If your team consists of the elite, individuals who hunger for challenges, leave escapes for people who get caught and take your team to an entirely different level.
Escaping Rooms have seen a small trend upwards of late. Good for them. Is that the best you can do for your team? If your team is status quo, trend followers, sure, that is probably an awesome team building exercise for you. Go for it! Have a blast! Stop reading this article.
If, however, you want to challenge your team and give them perspective on life, take them through a one or two week Surveillance Detection Route Training course. (These are usually one or two week courses.)
What is Surveillance Detection Route (SDR) Training? I will hold your hand on this one, but don’t get used to it. SDR is what people in hostile environments use to see if they are being followed. Think Mission Impossible, Jason Bourne, except real stuff. Mostly people who have a reason to feel guilty about something use SDR. Spies use SDR probably from the moment they get trained on it throughout their career, and even when they “retire.” (That paranoia sticks to ya.) SDR teaches you how to establish routes that give you a slight upper hand in determining if someone is following you. In the movie, Heat (great movie by the way), the thieves knew they were being tracked by air assets (helicopters), so they quickly went into a large airport, which in the movie, then forced the air assets to have to pull back momentarily because they did not have authorization to fly into the airports airspace. Well played.
If you are still scratching your head on what SDR is, google it, or go find another article to read, perhaps something about fantasy sports leagues.
The better courses are run by current and past real-world operators. Do not be dazzled if they have things like “FBI,” “CIA” or “SOF” in their past/current titles. What you want to know is, what the plan will be in your course. The legit courses will most likely be cashing in from both sides … because they like it that way. They will be training your team how to exist in and around the bubble, and they will be training another crew how to spot you and keep tabs on you undetected, aka Opposition Forces (OPFOR). Well, that would actually be a matter of perspective, but you get the idea.
You will need to have an objective in mind before you contact whoever you contact about this. The objective may be:
- We want to be able to travel from point A to point B undetected
- We want to be able to conduct some type of activity undetected
- We want to be able to identify surveillance
There will be a bunch of specifics you may need to know for whatever objective you come up with. For instance, if you want to travel from point A to point B undetected, how often will you be making this trip, how far are these two points, how long do you need at point A, how long do you need at point B, et cetera. If you are opting to conduct some type of activity undetected, how long will it take you to do your thing, where most likely will you be when you do your thing, how often will you be doing this, and so forth. If you want to be able to identify surveillance, do you want to do this in relation to a building, a person, a group of people, at a static location, while in transit, yadda yadda.
Keep in mind that you should make this objective something that is real for your organization. From a security perspective, at the very minimum, you should use this opportunity to make your team more aware of unknown threats. If you really are as good as you think you are, someone out there wants to beat you.
Once you have an objective, and once you have contacted whoever will be doing the training, I would highly recommend you get your team focused. Get your heads in the game. Focus.
I recommend meeting your trainers outside of their office. Worded another way, I recommend you do not meet them at their office. The problem is if the OPFOR are smart they will just watch their office and you lose before you begin. So, figure that out and play it carefully. Also, their OPFOR should NOT (as in not) be present when you are meeting with them. The entire idea for the OPFOR is that they do not know who you are from Adam … or Eve. You will most likely all meet at the ENDEX … end of the exercise, for something akin to an After Action Review (AAR).
If you are in a major metropolitan area, it will be a lot easier to find a reputable organization to take your money. Do not be disillusioned, this will not be cheap. Expect to spend tens of thousands of dollars on this. If I lost you on that last sentence, know that we just separated the men from the boys. These courses do not exist to make you feel good about yourself so you can high-five your buddies. Definitely these do not exist for you to flood your social media accounts with selfies and other garbage! These courses exist to train people who really need this type of skill set so they do not get captured or “detained” in real world situations. This is not an escape the room type of game. This is the real thing.
Can you use this type of training in your business? Probably not. But it will build your team up. Morale will be high, even if you suck at it. And the insights into this type of training, into this world, will most likely open the mind of each of your team members. Perspective will be gained.
This is not an advertisement for some SDR training vendor. I am not even going to put links in this article to make your life easier. If you want this, you will get it. If you don’t, it is a wonder you even read this far into the article you second rate lazy sack of rocks.
Winners look for challenges.
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