As An Ex-CIA Agent, Here Are 3 Strategies I Learned That Allowed Me to Survive – And That Can Help You Survive in Business

As a former CIA intelligence officer with five overseas tours in dangerous places, I was trained to get off the X to survive an attack. The “X” is defined as the location that terrorists, cartels or criminals have chosen to launch an operation against you. This “X” is the place where the enemy has the advantage and where you are most vulnerable. The training, which mimics a real-life attack, taught me and my agency colleagues to fight the tendency to freeze by pushing ourselves forward through shock, fear, and uncertainty. The concept is basic: freezing will get you killed, so moving gives you the best chance of survival.

Though the stakes aren’t quite as high in business, the concept of getting off the X is equally valuable. To remain successful in business, people must embrace change as a constant. This is widely acknowledged as true, so why is it so difficult to incorporate change culture in the workplace?

Let’s face it: change is hard. It takes time, effort and energy to move yourself, your operations, and your team/company forward. Adopting a change mindset challenges your natural instincts. Being able to act quickly and decisively when under stress is as crucial for survival in business as it is in intelligence, law enforcement and military.

Here are three ways to improve your company’s ability to roll with the punches and not only survive, but thrive in a topsy-turvy world:

1. Diagnose what’s holding you back.
   When the CIA came the closest it ever had in history to identifying the location of al-Qa’ida founder Usama bin Laden (UBL), it was maddening to know he might slip through our fingers because we could not confirm his identity. We were unable to figure out whether the tall guy in the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan—whose face and body couldn’t be seen from any angle—was the most wanted terrorist in US history. This individual became known as the Pacer due to his daily walks back and forth across the compound. He was safely ensconced in his strange villa, and no amount of effort seemed to coax him or anyone else out of the compound. The team tasked with identifying UBL was stuck and step one was to figure out why.

   Before you can get your business unstuck, you have to diagnose what’s holding you hostage to the X. What part of your business is stuck in its old ways, and why? Foundational reasons why we tend to linger in the comfort zone include fear and uncertainty. The fear factor for proposing changes to an entrenched bureaucracy is real. Few enjoy being the squeaky wheel or a voice calling out in the wilderness that things are no longer working.  Furthermore, we hold ourselves back by asking, “If there was a better way, wouldn’t the company already be doing it?” Or the self-defeating assumption that maybe you’re not the smartest or most experienced person in the room, so how could you generate a more efficient process/policy that others haven’t already considered?

2. Harness the power of an Ops Team to generate ideas.
   Similarly, uncertainty with all of its attendant possibilities keeps us frozen, unable to generate a course of action. Analysis paralysis is real and compounded by our unfettered access to information. Instead of being saved by data, we tend to drown in the myriad options without the ability to focus on or prioritize the most important, effective or doable next steps.

   To combat these obstacles, you must design a process that brings people together and liberates them to think differently. The most successful CIA teams knew how to do this well. Group leadership gathered staff from various offices to map out how we might identify the membership of a terror cell, determine the location of the insurgents’ safehouse, or recruit a source with access to al-Qa’ida’s plans and intentions.

   Assembling an Ops Team of case officers, collection management officers, targeters, and analysts of all ages and experience was our secret sauce. We met weekly to prioritize targets, conceptualize operational approaches, assess what worked, and discard the things that didn’t. Managers encouraged a free flow of information. No idea was too outrageous. In fact, we learned quickly that ideas beget ideas. It was preferred to have more ideas than no ideas. Indeed, it was strategies like this that drove investigations and intelligence gathering that ultimately led to the identification of a villa in Abbottabad, Pakistan where Usama bin Laden, al-Qa’ida terror chief turned recluse, had been hiding for years.

3. Mitigate risk by planning for Murphy.
   Finally, once your team has gone crazy thinking of ways to achieve your objectives, you can home in on the best ideas. Intelligence agents prioritize our operational approaches by identifying risks to each strategy and finding ways to avoid or mitigate them. In other words, we don’t hope something won’t go wrong, we assume it will. Intelligence officers know that Murphy will show up in all of his splendor, aka “anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” We know that an operation will rarely go as planned.

   In the Usama bin Laden scenario, this involved understanding that two helicopters would be needed to ferry the special ops team to the site, understanding the possibility of something going wrong with one of the choppers. And indeed, despite mitigating for dozens of risks regarding the transit of officers to and from the target location, the one thing that wasn’t anticipated happened: A backwash of intense heat from the compound walls caused the lead helicopter to crash inside the compound, necessitating the use of the “extra” Chinook to return the successful operators back to base in Afghanistan. The team didn’t freeze when trying to get off the X of an operation behind Pakistani lines. They were ready with a back-up plan and remained flexible and undeterred when the first transportation option went up in flames.

If you imagine the worst-case scenarios, you can avoid implementation of poorly conceived operations and minimize hiccups during the implementation of good ones. There is always risk in moving forward, so updating your expectations means that you won’t give up because something went wrong. You keep ideating and moving good ideas forward until an operation gets you closer to the bad guys or unveils their attack plans. You simply don’t give up until you’re off that X.

Written by Michele Rigby Assad.
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