Verbal Defense and Influence - the international experience

I just got back from a very intense week on the June 2014 Verbal Defense and Influence (VDI) Instructor Certification in Minneapolis, hosted by the Mall of America Security Department. What a week! I had the privilege of becoming the first certified VDI Instructor in the United Kingdom.

I am a fully qualified and accredited conflict and physical interventions training consultant in the UK. Recently here, we have for the first time ever seen a teacher knifed to death by a pupil in her classroom. We have seen yet another BBC Panorama undercover-camera documentary where vulnerable people in a healthcare facility are treated with contempt by the carers looking after them. We have seen yet another story of restraint-related death in a care environment. And now, the police are wearing cameras, in addition to the retail and leisure-premises cameras everywhere.

I have over the years come across elements of a verbal, tactical communications system for managing conflict that was in use all over the USA for the last 25 years. When I went to NHS Conflict Resolution National Syllabus familiarisation seminars, trainers would present models from this system (Verbal Judo) but no-one I ever met or asked was able to tell me that they had been on a training course!

This was grinding at me - I needed find out why people kept leaning on this system for their conflict management programmes! So, this year, after already amassing almost 8 years of full time training experience with teams from all kinds of healthcare, from social care, community groups and security teams, I decided it was long overdue that I go to the source and find out what made this system tick, from the inside. I needed to experience it in person to understand it properly.

A place was registered on the Verbal Defense and Influence course, a hotel and flights were booked, and then the course pre-work began! Wow, from the awesome pre-course online materials onwards, it was already clear that this was a methodology that was going to range deep and wide through the spectrum of human conflict.

Using case studies of real incidents and analyses of how services had changed outcomes for their staff through adopting VDI principles, the preview materials were a wonderful appetiser for the 4 intense days with the master-trainer Gary Klugiewicz and his team at the live training.

Gary has a long and legendary background of tactical training in law enforcement, criminal justice and mental health fields and this became increasingly apparent as we began to move through the compact but powerful 10-concept methodology that he and his group of 30 Vistelar consultants have been evolving. What was just as powerful as his professional experience and personal 'Peace Stories' though, was the experiences he brought from recent training engagements that he had been engaged with: a large urban-transit bus company, a global automotive corporation, a special negotiation unit in diplomatic services.

One thing became clear - this Verbal Defense and Influence system was addressing conflict at a level that was common to a host of different spheres. There were useful and effective elements here that could be applied to our schools, our hospitals, our care homes and our public services.

Although as a trainer I had been exposed to numerous models in the past, here was a very simple, well-defined and usable set of templates for effective communication in the midst of stress. I have talked with countless groups about the Kaplan-Wheeler Assault Cycle: but here were sequences of discourse which specifically addressed the triggering phase of the confrontation. I have introduced hundreds of teams to David Rock's SCARF model of primal influencers of human behaviour: here were the maxims and templates staff could use to address them practically. We learned these templates and then we drilled them, and we drilled them, because even though they are habitual to consummate contact professionals everywhere, this course gave us a format and a space in which to practice them!

One of the exercises, which perhaps I alone in the group found fascinating, was that at one early part of the course, we were asked to choose words from a list which would best describe our attributes. We moved on through several other exercises after this, but it resonated within much of what we covered: What was our sense of self? What could challenge this? When would that challenge force a primal-level reaction from us? What attribute, when insulted, would provoke us to drop our 'Professional Face' and instead show the often tragedy-inducing Personal Face at work?

This method was much more than a series of 'scripted' templates to be applied to this or that situation, instead it repeatedly provoked my sense of Role, my understanding of Listening, my practice of Empathy.

This course repeatedly challenged me to apply its principles as a 'practice' to my personal life, my professional life, my role as a trainer and my role as a colleague.

We talked about Bystander Mobilisation, which sought to empower those who see wrong-doing in their midst to take action against it. How timely, in a world of corporate irresponsibility among adults and bullying amongst school children, because ethical intervention in either domain is likely to save careers, lives and futures.

We talked about Universal Greetings, used to set the context, pace and flavour of an encounter between contact professionals and those they interact with. How appropriate, in a time when effectively communicating with people Dementia or Autism at their pace, at their level, with their permission, is critical to their quality of life and their freedom.

On that point, it needs to be said that in my experience SO many of the issues faced by staff are based on a 'wrong start' with a client, particularly in situations where they must work in close proximity with them - inside that persons comfort zone. How to have a 'good start'? Well, VDI suggests we start with the greeting and setting the tone....a Universal Greeting which answers the universal concerns! Simple, not rocket science, but very much a type of common sense which is perhaps all too uncommon in these days of texting, Facebook and the 140-character Twitter so-called 'communication'!

All of this was practiced in what the training team described as an Emotionally Safe Performance Driven Instruction framework which had our group of hugely varied instructor candidates working together, sharing stories and experiences within minutes and for the duration.

Gary showed a video at the end of the class about how children copy the behaviours that they see their adults modelling for them. Many of the behaviours modelled were not positive ones, and the children learned or copied them from their parents. There were several messages, but the one I took away was the 'ripple effect' mission: what if more people, in more places applied the principles of Verbal Defense and Influence?

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