In Complex Environments, “Listen To The Hairs on The Back of Your Neck”

In our inaugural “Training Leaders” series, Andy Thompson visits Erbil, Kurdistan, to speak with Charlie Mayne, Managing Director of VSC Security. We talk about bespoke training that enables organizations, and people, to operate with greater levels of confidence in the “complex environment” of Northern Iraq.

Who are VSC and what Training Services do you provide for whom? 

VSC has been operating in Iraq, primarily the Kurdistan region of Iraq, since 2006, initially almost exclusively a security company, but we were doing, and have continued to do, a significant amount of internal training within the company – so we decided to offer training services to other organizations.

For our corporate clients we undertake Driving, Security Management, and HSE training. Our primary focus for our training is in the NGO or CSO sector, where we provide Hostile Environment Awareness Training (“HEAT”) and we have quite a breadth of NGOs that we run through our courses, which are undertaken on the ground in Iraq and at our purpose-built training location.

What’s your assessment of the market, currently?

The state of the market at the moment is that there is no market, primarily because we’re in a location where our clients are required to go out and move to deliver their services. They simply haven’t been moving. On the positive side, we are in the process of confirming dates with three organisations who will be running HEAT, security management and driver training in the next six weeks. So there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Let’s hope it’s not a train!

So, in the short term at least, the outlook is starting to show signs of positivity after the obvious slow-down we’ve experienced.

I think it is positive. I think people will go back to travelling, in particular. When you take companies that have a need to deploy personnel, they will definitely go back to doing the jobs that they’ve been doing or providing the services that they’ve been doing previously, and I expect that will return as normal, so they will need to prepare drivers, prepare security managers and prepare their staff to be able to operate in the sort of environments that we teach them to operate on.

Can you describe those environments in more detail?

It’s “hostile environments”, but actually we prefer to think of it as a “complex environment”. So, it’s the type of place where you’re transiting into areas where maybe not everybody is your friend or where things have the ability to escalate. There may be significant numbers of security force checkpoints; a low but tenable risk of kidnap or – possibly, a better way to put it would be – being held against your will. So the sort of companies that we deal with are often going and working with local communities or are moving through local communities, and it does happen, on occasion, where people can be retained in order to create a lever in some way within the community, or for politicians that are powerful within the area. So, we’re helping people navigate the difficulties and increase their awareness of the dangers within what we call “complex environments”.

There are a number of providers operating in Kurdistan. What sets you apart from your competition?

We’re quite localised in our approach. Obviously, the Kurdistan region of Iraq isn’t massive. It does have a lot of organisations operating here with both expats and local personnel. So one of the things that I think differentiates us from the competition is the fact that we’re actually here – that we don’t just simply understand the training that we’re delivering, but we also really, genuinely, understand and live, ourselves, within the communities that these people are going to be operating within.

We’re also certified. So we’re a Highfield certified centre. There aren’t many training providers that can do that. And we’re also lucky enough to have quite a large training location that has open areas, classrooms and some really great facilities to train our clients. Many other elements of our competition will deploy a training team into country:  they’ll rent hotel rooms, and so on, and that approach lacks the breadth of experiential element to the courses. They can be a bit dry.

What sort of standards are you adhering to, formally or informally, when delivering training?

Our HEAT courses approved by Highfield so it’s an accredited course. I wouldn’t say that there’s a standard as such, but we’ve leaned heavily on learning from the myriad of information out there that is aimed at NGOs. So, for instance, the ICRC has a large library of security related information for NGOs and the NGO council, and the United Nations. And so that’s where we take our training evolution. The challenge for us, at the start of delivering external courses, was to take what we were doing internally with our own personnel and make sure it was genuinely right for our clients. We still, for every course, sit down and carefully go through the syllabus to make sure that what we’re actually delivering is as close as possible to what the client wants.

One of the key things we’ve learnt, and that people really benefit from, is this idea that good neighbours make good security. We’re not teaching tactics or techniques that are about how you get on the front foot if something goes wrong. We’re teaching people how to see an incident coming, how to diffuse the situation and how to make sure that they have the “social licence” to operate within the places that they’re going to. That’s absolutely key to what we tell people.

Have you seen that approach change or evolve over the years? What have you been doing in terms of innovating your training?

It’s a difficult one, when you’re client-led. I pause to call it “innovative”, but we keep abreast of how things are evolving, and the evolution for us as a company comes from working with corporate clients who invariably can have quite a fixed view of a traditional protective security detail, with a number of big vehicles, guys with guns rolling through with an almost militaristic approach to things. But as we’ve expanded our training services and sought to deliver the training to external companies that don’t have that kind of viewpoint, then we’ve taken on a more NGO based approach of “good neighbours make good security”.

What do you see as your core challenges?

One of the biggest challenges we face is simply with engagement. It’s difficult to predict how the attendees on a course have got there, and so that is one of the things we start every course with – asking questions such as:

• What do you want to get out of this?
• How did you end up here?
• Are you a volunteer at this is point?

We try and get that conversation out the way early and then we just make sure that it is as experiential as it can be. So, if you’re stood at the front of the classroom and you’re droning on and giving people information, then that’s just not an effective way to engage them. And so that’s what we really work at, but it continues to be a challenge – as the old adage goes: you can lead a horse to water, but sure can’t make it drink.

What has been the biggest impact you’ve seen as a result of your training services? Where have you failed and what have you learned from that?

The biggest impact is actually just engaging people with their situation, and it’s often the little things we get feedback on – like advice to carry a door wedge in your bag so that when you’re in a hotel room you can jam underneath the door if you need to. It’s little things like that, and making people aware that when they get into a situation, they should actually be thinking about how they would get out it if it goes wrong. Trying to be aware of not just the person you’re talking to in a meeting, but also the kind of feeling in the room. In some ways the successes we’ve seen is teaching people to take their head out of their phones, or elsewhere, and encouraging them to listen to the hairs on the back of their neck.

We’ve had a lot of good feedback that said “I went somewhere and was looking at something and I remember from your course and it just didn’t feel right, so we rushed through the meeting and got out of there”. Nothing dramatic. Maybe nothing was going to happen. I can’t say for sure. They didn’t say for sure. It’s that sort of thing. Where you have impact is convincing somebody to look out for themselves and helping them make a better decision as a disruptive event starts to unfold or is actually unfolding.

… Because you’ve certainly had some disruptive events in Kurdistan over the years, that’s for sure!

Well, inevitably – and this is actually a sort of corporate commercial example, but – it doesn’t really matter how much you talk about security, when people discover that the Islamic State is pushing down the road to Erbil [as they did in 2014] they’re inclined to panic. We don’t always get it completely right, but sometimes you’re relying on your guys to be saying to people: “You don’t need to swim across the river. We’re going to get you out. Just give me two minutes, the vehicle is here”. So those are the kind of situations where you think you can train all you want, but at that point, when the shit hits the fan, there will be some people who just panic.

In terms of lessons learned, an example I can pinpoint as one we had early on was not tailoring our courses to focus sufficiently on the specific issues that women often face and that led to some pretty bad feedback which was entirely fair. They were totally right and their feedback allowed us to fix this element and ensure following courses were much more inclusive. We now have a much better approach to gender and how that can impact the threats and issues that people need to be prepared for.

When companies are scoping training providers, what do you think they should look out for, specifically, or (perhaps, more importantly!) avoid?

Two things I’ve talked about – firstly, certification makes a difference. If a company can be bothered to get their training capacity certified externally, then that creates a level of certainty from a due diligence perspective. I would also warn against any company that is inclined to say, “OK, so we know all about hostile environments or we know all about driving in a given situation, so this is the course we’re going to deliver and this is the course you’re going to get”. A provider should be open to what an organisation or an individual wants to get from the training and so it’s about being careful that you’re getting a two-way conversation with your training provider and that they are happy – keen – to get the information from you and make sure their course is right for you or your organization. Ultimately, particularly around the edges in training, as far as I’m concerned, it’s always slightly different depending on the audience.

Does that advice change for individuals, for prospective candidates who are going on the training, rather than the companies who are investing in (buying) the training?

An individual is unlikely to have the leverage to get bespoke training unless its one on one. But any organisation that can’t provide you with the curriculum, where you’re reading it and agreeing with it as something you want to learn, makes it questionable! So, drill down into the detail. Find out what the day by day breakdown of the course is. Find out what you’ll be learning about. Make sure that’s what you want to learn about. Make sure it’s going to actually fulfil the requirements. Particularly for individuals, the cheapest provider out there is almost certainly not the best one.

Training can often – and should – be a fun experience. Can you share a story about amusing episodes, cock ups, or unintended consequences that happened during or as a result of your training courses that you could draw some light from?

Driver Training can be fun. You can quite often find it during the initial practical assessment, where you just ask the candidate to drive. Simple, right? At the starting point, you might have an absolutely brilliant driver, who might be able to drive around, chit chat… assessment passed. But often you don’t. And so the funny “screw up”, if you like, is telling somebody that they need to slow down and then discovering that you’re doing 15 kilometres an hour all the time and then having to work your way back from there and saying, OK, you need to speed up a bit. And then you’re discovering that the person that you’re in the vehicle with has no middle ground! He has flat-out and he has crawling. That is always kind of amusing, if slightly annoying and on occasion unnerving!

You quite often find that you’re dealing with a decent driver, who just can’t work out what he’s doing…. He’s swapping between thoughts of “I’m a security driver but the trainer is saying slow down!”

Who, from your experience, would you reference as a stand-out training provider?

I have had recent experience with a couple of decent business schools that I have found pretty inspiring. I’ve tried to take some lessons from that, where you’re dealing with people who are fairly fanatical and so enthusiastic about the subject matter! It’s about an ability to   be so enthusiastic that it’s utterly compelling.

I’ll use two examples. Firstly, I was involved in a set of lectures on macroeconomic policy. Now, I’ve looked at that before and tried to learn about it… and I thought “I do want to learn about this but I’m struggling to stay awake!”. I’ve been attending an advanced management program over the last few months. The macroeconomics element was delivered by a genuinely outstanding professor! With real world experience of serving on large bank boards and a very clear love of the subject, they explained the subject in a way that I’ve very rarely seen. I was transfixed by it and came away with a really decent understanding beyond what I have had before, of macroeconomic policy. And that’s not a compelling subject, right?!

I had a similar experience with the financial management part of the course. The professor used humour at just the right moment in just the right amounts, but also used a constant stream of case studies and experiences. Again, a subject that can be dry but made fascinating by the clarity of instruction and the compelling enthusiasm of the instructor.

So, if I was going to take something that’s genuinely inspirational about training, it’s a person who can really understand how to build a narrative around their subject, I’d say you’ve got to deliver the information, but stories and humour and experience are what makes people listen and really take it on board. What I really admire about great teachers is their ability to be fantastically knowledgeable about the subject, but also to know that humor and the narrative that runs through what you’re trying to get across is the absolute secret to making people listen and learn.

For more information about VSC and their training courses in Kurdistan, Charlie can be reached via email at cmayne@vscsecurity.com

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