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In this episode, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser, along with Senior Consultant Jenn Otremba and consultant Lindsay Bradford, discuss leading through an active shooter incident. Together, Bryan, Jenn, and Lindsay led through a major active shooter incident at a Fortune 30 corporation that turned out to be a false alarm after nearly four hours of watching law enforcement clear a headquarters building in Minneapolis.
In this podcast, we share lessons learned for preparing for, responding to, and recovering from an active shooter incident in your workplace. Topics discussed include crisis leadership during an active shooter incident, the perspectives of an incident leader in the midst of the crisis situation, communicating and making decisions, and sound strategies that can be used to prevent situations from reaching the point that gunfire is involved.
Key learning points:
- Mitigation and preparedness strategies for active shooter incidents
- Crisis leadership during an active shooter situation
- Helping your employees recover from workplace violence incidents
- How to communicate and make decisions during a crisis
Related Articles, Episodes, & Resources
- Bryghtpath’s FREE Active Shooter Planning 101 Introductory Course
- Webinar: Shots Fired – Leading in an Active Shooter Incident
- Presentation: Leading in an Active Shooter Situation – July 2017
- Managing Uncertainty Episode #19: Exercises are Boring
- Managing Uncertainty Episode #34: Communicating after the Boom
- Managing Uncertainty Episode #50: Conducting an Effective After-Action Process
- Blog Post: What free active shooter planning resources are available online?
- US Department of Homeland Security: Active Shooter Preparedness
- FBI: Active Shooter Resources
Episode Transcript:
| Bryan: | Welcome to the Managing Uncertainty podcast, and this is our first three-person podcast, and we have one of our employees with us, Lindsay Bradford.
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| Lindsay: | Hi, everyone.
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| Bryan: | Lindsay, tell us a little bit about you.
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| Lindsay: | Sure. I am up here visiting Bryghtpath. I met Jen and Bryan when I worked for Target at the corporate command center, where I learned all of my crisis management background. Before that I was in investigations with Target, and before that I was with Tempe PD police department out in Arizona as a tactical crime analyst, so I focused on homicide and cold case sex crimes, so I have a little bit of a unique background. Husband is in the navy. He’s on one of the new ships, so that brought us down to Jacksonville, Florida where we currently reside. I’ve bounced back and forth across the country now two and a half times in the last three years, so it’s been exciting and I’m excited to be back here with the crew again.
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| Jen: | We’re excited to have you.
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| Bryan: | Our long term goal here at Bryghtpath of course is to get the band back together, literally, and we’re well on our way to doing that. We’re adding our fifth person here in a couple of weeks. We’ll have her on the podcast as well.
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| Jen: | Which will be really fun.
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| Bryan: | Which is going to be really fun, but we’re here today to talk about something else entirely which is leading through active shooter incidents, and Jen, Lindsay and I, when we worked together at our previous employer, had the unfortunate experience of leading through multiple active shooter incidents. I think it was seven for me, one of which was an actual, full-blown response the way we think of people sheltered in place and having to go through a building with a SWAT team and lots of folks in harm’s way, and that turned out to be a false alarm.
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| Jen: | Thank goodness.
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| Bryan: | Thank goodness. We were really worried about a number of people in that situation, but we also worked through a number of homicides involving employees and customers and others from a lot of different situations, so we’re going to talk about what that looks like and what we learned through that process, which we’re happy to share with you so that you can be prepared, but we certainly hope that you never have to use any of this in your career.
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| Jen: | First just briefly, when you’re talking about an active shooter incident, you have to start with before the attack. With an active shooter, there’s never just one incident. There’s always pre-attack indicators of some kind, whether it be an employee or a guest at an organization, or it could be domestic violence that spills over into the workforce, but either way, there’s always some kind of pre-attack behavior.
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| Bryan: | We have one client today that almost every actual violent threat, real threat that has come in as opposed to threatening comments and things that aren’t actually threats. The real threats have been entirely domestic violence situations, and the incident … This client has two very large corporate campuses in a large urban area in the western part of the United States. The ones that have actually occurred as violent incidents at their facilities have been domestic situations that have spilled over into the workplace.
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| Jen: | Right, so first and foremost it’s about recognizing what those indicators are so you can hopefully stop the active shooter incident before it happens.
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| Bryan: | So we deal with that. What are some of those pre-attack indicators that are out there in these active shooter incidents?
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| Jen: | Really the number one indicator is an verbal threat or a written threat. Some kind of specific threat made is really a number one indicator, so that can often be done domestic violence threatening their intimate partner, or it can be an employee on employee making an actual threat. Those are big ones. Other indicators can be a change in behavior at work. If you have an employee who’s been really an awesome employee and all of a sudden their performance starts to decline, that might be an indicator and something you want to maybe just talk to them about and see what’s going on.
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| Bryan: | A big part of this not only is seeing the indicators, but having some kind of threat management process so that threats are reported centrally and there’s a method by which they’re evaluated, triaged, to what’s real.
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| Jen: | Right. In my previous role I actually worked on one of those teams where we evaluated threats of violence and we put them into different risk categories to determine what to do next. How do you mitigate those situations? That’s what I did in this previous role.
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| Lindsay: | I actually used Jen’s services in one of these situations. Once we departed ways, were in different areas of the business, I had to call because like Jen had mentioned, the interactions and the behaviors of the employee changed significantly to a point where it wasn’t just management. It was the team was noticing these things, and it really was a very large indicator. They had never verbally said something to us but there were a lot of things that were starting to make people uncomfortable and we were noticing, so I had to call Jen to work through next steps and what could possibly happen, so I think knowing your team is really important and being okay saying something’s wrong. Something’s different now. Listening to your gut.
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| Jen: | And there’s no one indicator either. There’s no one indicator that’s going to point to active shooter, but that’s why it’s important to evaluate the whole situation and slow down in the process to really understand what’s going on. Leading into that, then you go into, what do you do with that information? How do you prepare yourself for a violent threat or a full blown active shooter?
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| Bryan: | We often have folks that call and we talked to some people at a conference we were at this week who started the conversation with, “Yeah I’d like to talk to you about building an active shooter plan,” and we always turn that around to, before you even get to the plan, how do you handle [crisises 00:06:06] today? What’s the process by which you collaborate and make decisions and communicate the results of those decisions? We always go back to what we’ve talked about in previous podcasts which is you need some kind of framework. You need a crisis team. You need a collaborative process where you’re able to talk through these situations and make decisions, and you need a way to escalate these situations to your executives or to your board if that’s appropriate, but you have to start there because if you just start with, I got to have a plan, and you get in a situation that doesn’t fit your plan, you’ve got nowhere to go.
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| Jen: | And a single source reporting. How do you get the information to that framework so that they can make decisions from there?
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| Bryan: | We start with having a crisis framework and having a crisis team and a theme that we keep coming back to is picking the right people for that crisis team. We want folks who are going to be calm in the moment and can deal with the emotional impact of some of these situations. Natural disasters, active shooter, and active shooter’s about the most traumatic thing I think you could go through.
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| Jen: | Right and it truly happens a very small percentage of the time. Most of the time it’s other incidents that don’t quite get to the active shooter level.
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| Bryan: | Then we talk about having a plan and I know in the past there’s been lots of discussion about what should be in a plan? What should we tell people to do? With the last couple years I think we’ve really come down to, there’s consensus on what should be done, and what is that? It’s run, hide, fight. Right?
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| Jen: | Yeah, that’s the common thing you see all over the place. You see it in airports. You see it in schools. The DHS run, hide, fight seems to be really common. Everyone recognizes it and knows it at this point I think, or most people do at this point, so it’s just understanding what those steps are and what you’re communicating out to your teams.
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| Lindsay: | And that’s simple, because if you’re in an extremely high stressful situation, you need simplicity. If you have all these little intricate steps that’s not going to work at the end of the day for people who aren’t trained and have that type of mindset, so I love the run, hide, fight simplistic steps we have.
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| Jen: | Run, so you can get away.
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| Bryan: | If I can get away I’m going to get out.
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| Jen: | Yes. As fast as you can.
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| Bryan: | I’m going to get far away.
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| Jen: | Don’t question it. Just leave.
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| Bryan: | Don’t take anything. Just go.
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| Lindsay: | Nope. Don’t go back in either. You stay out. Get out.
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| Bryan: | That’s a great point.
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| Jen: | Leave your cell phone. Leave your keys. Leave everything. Just get out of the area.
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| Bryan: | Hide. I’m going to shelter in place. I’m going to find a room I can lock. A bathroom, a conference room, an office. One that doesn’t have windows or that has blinds that can cover the windows.
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| Jen: | Preferably, right.
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| Bryan: | And this poses an interesting challenge for the workplace in that we’re used to not putting locks on conference rooms and bathrooms and maybe even some offices.
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| Jen: | Schools.
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| Bryan: | Schools are a great example, but now lots of companies are going back and adding locks and blinds and things back in because you need to be able to shelter in place and you need to be able to create that barrier of entry in these situations.
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| Jen: | You might have to get creative too. It may not be a conference room that you hide in but you’re able to get into a cabinet or something like that.
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| Bryan: | Right.
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| Jen: | Something to get yourself out of sight so that you’re not visible for the shooter.
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| Bryan: | And then fight. If you’re confronted and you’re comfortable doing so, then fight with what you have. You can distract them with a stapler or with a phone. With a podcast microphone. What can you use?
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| Lindsay: | Even loud noises, and I think you might know from some of your training. Just loud, quick noises if there’s for some reason nothing in that room can distract them or catch them off guard.
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| Jen: | If you can quickly organize, and a couple of you can attack at the same time, that’ll throw him off guard as well.
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| Bryan: | All great ideas. We think about this for frontline employees, keeping it that simple. Your warehouses, your retail stores, your factories. We’re not asking them to make decisions and establish command and control, but their message is run, hide, fight. Call 911. You got an internal reporting number, crisis center, or whatever then make that call. Otherwise get away, and that’s what we really encourage companies to keep the plan that simple. If you hand a warehouse manager a 180 page active shooter incident plan, who’s going to execute that?
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| Jen: | Right, because here’s the deal. Once it gets to that point, we know these situations end within a matter of minutes, so there’s not a lot of time to do anything else, so that simplicity that you said, Lindsay, is a good means of explaining it.
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| Bryan: | At a corporate level, it’s a different kind of plan. For your employees of course in a headquarters environment, you’re going to have run, hide, fight and that’s what you want people to do.
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| Jen: | Yeah, so you’re going to have a checklist. Your first steps for your crisis team is you’re going to have a checklist. This gets reported in to your crisis team. The people answering the phones are the first person that’s going to be responding, so have a checklist. Have a checklist of questions you need. Understand what it is that law enforcement’s going to need from you.
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| Bryan: | And what are those initial actions that you’re going to take?
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| Jen: | So have a plan. Have it readily accessible so that person that’s answering the phone is prepared to ask the questions quickly. Just like a 911 dispatcher would.
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| Bryan: | Right. They’re going to pull the process and they’re going to execute that process.
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| Lindsay: | Which ties right back to the framework which you brought up earlier that you absolutely need. This initial step and all these checklists and questions will then lead you to go through that framework in the next steps.
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| Bryan: | When you have these plans in place then the really important part comes in, which is plans are plans but if you don’t exercise them they don’t mean anything, so you have to practice. You have to exercise all aspects of this. You have to exercise what run, hide, fight means. Don’t have your employees fight each other. Do they know what to do? Do they know how to evacuate? Do they know where to take shelter? And for your corporate team, your crisis team, you should run tabletop exercises or simulated exercises for them to work through their crisis action plan.
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| Jen: | One thing we’ve been asked in the past is how do you actually simulate that stressful environment? It’s a tabletop or an exercise. They know it’s a tabletop or exercise. Well, obviously in the military we exercise a lot but you can compound those stressors to make it as realistic as possible. So maybe you have an active shooter in the exercise but you throw in in another area of the country where you also do business, there’s also a hurricane going on, so that you have to force them to manage all of these different situations to simulate that added stress.
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| Lindsay: | I also think you could do … I know we did it a few times where we didn’t tell the full team that we were having an exercise. That’s how we did internal assessments as well as how our personal team reacted and how we went through that as we didn’t tell our team that we were going to do it. There were a couple of people that knew and then we executed the event and really helped for lessons learned. It’s a great way to practice.
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| Jen: | You might want to make sure your leaders know what you’re doing.
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| Lindsay: | Yes.
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| Bryan: | Exercise, exercise, exercise. Put headers on those emails so you don’t freak people out. One other area of preparedness is that you really need to sit down with your local law enforcement agency and have this discussion about what your plan calls for and learn what their plan calls for, and make them familiar with your … Invite them in to look at your facility and understand the layouts and points of entry and places that they could use so they might gain an advantage in one of these situations.
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| Jen: | One thing at our previous employer is they would come in and actually welcome that because they’ll come in and do their own exercises and we can go along for the ride.
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| Lindsay: | Yes, they’re open to … I just read an article this morning. North Carolina, one of the schools worked with law enforcement to do that, so they’re very open to it.
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| Bryan: | Our clients out in the western part of the US from the two headquarters campuses, the two city police departments have come in and done extensive photos and videos of how to get in and where to go and how they can approach the buildings and what’s behind door number eight? Is that a good place to enter? We had lots of discussions about things that they could do because of the risk with this particular client of ours.
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| Jen: | Yep, and understanding backup plans. That original plan didn’t work. What else can we use? Being nimble in the time.
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| Bryan: | So the bad thing happens. We have an active shooter incident or a violent situation. Where do we start?
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| Jen: | I think it goes back to the framework again. You have the single source reporting comes into however you got it set up. Someone is going to come in and gather this information and they’re going to start asking questions to try to validate what’s going on.
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| Bryan: | So you’re going to run the checklists.
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| Lindsay: | Write down the checklist.
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| Bryan: | You’re going to write down that checklist of questions that you’ve prepared on what you should ask, and while your local facility is executing run, hide, fight and the steps that you’ve outlined for them because you’ve written this plan down and you’ve exercised it with the team so they know what to do.
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| Jen: | We were all actually in an incident at our previous employer where this had happened like Bryan had originally said, but it was a false alarm, but we all went right to it. We had someone who was in charge and the rest of us followed and did what we needed to do, and then when there were people in the room that needed to not be in the room we made sure to boot them out so that we could actually do the business at hand.
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| Bryan: | In this particular situation, we should be clear that it actually took four hours before we knew that it was a false alarm. It went on for quite a while.
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| Lindsay: | Just to make a side note, I think that’s important to know is that sometimes you won’t know all the answers and it took four hours to find out what actually was the cause of the noise and everything that happened, and so when you’re beginning to execute this plan and that initial call comes in, you may not get all the details. Your questions are not going to be detailed. You won’t know everything, and that’s okay, and you guys have to be comfortable with that as well and so that’s why the checklist helps you walk through all of that.
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| Bryan: | In that situation, to Jennifer’s point, we had some people come in and decide to be a part of the crisis process that weren’t, and we invited them to leave and go meet with the representatives from their organizations that were involved with the crisis process, because it was just disruptive. But this is going to happen. You have the high profile major thing and you’re going to have some senior leaders that think they’re supposed to be involved when hopefully you have a well defined crisis process.
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| Jen: | In our case, one thing I do think that we did really well in this situation is that we had an on call process, so that on call person was the lead in this situation. I think that works really well because it’s clear. Everybody knows exactly who to talk to, who to give updates to, and that person, for lack of a better word, can start barking orders and the rest of us can follow.
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| Lindsay: | Absolutely, and they don’t have to be the most senior person in the room, and I think that’s what also worked is that we knew we respected the position. We respected the framework and our process and that person was not the most senior. I think Bryan said she was one of the least experienced but still ran it and we all fell in place and that helps with that communication piece as well. You don’t have multiple people running the show and everything was very clear and concise and we were able to execute properly.
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| Jen: | Yep, and there’s plenty of things to do in that situation. Plenty of things to do. To include as easy as taking care of basic needs. We have one person that was ordering food for the whole group because we knew we were in for the long haul.
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| Lindsay: | Very important.
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| Bryan: | People are going to get hungry. It’s an adrenaline driven situation. You’re going to need caffeine. I recall drinking coffee like a fiend throughout this whole situation, just because that’s what I felt I needed to stay perky.
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| Lindsay: | And Code Red Mountain Dew. That was very important that day for us as well.
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| Jen: | The other thing about taking care of basic needs was we had all of our technicians, the ones answering the phone and fielding all these calls that were coming in.
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| Bryan: | Call home.
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| Jen: | Take a moment and call home. Take some time away and go make sure that they’re families know they were not in fact in that building.
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| Bryan: | We should give context. This happened in a headquarters complex where our command center was in one building and the incident was actually occurring across the street from where we were sitting.
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| Jen: | Yeah, so we were perfectly safe.
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| Bryan: | We were fine. We were just really worried about people that were in the building, and this actually brings up an interesting point with your crisis team in that you have to have multiple backups for positions. One of the key players in our crisis team in this situation was actually in the building that the threat was in and was holed up in an office with many other people sheltered in place, but he couldn’t come to the command center obviously to participate in the discussion and response, so his backup went, who was his boss. It’s good connectivity there, but that was part of the plan. He was going to be the backup if the primary wasn’t available and we had practiced that so they knew how to execute and do it, so we’re back to that. You have to practice the things that you put into place around that.
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| Jen: | Then one other thing that I think is also important to note is, and I had alluded to it earlier with the exercising, but you may have other things going on besides just this incident so you may have multiple things that you need to manage at one time, and so it may be important to select a different space for all of the other stuff and assign different people for all that other stuff.
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| Lindsay: | Right. Your business is still operating outside of this one location where the incident’s at, so you still do need to have that focus in one way or another.
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| Jen: | So it may seem like time has stopped and this is the most important thing. There may be other things that you need to manage at the same time, so finding a different conference room for something like that to go on might be a good idea.
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| Bryan: | One of the other areas that we’ve learned coming out of this and having managed multiple situations is that in today’s world where everything moves at the speed of light when it comes to reputation and social media and what gets on the news is that your communications planning is just as important as your response planning, and it actually needs to be integrated into that process but we often run into challenges as consultants where we talk with comms teams about the need to develop messaging templates and themes and how are you going to respond in the moment? And the answer we get most often is, “Well every situation’s unique therefore we’re going to build a plan after the incident happens so that we can put all the right context in there.” And we say no, that’s a bad idea.
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| Jen: | It’s a really bad idea.
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| Bryan: | There’s no time. There is no time to do that.
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| Jen: | Not only is there no time, but it’s stressful so why would you put yourself into a situation that’s even more stressful when you could just have something pre-drafted?
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| Lindsay: | That, and what if the comms team is inoperable? What if they are in that location and even the backup of the backup of the backup isn’t there? Someone else needs to be able to step in and execute that, so if you have these templates your crisis team, someone else can step in and help initiate that communication and those messages.
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| Bryan: | You can edit the pre-prepared messages before they go out. They don’t change all that much.
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| Lindsay: | Absolutely, especially from a brand reputation perspective. You’re going to be using the same type of messaging.
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| Bryan: | When these situations happen, particularly if they’re close geographically to your headquarters, we always encourage and we did in this situation sending a communications staff member along with a senior executive who hopefully will have been trained in speaking publicly, down to wherever the law enforcement public information officer, the PIO, is so that they can coordinate and make sure they’re dealing with the same set of information, but it’s best if they talk to the press together. Because as a company you’re not going to want to talk about the law enforcement details of what’s going on. You are in fact not going to want to share a lot about the incident until well after it’s over, but it shows unity and it keeps you on the same page about what’s going on.
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| Jen: | And it should be consistent. All of the communicating should be consistent.
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| Bryan: | Right. Communication technology has also come into play. Mass notification tools. In our particular situation here we didn’t have anything like that.
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| Jen: | There was a loudspeaker.
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| Bryan: | We had a loudspeaker. We were using radios and cell phones to communicate. We were using runners in some cases to run down between the command post the police had set up and our command center because we were having some communication difficulties.
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| Jen: | Which is common. We have heard from other people in different situations where cell phones may not work in certain situations so you have to come up with a backup plan.
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| Bryan: | Then like any crisis, when this is over, an honest self-assessment is really needed about what worked and what didn’t and what you want to take away from that in terms of action items. If your employees are involved, they’re going to have thoughts and you’re going to need to find a way to capture that. Survey, listening session, and then for your employees as well you need to circle back with them about what you’ve decided to do. Here are the things that I learned that I want to bring back to the team and say, “Here’s what we’re doing in response to your concerns.” Because otherwise they’re going to think you’re not doing anything, and so you need to communicate those things.
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| Jen: | Even if you’re not saying a lot, saying something is better than nothing to your employees for sure.
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| Lindsay: | Acknowledging them. And I think the key is an honest recap and assessment of what happened. If something were to actually happen whether that be if you’re just going with an exercise and then the actual event happens, you need to know where the gaps were. You can’t just pretend your team looks great that wow, this is fabulous, and then an actual event happens and you see these huge gaps that everyone knew was there but didn’t want to talk about so they didn’t look bad in front of the executives. So you really, truly, because this could be people’s lives on the line at this point, have that.
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| Jen: | It’s not the time to be proud.
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| Lindsay: | Exactly. Best way to say it.
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| Bryan: | Closing thoughts and then I’ll wrap up. You’ve heard a number of our lessons learned about dealing and leading in an active shooter situation. If we can help you with your active shooter planning or you want to talk about crisis frameworks or crisis communications or some of the topics here, give us a call. Our number is 612-235-6435, or contact us through our website at Bryghtpath.com and we’d be happy to talk with you about your particular needs and how we can help you. Thanks for listening.
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| Jen: | Thank you.
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| Lindsay: | Thank you.
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