a serious inquiry about how organizations handle e.g. traumatic impacts

[Richard Thieme <rthieme () thiemeworks com>]

My speech on "Playing Through the Pain: The Impact of Dark Knowledge and 
Secrets on intelligence and Security Professionals" continues to gain 
momentum (over 6000 views on you tube of the def con talk and more on 
the O'Reilly site). The Def Con video is at 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IowHTVxHpAs. The talk will given again 
in Columbus Ohio (4/21/17) for a regional ISSA meeting and in Dublin for 
SOURCE Dublin.

Discussing a short book on the subject, the publisher raised this question:

"the section on remedies and solutions is focused on how an individual 
can divert the negative impact of keeping secrets or moral dilemmas. I'd 
like to expand that to include how organizations can help divert the 
negative impact on their teams."

One issue with addressing that is, businesses are themselves sometimes 
perpetrators of the conditions that create traumatic impact and 
solutions are generally on behalf of keeping people functional in light 
of business goals. not the well-being of the individual. That's why my 
emphasis is on what the individual can do. The example below is from the 
IC but applies equally to some corporate cultures and their dynamics. (I 
was sent a detailed document from the person who set up the EAP in the 
DIA and ran it for years and strong opposition to her goals came from 
her bosses who wanted, for example, disclosure of confidential 
conversations with therapists. Her battles to sustain the program were 
successful for years but when she left, they gutted the program.)

Policies are policies, but the real question is not, what does a company 
say they do, but what does a company DO?  This morning there is a news 
item that two former Microsoft employees are suing Microsoft for not 
providing adequate care for their PTSD after reviewing instances of 
abuse, child porn, etc on behalf of the company's policies. Microsoft 
denies it, says they do everything. So sometimes there is at least a 
perceived difference between what programs provide and what feel they 
people need.

Can you share anything at all, on or off the record, about your insight 
and experience in this area? What is the actual experience of employees 
who tried to avail themselves of help and - can people keep their jobs 
without (1) losing face in front of peers and (2) harming their careers? 
(both points raised in the talk)

Here's an illustrative example from a veteran in the IC:

<snip>

"Early in my career I was assigned to a small group working on trying to 
develop a means to access information about what the Soviets were doing 
on a serious threat to the U.S.  The way the group was focusing on had 
little prospect of succeeding but was kept being encouraged by 
management to keep working on it.  As I thought about the problem I 
realized one could capitalize on some aspects of physics that appeared 
to offer great promise. I presented my thinking and suddenly found 
myself called in by management to be grilled on who had told me about 
what I was proposing.  I said, “Nobody told me anything.  I am a 
physicist and my physics knowledge led me to this.”  I was then told 
that I now had to be briefed into a highly compartmented very sensitive 
operation that I had stumbled upon.  The thought this raised in my mind 
was that my management knew this solution was being pursued but still 
had our group working on a not needed initiative that had little 
prospect of success anyways.  Was our group being used as a cover in 
some way? Could I be being used on a futile pursuit without being 
informed of such?  Such an experience leads to a distrust of the 
organization that never goes away.  It can start a path to paranoid 
thinking that is readily reinforced throughout one’s career.

Much later I was informed by another manager that he was battling to 
have me briefed and included on another highly sensitive initiative. He 
was concerned that the mix of people involved in it could be lead 
astray.  He informed me that their management was balking at including 
me, which just drove my boss to be more concerned.  I was briefed into 
it and found it was an experiment being run by a contracted organization 
to try to verify a hypothesis.  It was fundamentally a scientific 
experiment.  The others in the group were engineers, not scientifically 
trained, experienced, or oriented.  As I examined the protocols of the 
experiment, I found holes where one could manipulate and control the 
results to be what one would like them to be.  I raised these to our 
group and said we needed to revise the protocol.  If the hypothesis were 
demonstrated to be valid, the government would spend millions of dollars 
pursuing it, and the contracted organization stood to make considerable 
profit.  We needed to be as sure as we could be that the experimental 
results were valid.  I met with huge resistance.  The contractors 
severely balked.  The next week I was called in and formally debriefed 
from the effort.  The debriefing included that I could never say 
anything about the project, not even acknowledge its existence,without 
being subject to serious punishment.  This illustrates the tools that 
exist within the intelligence domain to control one, and the dilemmas 
one can be thrust into and have to live with."

<snip>

Richard Thieme
www.thiemeworks.com
rthieme () thiemeworks com
neuralcowboy () gmail com
414 704 4598 (cell)
neuralcowboy on twitter and skype
Richard Thieme on FB and linked.in

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