“Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across.” – Sun Tzu
Today’s post is video heavy. These are generally aimed at law enforcement, works very well for capable citizen too.
George Thompson at Columbia Business School. Diffusing Conflict Through Conversation 1hr 31 min
The Three Tactical Principles 12min 10sec
A scenario in a tavern showing the wrong way first and the Verbal Judo way second 7min 28sec
Verbal Judo is a great technique if deployed properly but it does have some significant flaws. When I say “autopilot” and “unthinking”, in some ways I mean it literally in others it’s a stand in for Thompson’s “Natural Language”. Basically running on instinct and emotion rather than being rational and calculating.
First the good
- Excellent for dealing with people who are thinking emotionally.
- Great against people who are thinking on autopilot and not considering their situation or eventual end goals.
- Great for people who are expecting you to respond to their tactics and insults a certain way. Most people have not been exposed to Verbal Judo and as such this is unexpected. Messes with their OODA loop severely.
- The above categories are easily 80% or more of the population.
- Helps you put your mind in the correct place and thinking tactically before the physical fight, and that the fight begins long before hands on or never is physical. You can easily be the one that loses the fight before it ever happens.
- Prevents the practitioner from thinking emotionally and this may be its greatest value.
- It’s certainly an awesome tool in the toolbox to use, especially when there’s no clear direction to take, especially when someone is being unreasonable. It’s not terrible as a default setting or to feel out a situation.
Now the bad
- Thompson’s opinions are woven into Verbal Judo and are not always necessary to the technique. It is critical to parse these out. It is a challenge because some of these are critical to the technique working. Some are valuable and should be adopted but aren’t really Verbal Judo techniques but are practical applications of the Way. Others become parasitic to the departments that adopt this wholesale and I think warp the officers and operators in unnecessary and unproductive ways.
- Some manifestations of Verbal Judo are almost like a religion with dogma and heresies. Sometimes it is taught this way. Akin to “use this one simple trick and rule the world.” People that practice this way tend to become robots.
- Does not work against people that also know it and use it. Might actually be counter productive. Generally with these people it is unnecessary as they are rational reasonable actors and can be properly reasoned with, understood, and debated.
- Many practitioners are on autopilot themselves and verbal judo becomes a script and they forget how to speak and think with another thinking person (or the practitioner themselves never was a thinking person).
- Verbal Judo’s buttons do not exist in a fully rational person and it induces cognitive dissonance in the recipient and lets them know exactly what’s going on. A new approach must be deployed immediately if the recipient is dangerous.
- Do understand that a key principle of Verbal Judo is making your opponent sound unreasonable and silly to themselves, then giving them the option where they don’t. If they do not care about this, it doesn’t work.
- Some people want to think that if you talk to anyone just right you can preclude violence. This is not true. Some people are intent on violence for violence’s sake, the time to intervene was long ago. These people must be stopped with force, and quickly. Using Verbal Judo and not recognizing the warning signs in the opponent is a recipe for disaster.
- Thompson himself is generally smarter and better thinking than the people he’s using these techniques on. This works well if you generally are smarter than the people you are dealing with. If you’re not, caution must be used when deploying these techniques for many of the reasons above.