostage be saved or is there a terrorist attack? A SWAT team always knows exactly what the goal is. In a company, it looks different and many employees in companies do not care what the company’s goal is anyway. They often know little about the exact steps the colleague has taken to achieve the goal and only read some memos that a certain goal has been achieved.
This largely prevents employees from being able to hand over their tasks to others as dynamically as with a SWAT team. So you can quickly see differences in the organizations that make these principles difficult to apply to companies.
Organizations that are more oriented towards teamwork and mutual team success have more chances to learn something from the SWAT team. One can think of sports teams or research teams, for example. The principle can also be transferred to other authorities, such as emergency services and the fire brigade.
So it is anything but easy to transfer this concept to other organizations and yet it provides interesting insights into the way high-performance and high-reliability organizations react efficiently to surprises in fractions of a second and act accordingly.
