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A common task for military and police units is to build a map of a criminal, insurgent or terrorist network that they are targeting. Often done through surveillance (observation), it is through understanding the relationships between members of an organization and identifying sources of information that the required information begins to present itself to build a map.  That is what today’s exercise is focused on.

Click the “More” button to view the exercise.

The Workout

  • Functional skill development tasks.  Assessing Groups.
    • What is the relationship between Person #1 & #2?
    • What is the relationship between Person #3 & #4?
    • What is the relationship between Guys #6/#7 and Person #5?
    • Your choices are: intimate, friends (personal zone), acquaintances (social zone), or strangers (public zone).
  • Application Task.
    • If the person you were surveilling was Person #4, which person in this video would be the best potential source of information about her?
    • Who in the video could help you confirm that the person you chose above is actually the best source of information?
  • Write your answers on a sheet of paper before viewing our answers

[expand title=”View Our Answers”]

  • Functional skill development task. What is the minimum relationship between:
    • What is the relationship between Person #1 & #2?
      • Likely friends, but could be intimate.
      • Reason: Standing side by side in line and in closer proximity to each other than they are to the other people in line.  There is touching of the hair, implying a close, but not intimate relationship.
    • What is the relationship between Person #3 & #4?
      • Likely acquaintances, but could be friends though.
      • Reason: When the video starts, Person #3 has her back to Person #4 and there is minimal interaction during the two-minute video.  Person #3 is also standing further away from Person #4 than Person #4 is standing compared to Person #5 (it appears 4 and 5 are friends/in the personal zone). As Person #4 gets closer and displays dominant cues later in the clip, Person #3 re-establishes the separation.
    • What is the relationship between Guys #6//#7 and Person #5?
      • Likely strangers, but could be acquaintances.
      • Reason: During conversation, Person #5 keeps her back to the guys and doesn’t turn to face them except a couple of time, resulting in her just talking over her shoulder towards them. Separation between them is similar to the social zone (implying acquaintances), but it is towards the end of the video where there is no conversation that causes me to assess them as being strangers.
  • Application Task.
    • If the person you were surveilling was Person #4, which person in this video would be the best potential source of information about her?
      • Person #5. During the video she not only talks with Person #4 the most, but she is also likely a friend of Person #4 as she is observed within the personal zone.
    • Who in the video could help you confirm that the person you chose above is actually the best source of information?
      • Guys #6 & #7. Depending on what conversations they overheard or had with Person #5, they might be able to confirm that yes, they are close friends, or have additional information (especially because they are likely strangers to Person #5).
      • Person #3. While she is either an acquaintance or friend of of Person #4, she doesn’t communicate at all with Person #5, though they are connected through Person #4, making it possible that she could have information about Person #4 and #5’s relationship.
  • Add a comment with the assessments that you made, but that we didn’t make, so that we can check for those assessments and provide feedback on those specific observations.  We will add them to our answers in the post itself for future viewings of the exercise.[/expand]

Enhance The Workout

  • Repeat
    • One of the goals for the exercise was to put the assessment about groups of people into practice in a situation where it shows how it can help inform decisions made on the ground.  The more accurate your relationships about groups of people are, and the more ways that you can pick up on the subtleties that betray the relationship between people, the more quickly and more accurately you can execute this process.
    • For more practice, assess the two guys (#6 & #7), the three girls (#8, #9, and another not numbered), and #10 & #11.  Feel free to leave your assessments in the comments below.
  • Reflect
    • Consider the context for the observations you are making about these groups of people and think about how that could affect the accuracy of your assessments.
    • As it is a line where people are waiting to go to the bathroom in a Port-A-Potty, many people are displaying the uncomfortable or dominant clusters of behavior (indicating a stress response).
    • The situation (waiting in line) is likely influencing those clusters of behavior, which can skew our group assessments because it could cause people to create additional separation from each other or make it hard to confirm our assessments by observing the comfortable cluster.  Additionally, the dominant, submissive and uncomfortable clusters are what we are often searching for to disprove our space-based relationship assessments, but in this case, the situation makes those unreliable techniques to validate what we have observed.
    • So when considering the accuracy of our assessments, I would remain humbly confident in the way we determined these group relationships because we haven’t yet confirmed it.
  • Act
    • Spend some time in your office or at work this week and watch how people interact after a meeting.  Differentiate between the people who are comfortable being in the personal zone (friends) and who maintains the social distance revealing that they are only acquaintances.
    • Mapping your own organization can help you identify the people with the best sources of information as well, it doesn’t only have to be applied for criminals.

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