Think Like a Spy: What Intelligence Work Really Teaches About People | Julian Fisher

[00:00:13] Secrets and Spies is a podcast that dives into the world of espionage, terrorism, geopolitics, and intrigue. This podcast is produced and hosted by Chris Carr. Welcome to Secrets and Spies. On today's podcast, I'm joined by author and former British intelligence officer Julian Fisher, and we discuss what we can learn from human intelligence methods. We look at how spy skills can help us become more effective in our day-to-day life.

[00:00:38] If you enjoyed this discussion, Julian has a fantastic course that starts on the 23rd of June. Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. Take care. The opinions expressed by guests on Secrets and Spies do not necessarily represent those of the producers and sponsors of this podcast.

[00:01:03] Julian, welcome to the podcast. And this is your second appearance. So it's great to have you back on. How are you? I'm very well. Thanks, Chris. Delighted to be here as always, as you say, second time round. I feel very fortunate to be joining you again. It's some time ago since we first had our conversation about the publication of my book, Think Like a Spy. That was back in 2024. So I feel it's long overdue.

[00:01:30] Indeed, indeed. Noel, thank you again for joining me. So there may be some listeners who didn't hear our earlier podcast. So just for the benefit of them, can you just tell us a little bit about your background, about yourself, how you went to work in intelligence and now teaching leadership and influence?

[00:01:46] Yes. So I'm a former British intelligence operative. That's about as far as I would want to go in being explicit about background for obvious reasons. I resigned from government service over the Iraq war, as it happens. Some concerns about the manipulation and presentation of intelligence leading up to that conflict.

[00:02:07] So I resigned on the matter of conscience. So I resigned on a matter of conscience, but still have a huge amount of respect for those people who work in the broader intelligence community in Britain, which I think is an extraordinary force for good in the UK.

[00:02:23] Okay. And one of the aspects that I think we do particularly well is teaching intelligence officers how to be adept at managing human relationships.

[00:02:39] And I sought to take some of those lessons and reproduce them in this book. Think like a spy, master the nine secret skills of influence and leadership, which was published originally back in May, 2024. And in this paperback version earlier this year and in January. I was also lead trainer some years ago now on a channel for TV series called spies.

[00:03:10] So I walk a very fine line of trying to take those aspects of intelligence work that I think can be helpful in the wider professional community without, of course, getting into difficulties concerning material which rightly remains protected by the Official Secrets Act and other legal obligations on me.

[00:03:36] Question. So we have a question. So we have a question. So we have a question. So we have a question. So we have a question of quite a wide American audience. We've had a lot of former American intelligence officers, CIA and other agencies. Why is it much harder in the UK for a former intelligence officer to talk about their background in comparison to being an American who can easily publish a book?

[00:03:55] Yeah, I think part of that is because the agency, the CIA, very much more starkly delineates functions within its organization. So there are analysts perhaps who don't see frontline operational action.

[00:04:12] And it's easier for an analyst who hasn't had their face exposed in potentially dangerous third country situations perhaps to appear in public. So that's one possibility. The second thing I believe I'm right in saying is that the American agencies have a much more structured approach to declassifying the fact of a former officer,

[00:04:38] what they would call an agent, what we would call an officer, the fact of a former agent having worked in one of those services. And so they will formally go through a risk assessment of what any public exposure for a former agent might imply for former operations and existing operations

[00:05:01] and the safety of former officers, agents, sources, and serving officers and agents and sources. So it's a much more structured means of dealing with the fact of somebody's employment.

[00:05:19] Whereas in the UK, we remain in, I think, a slightly outdated environment in which the fact of employment is considered as much of a secret, if you work for some of the three-letter acronym agencies, as anything you did within those services. I suspect that is in the medium to long-term unsustainable. But that is the world in which we currently work.

[00:05:49] Could you just give us an overview of the workshop itself, what participants can expect and when it will be taking place? The title of the workshop is Think Like a Spy Strategic Relations Workshop. And it's a very carefully chosen title. There's two elements to it, I suppose. One is Think Like a Spy. There's a clue there that it builds on the material contained in my book of the same title.

[00:06:14] And then the second aspect of it, I think, is the really important one, which is strategic relations. What I'm aiming to do is to help my participants, my delegates, workshop participants, to better understand how to build long-term strategic relationships, to better understand the importance of those interpersonal relationships, the one-to-one human connections,

[00:06:40] to enable them to achieve their short-term and their medium-term and their long-term objectives. It's a structured way of applying a system of relationship building, which is known as the age of recruitment cycle, in the non-espionage setting. Because the secret about the secrets behind intelligence recruitment is they're not actually secrets.

[00:07:06] They are a set of interpersonal skills that all of us have access to, all of us can practice, all of us can perfect. The difference is the intent with which those skills are applied, and the recognition of how the cycle of strategic relationship building works. So on the practical side of it, the first of these workshops will be running online.

[00:07:34] I will do live workshops later on as these series develop. But the first will be online, commencing on the 23rd of June at 1900 BST, British Summertime. The timing is to allow also US participants, should anyone from over there wish to take part.

[00:07:58] The workshop takes the form of four online sessions on alternate weekday evenings, so the 23rd of June, alternate weekday evenings after that. And it's intended to be interactive. It's intended to be something in which the participants are as equally engaged as I am. I want to guide people through an understanding of the skills and techniques that I'm talking about.

[00:08:23] Your workshop draws heavily on lessons from human intelligence and agent handling. What first made you realize that these skills had value far beyond the intelligence world? I think I realized as soon as I was told what they are. There's an important distinction, I think, to be made here between the extraordinariness of what spies do. And when I say spies, I mean intelligence officers.

[00:08:51] And the ordinariness of how they do it. And that's the thing which I think the paradox which struck me most when I was first exposed to the intelligence process. Because, and I talked about this on our first podcast, Chris, what intelligence officers do is quite extraordinary.

[00:09:14] They build relationships to the point that they're able to ask their interlocutors to do something which most of us would, to put it mildly, hesitate to do, which is to become a traitor. They build relationships and trust to the point that they are able to work with people in third countries to betray their own national interest.

[00:09:44] And when you think about it in those very stark terms, it seems that there must be a breed of people, intelligence officers, who have access to a set of skills which is simply not available to the rest of us. And indeed, when I first had it put to me that that's what a spy does, that was my assumption too. It was as I learned how they do it, that I began to realize,

[00:10:14] well, there's nothing unusual about any of this. There's nothing that is inaccessible to everybody else. And in actual fact, given that at the heart of intelligence work, the type of intelligence work I'm talking about, and we can come back to different categories of intelligence, intelligence, but at the heart of human intelligence work, is something quite simple, which is human relationships. It seemed to me fairly obvious fairly early on

[00:10:43] that if an intelligence officer can use a set of interpersonal skills to that extraordinary end, persuading somebody to become a traitor, then we must be able to turn those skills to other, perhaps less extraordinary, but equally important ends in professional and indeed in personal life. That makes sense. So many people hear the word spy and are thinking like gadget surveillance and covert operations.

[00:11:12] When you talk about thinking like a spy, what do you actually mean? I'm talking about human intelligence work. So let's start off by looking at the different categories or some of the different categories of intelligence work. There is something called OSINT, open source intelligence, which speaks for itself, the recovery of information perhaps through online means, which is then subjected to intelligence analysis. That's one skill, all of its own. SIGINT, signals intelligence,

[00:11:41] or TECINT, technical intercept, which is perhaps the domain of GCHQ or the NSA in the United States and requires a particular understanding and ability to manipulate technical capability. And then there's human intelligence. And human intelligence is the bit that really interests me. It's the bit which aims to get hold of that information, that intelligence,

[00:12:09] that is not retrievable through any other means, essentially. And I guess that's ultimately the definition of secret intelligence. It's obtained through covert means in the sense of building covert relationships, and it's not obtainable by any other means. And there are certain categories of intelligence, which if you think about it, are not going to be susceptible to all of those extraordinary technical capabilities

[00:12:39] that have been developed in recent years. I think about it this way. If you give a talk called Human Intelligence in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, and I point out that, yes, of course, artificial intelligence and other technical advances mean that we have access to the most extraordinary amounts of information, most extraordinary amounts of data. But so does everybody else. And quite crucially,

[00:13:09] our enemies, if you like, understand that. Hostile actors understand that. And so, a sophisticated threat to British national interest or whatever, the architects of that threat, the organizations behind that threat, be they government or supranational or criminal gangs, whatever it might be, will, to the extent that they possibly can,

[00:13:39] avoid committing their most devastating secrets to digital format because they know just how susceptible that data is to technical advances. So, in an age of artificial intelligence, I would argue that human intelligence has become more important than ever. It's also, incidentally, become more difficult than ever

[00:14:08] because creating a persona which you may need to do for a human intelligence operation has become increasingly difficult because identities and legends, aliases, backgrounds, stories, cover stories are also easily checkable. So, we do live in a particularly challenging time for the intelligence world. For me, human intelligence intelligence is the most interesting

[00:14:38] aspect of what the intelligence community does. It's probably, I wouldn't necessarily say it's the most important. It's certainly a vital part of it. But to me, it's the most interesting because it's the most enduring. And, if you think about frequently one hears intelligence referred to as the world's second oldest profession, profession, it's probably one of those professions that will endure

[00:15:08] long beyond the development of AI capability that will rob many other professions of the human element. Because, ultimately, secrets live in people's heads. And so, you need to get into people's heads to get those secrets out. So, one of the themes running through your work is influence. And in your experience, what separates people who are genuinely influential from those who simply hold positions of authority? That's a really key question, Chris, because influence

[00:15:37] isn't about organograms, it's not about hierarchy, it's not about managerial positions. Influence is about human relationships. And I think there is a misunderstanding for many people that because they have a position of, on paper importance, because they have a position of seniority, that that means they're automatically influential, they're automatically leaders. And by the way, I would allied leadership with influence and we can come back

[00:16:06] to why I say that. Leadership is influence. In fact, nothing more and nothing less. As the leadership guru, James C. Maxwell, has said. And what is it that demarcates a really effective person of influence? I won't say influencer because that has a different meaning now, but a really effective exerciser of influence from everybody else. I'd say probably two things.

[00:16:36] One is integrity, which may be surprising, but I stand by that. And the second, which is actually not so distantly related, is self-awareness. So, if I was forced to choose one of the two as the thing that separates people who can exercise influence effectively from everybody else, I would say self-awareness because that encompasses a very broad category

[00:17:05] of things that is itself a very broad category of different personality traits, one of which is integrity because integrity is about being whole to the self, about being true to the self. And we misunderstand, I think many people misunderstand what self-awareness means. It's important not to confuse it with self-obsession or self-consciousness. It's actually about understanding the impact

[00:17:34] that you have, your actions have, your words have on other people. So in a slightly paradoxical way, self-awareness is about looking outside of ourselves. And that's really crucial in the exercise of influence, particularly in the exercise of influence in an ethical manner. Yeah, interesting you mentioned ethical manner. Do you think, how do we, how do we, I suppose, unpack the ethics of influence and also

[00:18:05] are there ways to tell if somebody is trying to manipulate us? I think there's important distinctions between terminology here. So manipulation, influence, and persuasion. Those are perhaps three words that are to one degree and another used interchangeably, but I would make a very, very significant distinction between all three of them. Manipulation is, I would say, the unethical use of influence. So let's just put that over there so we don't really need to think about it any further.

[00:18:35] Influence in itself is certainly not unethical. And anybody who believes that the exercise of influence is inherently unethical, I would invite them to consider pretty much every interaction they have every single day with their partners, their friends, their colleagues, even their pets, where in order for society to function, they have to be on the receiving end and they have to exercise to one degree or another influence

[00:19:05] in pretty much every single human interaction or interaction with another living being. Who's going to make the tea this evening? Who's going to walk the dog? Who's going to take this particular project? Or who's going to go and tell the boss that we think he's got something wrong? In all of those decisions, in all of those moments of micro-interaction day-to-day, somebody somewhere

[00:19:35] is exercising influence and because every action has an equal and opposite reaction, somebody somewhere is being influenced. Persuading, persuasion, is a different thing again, I think, because persuasion does have a slightly more dark tone to it. I think we persuade people to do something against their will. I don't think

[00:20:04] you can influence somebody to do something against their will. And that's the really important distinction. I talk in the book about going to a car lot and being persuaded to buy a car that is unsuitable for you and coming away full of buyer's remorse. Well, that's not the exercise of influence and it's probably not in the longer term going to help the salesperson who sold you

[00:20:34] that vehicle because you're going to go away and tell other people not to go to them. So in fact, when it comes to influence, they failed. When it comes to persuasion, they've possibly been successful in that one-off sense. But let me just go back to it. You can persuade somebody to do something against their will. I don't think you can influence somebody to do something against their will. And that also feeds into what I think is one of the best definitions of leadership that I've ever seen,

[00:21:04] which is the Australian Army's definition of leadership as being the art of influencing other people willingly to work towards an organization's objectives. And that word willingly is very important in that. I think it's sort of built in to influence as it happens. But it's not a bad idea to reinforce it. I was just thinking as you were talking about that weirdly, I've sometimes wondered whether the world would benefit

[00:21:34] of everybody experiencing a managerial position once in their life. Because there are times where you have to be the leader and it's a very should have should have their 15 minutes of leadership, their 15 minutes of fame, if you like.

[00:22:03] I'd go further. I would actually say that we should be teaching leadership and influence in our schools. We shouldn't be treating, first of all, we should recognize the illusion of influence with leadership. That's a really important recognition. Secondly, we should recognize the importance of human relationship building, strategic human relationship building in influence. Effectively, that is what it is. It's the building of a relationship with somebody,

[00:22:33] long-term exercise of influence. Thirdly, we should recognize that it is an ethical and indispensable part of human interaction. And then we should be teaching the next generations the desirability of avoiding occasionally temptation to take those influence skills and turn them into manipulation. So I think leadership

[00:23:02] in some schools it already is, but leadership and influence should be firmly on the curriculum. I agree. Let's take a break and be right back with more. The workshop uses elements of the agent recruitment cycle. Without giving away any trade

[00:23:32] secrets, what can business leaders and professionals learn from the way intelligence officers build relationships? Intent, I think, is the most important aspect. A lot of business people in my experience are quite scattered in the way that they approach their relationships. And this is, I make a very important distinction between targeting and networking, for instance. We see people going to conferences and coming away with a handful of business cards and feeling that somehow they've achieved something because they've got all of those

[00:24:02] business cards. But then oftentimes, and we're all guilty of this, they fail to follow up, they fail to target. And so, rather than, but I would go one step back even, I don't think coming away from a conference with 20 business cards is an indicator of success, if you like, in inverted commas. I think it's far better would be to come away with one or two business cards that are the beginning of something significant

[00:24:31] and meaningful. So, targeting is one aspect of it. Intent is another aspect of it. Why are you building that relationship? What are you trying to achieve with this? Is it simply that you want to make a sale? Or do you actually want to build a long-term strategic relationship based on trust? And that brings me to the third element of this, which is the most important thing, which I, in my opinion, that professionals can learn.

[00:25:00] is not to make relationships transactional. We live in a very transactional world, unfortunately. Even more so now, gosh. Even more so now. Transaction has become a part of everyday life partly fueled by dating apps, for instance. That's a very transactional thing. And I think we have become guilty as a society in the West, broadly speaking, of

[00:25:30] looking at relationships as transactional. What do I get out of this? And here's a way of, there's a phrase that I think an intelligence officer would use much more often than many professionals, which is not will you work for me, but will you work with me? And really, the key to effective

[00:26:00] relationship building is unity. And that is actually one of the tools of influence that Robert Cialdini talks about. The importance of unity, the importance of team building, being on the same team. We more readily say yes to people that we see as one of us, not just like us. This is a quote from Cialdini, not just like us,

[00:26:29] but one of us. If we're on the same team, we are more readily work together. So what I would urge every professional to start thinking about is how do I work together with somebody with whom I'm building a long-term strategic relationship rather than how do I get them to do something for me or to work for me. Replace that word for with the word with and

[00:26:59] straight away that will revolutionize the way in which someone approaches relationship building. And I think very much, very much for the better. Thank you for that. So trust seems to sit at the heart of successful intelligence work. What are some of the common mistakes people make when trying to build trust and credibility in professional settings? That's a really tricky question. I think one of the

[00:27:29] peculiarities that I've noticed in many professional settings is the use or the belief that somehow deceit is an end in itself or lack of transparency is an end in itself. And I hope most people who work in offices will recognize that. Those whispered conferences behind closed

[00:27:58] doors about matters which actually should be transparently discussed with the entire team. I find this with some of my former colleagues as well who seem to believe that deceit is part of the toolkit as an end in itself. And I've never really got that because deceit is an important part of espionage in one

[00:28:28] sense because covers need to be used and cover is there to protect the officer and protect the agent ultimately the person that they're recruiting. So deceit is only ever a tool of protection. It's not something in its own right. It's not an end in itself. And I see so many people using deceit and secrecy and lack of transparency in a way that suggests that they think there's something that they gain by doing that, that

[00:28:58] they gain an advantage over somebody. I had an example recently with a former colleague. We were talking about potentially working together on a particular project. of going ahead with me in a trusting partnership. My sense was at the end of it he decided to go off and do the same thing with somebody else, the thing we'd be discussing with somebody else. And I think

[00:29:28] he probably thought he got one over me because in the conversations we'd had I'd shared with him my observations as I'm sharing with you. And I share with many people my observations about influence leadership, the agent recruitment cycle and so on and so forth. And I wonder whether at the end of it when he decided that he was going to pull the plug on something which I thought we'd be discussing in good faith that he thought somehow he got one over on me. Well, maybe he had, but I have

[00:29:57] no objection to sharing my observations on what it means to think like a spy, what it means to exercise influence, the illusion of influence and leadership. I do it all the time. And indeed, I wrote a book about it. So, you know, he didn't gain, you see what I mean? He didn't gain anything. In fact, all he did probably was longer term create a situation in which he's lost an ally, he's lost a supporter. And so that's where I think a lot of people go wrong.

[00:30:27] That's not just former colleagues of mine, but some of them do fall into that trap. But I see it so often in business that people think that somehow lack of transparency is something to be embraced. And I would wager that 80 to 90% of the time is completely unnecessary. I've made the mistake in two ways.

[00:30:57] The first mistake I've made is sometimes I try and delay or avoid confrontation with someone. So I kind of come up with a bit of a white lie that hopefully just diffuses that situation, which usually then doesn't and then you become the bad guy and makes matters worse. And then the other thing I've had to do sometimes when I've been producing films, I've sometimes had to delay information because I remember once I was working on a film where during production, so we were making the film, we suddenly,

[00:31:27] lost about a few thousand pounds of our budget, which was set aside to, so basically an investor suddenly pulled out as we were filming and that money that they were going to give us was to pay the crew. Now if I went on set that day and said, oh everybody, we've just lost our financing and we might not be able to pay you, the film would have ended right there. I had to sit on that information for about three weeks and work very hard to find a new source for that money, which I did.

[00:31:57] And people got paid. But if I had told everybody in that moment, it would have ended everything and it would have been even more expensive to try and resurrect the project. It may never have happened. So there is a sort of difference. So being totally transparent sometimes isn't always functional. Yeah. Don't get me wrong. There are situations in which a strategic response to a setback may well be that you have

[00:32:26] to suppress certain information. Other times it's the opposite. And I think part of leadership is about understanding when the distinction matters and acting accordingly. As you were speaking, I was put in mind of one of my favorite movies, The Wild Geese. Classic. I don't know if you've seen it. Yes, classic. Gosh. And I hope all your viewers and listeners have seen this. And if you haven't, then I thoroughly recommend it, not

[00:32:56] least for the soundtrack. But there's a point at which the men are waiting for an airframe to land to take them out of the country in Africa where they've been helping to bring an opposition leader back into power. And they're double crossed. And they're waiting there for the plane to land and pick them up. And then the pilot gets over the radio, the words go around or pass them by, pass them by is the phrase.

[00:33:25] And he aborts the landing and takes off again. And sadly, I can never remember the name of the character, but the leader of the mercenary group has to make a decision. And he comes out and he says words to the effect of, men, we have been double crossed, lost, but we will plan our way out of this.

[00:33:53] And I use that as an example of exceptional leadership because it's an omission of vulnerability, it's an omission of failure, and it is a commitment as the person who takes ultimate responsibility to do something about it and an expression of confidence that he's able to do so. Now, in a similar situation, of course this is entirely fictional, but we've all faced actually similar sorts of situations in one way

[00:34:23] or another. And you describe one that's in a way very similar. You had to make a call between is this a moment for secrecy or lack of transparency, or is it a moment where I go out there and explain to people exactly what has happened? I can't say whether you made the right call. You probably did. I felt very bad about it, but I think I still did make the right call, but I could be wrong. Well, if in the end you found another investor and people got paid, then that

[00:34:52] was the right call, wasn't it? Yeah. Because the alternative is that it would have fallen apart and nobody would have got paid. Yeah. So you were definitely playing, you had a balancing act there. But my instinct is to tell people where possible to, first of all, admit vulnerability, accept failure, take responsibility and do something about it. Commit to doing something about it. And that's, I think, a

[00:35:21] bit that we're, sad to say, in public life here in the UK, I think we're a bit lacking. But commitment to do something about it. Oh yeah, I think we are. I've lost count of how many times I've heard certain politicians say that I take full responsibility for, and then neither take responsibility in any meaningful sense or do anything about it. Yeah, or have total faith in somebody they dismiss a few days later. That was a, yeah.

[00:35:50] Listen, yes. I think we all know what we're talking about here. But you see what I know. And this is the interesting thing about leadership. We can all see it in its failure. And leadership isn't about hiding away from failure. Leadership is about taking responsibility. And that's what builds trust. So, you know, go back to your question, what is it that really erodes

[00:36:19] trust in so many contexts? It's unnecessary secrecy and failure to take responsibility. Indeed. Many listeners work in competitive industries. How can people build strong professional networks without feeling transactional or manipulative? Yes. If you are setting about building a strategic relationship, there are many aspects to what that relationship will look like. I don't think you

[00:36:49] should hide away from the purpose of it. You know, there's no point in trying to hide away if you're sitting down with a potential investor or somebody that you want to buy a product or you want to buy a service from you. There's no point in trying to hide away from that being the reason for you being in the room or over a lunch table with another person. So an acceptance, a clear acceptance of what's going on is quite important, actually. A clear-eyed acceptance of what's

[00:37:18] going on. But then within that or as an adjunct to that is a genuine interest in the lives of others. So, which I always think is a bit ironic actually because there is a movie called the lives of others. Oh yeah, it's an Oscar-winning spy film. It's a really good film actually. It's a fantastic film. Again, so two movie

[00:37:48] recommendations, the lives of others and the wild geese. Yeah, quite different films as well. Quite different, but both broadly the same sort of espionage leadership themes. And so I think it's always a little bit ironic when I talk about the lives of others because I'm not to, I don't mean that in the sense of prying because that film is about, I don't want to ruin it for people, it's about intercept and it's

[00:38:16] about, it's about neighbors spying on one another in the Soviet empire. No, I mean genuinely developing an interest in the lives of others. You know, it's extraordinary how many people think about their interpersonal relationships in the professional sense in very two-dimensional terms. Are you my employee? Are you my employer? Are you buying something from me? Am I selling

[00:38:46] something to you? Whose provider? Whose client? Who's senior? Who's junior? And so people don't like to be thought about in two-dimensional terms. We all deserve and have a right to being recognized for who we are and being seen and being heard wherever you are in the hierarchy and wherever you sit in the relationship between supplier and client.

[00:39:16] And so a genuine interest in the lives of others can take one a very, very long way. But it doesn't have to replace the point of building that relationship. So an honesty about what's going on here allied with a genuine interest in the person that sat opposite you is the sweet spot. I also think, just talking about this generally, it's just like having broad interests yourself so you're also equally an interesting person that

[00:39:44] somebody can unpack. Yeah. I have been in some situations at networking events where you meet someone and they have zero interest and it's really hard to engage with them and then you end up either talking about yourself or you try and move on. Well, I talk about this in the book and I will talk about it on the workshop. There is a concept of cover that I talk about which isn't the defensive cover where you pretend to be something or somebody that you're not, but offensive cover by which

[00:40:13] I mean developing that, presenting that part of your personality or those elements of your personality that make you attractive to other people and sometimes that might be about developing interests that aren't necessarily part of your repertoire currently. But an openness to learning about something that an interlocutor, somebody that you're building a relationship with is interested in is very, very powerful. You don't have to become

[00:40:42] an expert because one thing that people really like to do is tell you about their interests. So you can use sometimes ignorance about a subject to your advantage. It's not very difficult to say, well, tell me more about that. What first let you down, what first interested you in this subject, in this hobby, whatever it is. Tell me about it because I'm keen to learn. Then go away and find out more and come back and introduce into that

[00:41:11] relationship a shared, doesn't have to be a passion, but a shared interest in something. You're finding that common ground. That's the really important thing. Finding that common ground and if your common ground doesn't already exist, find out what interests that other person and then build common ground with them. And one of the interesting things I think about any subject is that by

[00:41:39] delving into it over time, you find you do genuinely become interested in it. So it's not a bad thing to do anyway. So broadening our horizons, our understanding of subjects, our understanding of pastimes that matter to other people. And by taking that action of becoming interested in what interests somebody else, you are doing something quite important, aren't you?

[00:42:09] You are hearing them. You're seeing them. You're validating them. And these are all things, you know, these are not bad things. These are all things that help human society function. And so they may be ultimately beneficial to you because that relationship is going to, one hopes, lead to an outcome that helps you whether or not it may be somebody giving you a reference, it may be somebody buying something from you, it may be

[00:42:38] somebody entering into a partnership with you. And I think it's a wonderful side effect of that building that relationship that in actual fact it's doing all those good things of validating, hearing other people. Yeah, I think it's really important to see the person in front of you and not try and see them and tick a box in your head because so many people do that these days. You know, there's many boxes people try and tick and then you just end up

[00:43:07] not really actually dealing with that person because people are so contradictory, sometimes mainly in a positive way but sometimes negative way to what you expect. Absolutely right. And we never really know what might become of any relationship. And I recognize that for people with very public personas that this isn't viable but I try to engage with everybody who engages with me. You know, somebody writes to me and says, can I give them a bit of advice?

[00:43:36] I'll pick up the phone if I possibly can and give them a bit of advice or spend 10 minutes writing an email to help them navigate whatever it is they're doing, particularly younger people. And I have to say I'm always surprised by the quantum effect of that, somewhere down the line. Taking that time to recognize somebody else and see them as more than a supplicant, more than a book buyer, more than

[00:44:06] somebody attending a workshop, it really has value. Not only for them but also ultimately for ourselves. So this is the point I want to make, that strategic relationships are mutually beneficial. And there's nothing wrong in that. We needn't be afraid of admitting that there are positive aspects for ourselves in fostering long term strategic relationships. The trick is, the aim is to

[00:44:35] make it mutually beneficial. And that benefit can be something as simple as somebody just feeling for a moment that another person is listening to them. That in itself is a really important interpersonal skill. Just being able to listen to somebody else and take seriously for the time that they need to be taken seriously to the subject that is on their mind. Let's take a break and be right back with more.

[00:45:14] In your workshop, you also teach something called strategic transcendence. Can you explain what that means and why it's such an important skill in today's increasingly complex world? My definition of strategic transcendence, it's the discipline to remove yourself from the emotional battlefield. Now, what does that mean? The best way I can explain this is that after repeated observation, it's much easier to see what the next move should be in a chess game that you are not playing.

[00:45:44] You know, I'm sure we've all experienced that. I've also experienced in foreign countries where I have a very minimal grasp of language, I understand the conversation on the table next to me, but when I try and speak to the waiter, I cannot speak a word. I think there's another point there, actually, about being overseas. I've always found that the lack of emotional engagement that we necessarily have in a third country, a third country's political life, helps you to think very much

[00:46:14] more clearly in your relationships with other people because you remove the emotion from it. So, the point about this strategic transcendence is to remove your ego from whatever is happening so that you can make clearer data driven rather than emotion driven decisions. And this is particularly

[00:46:44] important now because let's face it, we live in an age of tribalism, we live in an age of rage baiting, and we live in an age of media framing. It is impossible to escape, I think I'm right in saying, it's impossible to escape people trying to manipulate our emotions. So, I'm particularly

[00:47:12] appalled by mainstream media framing, for instance. I don't think I need to give any examples, but so often you see the reference to a politician or a person with an epithet applied before the name of that politician. So, it's telling you as the reader either to be angry or sympathetic towards that politician.

[00:47:42] And if there's one thing I would beg journalists to do is not to tell me how to feel. Because I'm quite capable of coming up with my own feelings. And yet we live in an age when we're being constantly told how to feel. We live in an age of clickbait and rage bait. so that by the time you land on a page of news about a particular current event

[00:48:10] you are already being conditioned to feel emotional about what's going on. And then more importantly we live in an age of tribal identity so that you are expected to respond according to what your tribal identity is. and all of that is the enemy of good strategic decision making. So, strategic transcendence is taking your emotion out of this. It's removing yourself from the emotional

[00:48:40] battlefield. And it sounds easier than it is I can guarantee you but there are certain techniques you know one of them that they use in the British Army for instance is frequently referred to as taking the knee. Now, it's not taking the knee in the more modern political sense that we understand it. It's when you walk into a conflict when you walk into the battlefield when something erupts in front of you it's first of all lowering your

[00:49:10] taking the knee physically which lowers your profile makes you less of a target and taking the knee for a period of time so that you're not to give you time to respond to the data that's in front of you rather than your emotional visceral reaction which in many cases is fight or flight. So it's getting away from the fight or flight response reaction is to giving yourself time

[00:49:40] to respond to gather data and for your next action to be data driven rather than emotion driven. one other thing another way of looking at this is police drivers are taught when they're in a car chase or whatever it might be in fact in day to day driving they're taught to vocalize what's happening around them

[00:50:10] and here's a little exercise I would suggest for everybody who's listening next time you're driving just say out loud what is going on around you there's a blue lorry moving from the middle lane to the outside lane there is a red Ford Escort coming out fast on my inside whatever it might be there's a brake the brake lights four cars ahead of me and the reason that's important is because of course when we're driving as in so many

[00:50:40] experiences we're actually quite emotionally reactive to what's going on around us this is why we have road rage and what the vocalization does is remove the emotional element of it it's reminding yourself that actually all you're dealing with is data a set of data and there's a response that you need to make to that data rather than your emotional response to why has that person just undertaken me if you just say that person has just undertaken me

[00:51:11] then you respond to the way they've done that which is to recognize that they are a dangerous driver and you may want to allow space to develop between you and them rather than getting into a race with them for instance which might be the emotional response so I think this is something which we can take from the driving or the battlefield the military battlefield and take into the boardroom or into a social setting the next time I'm not saying to you necessarily but to listeners if you walk into a room and you feel overwhelmed you're perhaps

[00:51:41] at a party or a function you're surrounded by people and you feel that it's really important that you get talking to somebody that you're not that lonely person standing in the corner actually mentally describing the room to yourself is a really good start and it enables you to take the knee for a moment so you don't need to vocalize please don't vocalize it because people will think you're a bit

[00:52:11] mad and they will walk away from you but there's nothing to stop you mentally vocalizing what's the situation I'm facing here and again in conflict well yeah you can go get a drink and do that exactly and in situations of conflict or fast moving difficult decision making environments just take that time to describe to yourself what's happening and that gives you

[00:52:41] it just creates a little bit of emotional clear blue water to allow you to frame what your response is going to be now there is strategic re-entry and for those people who will join the workshop workshop I'll explain what I mean by that it doesn't mean that you have to be entirely detached it's just knowing that point at which you need to transcend that emotional battlefield before working out how to respond to it

[00:53:11] and then re-entering I was just thinking of Ted Lasso a little bit when you were talking about this I don't have you ever seen the show Ted Lasso I don't think I have actually the basic premise is an American football coach is brought to England to try and sort out an English football team but there's more to it than that and he's a very positive person but it takes a toll on him which the show experiences but there's a really great phrase in there in one of the episodes where he talks about

[00:53:41] being curious and not judgmental and that's what this kind of the strategic kind of reminded me of a little bit I think that's absolutely right and you can do that actually you could take that in I'm not a psychologist so I always have to say to people look I'm not talking to you from any academic status here I don't have qualifications as a psychologist but from personal experience I think you can do the same thing with your emotions

[00:54:11] you can be curious about your emotions it is possible to label them and talk to yourself about them and thereby somewhat take the sting out of them if you feel that somebody has just snubbed you if you feel that you've been overlooked for promotion if you feel like somebody's being rude to you and you respond it's not a bad idea sometimes and you have an emotion that is troubling you it's not a bad idea sometimes to be

[00:54:40] curious about that emotion that's interesting I feel slighted I feel like a little boy again who's just being pushed over in the playground that's an interesting way I'm responding to that and what it does it enables you to retake possession of the moment and it robs the person who's wronged you if that's the right phrase of the power over you

[00:55:10] because you become a spectator in your own emotional battlefield world thank you for that the workshop covers communication storytelling self-awareness and personal impact of those areas where do you often see people underestimate their own potential they're all related in fact but I think the most practically useful response I can give to that question is to say that I think people let themselves down on storytelling

[00:55:40] and the reason I say that is because well we have two reservations about storytelling as far as I can see two major reservations about telling our story one is the one that many people think to themselves they may even say from time to time or there's nothing very interesting about me and the second thing is I don't want this to be about me and you know a lot of what I'm talking about is looking

[00:56:10] outwards looking at other people so self-awareness is part of this as well so those two things let's just recap recap them there's nothing very interesting about me and I don't want to make this about me so the reaction to that the response to that for many people is not to tell their personal story I would say to anybody who says there's nothing interesting about me you are wrong there is something interesting about everybody you just need to

[00:56:40] work out what it is and secondly telling a story about yourself doesn't need to be self-centered it's not necessarily making it about yourself and there is an exercise which I will do in all of my workshops and masterclasses which is developing that story about yourself which embraces the challenge that you face internally and what another person has

[00:57:10] done to help you overcome that challenge and that's a really important aspect of it so it's looking outside of yourself as well so it's not actually all about you it's about something which is a shared experience about something which that the listener can identify with and we don't get that often about storytelling you know in actual fact when you're telling a story what you're really doing and this

[00:57:39] applies as much to a story about yourself as it does to a fairy tale what you're really doing is appealing to somebody else's emotion and that's the bit we don't often get it is actually what is the point of the story it's to establish common ground within humanity that's the magic of storytelling

[00:58:09] it's appealing to something which is important to all of us and just because that story is about you doesn't make it self-centered so long as you're able to again it's about transcendence if you're able to take it away from just being about you nobody's interested if you can say to somebody oh okay this is the school I went to then I did that you reel off your CV that's not a story

[00:58:41] that's that's a that's a list storytelling is about facing a challenge and how you overcame that challenge and how you changed as a result of it but because it's about just because it's about you doesn't also mean it's not about everybody else because we all face the same challenges we all want to see what the answers to those challenges are and we all want to be transformed by having

[00:59:11] facedown a challenge so storytelling is absolutely vital I think in any durable long-term strategic relationship thank you for that let's take a break and be right back with more so

[00:59:41] on your course every participant leaves with a personalized strategic development plan so what kind of outcomes or changes are you hoping people experience after completing the program I hope that by the time participants leave the four sessions that they will have a firmer grasp of what their personal story is and why it matters and how to apply it in the strategic relationship building every attendee I want to go away with an understanding of the importance of cycles we talk about the intelligence cycle we talk

[01:00:10] about the agent recruitment cycle and we can apply those to our professional and personal lives as well so the intelligence cycle becomes what I call a personal goals cycle the agent recruitment cycle is about building those strategic relationships the same considerations go into them so it's understanding that each of these things is a cycle and iterative and also understanding

[01:00:40] the weaknesses that they have in any part of that cycle so just rattling it off the agent recruitment cycle I won't talk here about how we adapt it for use in civilian world but just as an illustration the agent recruitment cycle is effectively targeting cover cultivation elicitation of motivations recruitment continuous use of influence

[01:01:09] debriefing and management of the environment or what we call tradecraft and once you've established it once you've gone through that cycle once you learn more about the person that you're dealing with and you start a new cycle of relationship with them so it's important to understand what cycle you're in where you are in that cycle and which bits of it are your weaknesses so in that particular

[01:01:39] cycle for instance I can tell you I know what my weaknesses are my particular weakness is debriefing because I'm sufficiently self-aware to admit that I'm a little bit impatient and so I know some intelligence officers who will debrief over three four five hours and they can be very patient in

[01:02:10] drawing out from their source exactly what has happened and how it happened and why it happened my weakness is I want to get it done in half an hour and so I work on that I want to get it done in 15 minutes let's be honest that's a big and the participants will effectively draw up this strategic personal

[01:02:40] development plan themselves because I want to guide them through working out in those various cycles the personal development cycle or the strategic relations cycle which bits of them they can improve on and give some specific pointers about how to set about improving those areas of weakness weakness is a terrible phrase because it implies something negative but I don't mean it like that

[01:03:10] we all have weaknesses we all have areas of relative strength and weakness so I'm not using that phrase in any judgmental way what I mean is an area where you recognize that you could benefit from exercising that particular muscle got you yeah just think about as we should come up a new phrase to replace the word weakness shouldn't we I think we should it's it's a tricky one I thought about it long and hard I

[01:03:40] can't it's useful in one sense in that an area of perceived weakness does force us or enables us to focus on what we need to do so it's again it's like if you're at the gym and there's nothing wrong in saying I'm aware that my abs need work they're weaker than whatever it might be it's a recognition that's where you need work

[01:04:10] areas of potential improvement rather than weakness Julian looking at the workshop who do you think will most benefit from that is it primarily aimed at senior leaders or can students entrepreneurs and early career professionals gain just as much from it I'm a great believer in lifelong learning I talk about the cycle you know I think just because you've worked on yourself and your abilities in one turn of the cycle doesn't mean you shouldn't do it again so

[01:04:40] my belief is this sort of work benefits everybody at every stage of their career we sometimes have short memories we sometimes get into habits good and bad and it's occasionally useful to remind ourselves of the first principles of the importance of strategic human relationships what that means for influence and the relationship between influence and leadership

[01:05:09] so I think anybody can benefit from it but I would say those people coming out of university recent graduates people may perhaps a few years into their first careers may if they haven't stopped to think about some of the principles I talk about on the workshop may find it particularly valuable fantastic so Julian where can listeners find out more about you your workshop and your book think like a spy two I have two websites

[01:05:39] because why would I not you know is one ever website is julesfisher.com and then the specific website for the workshop is the intelligence maven dot com all one word the intelligence maven dot com I can also be found on LinkedIn where I'm reasonably active and indeed have posted snippets

[01:06:09] from our previous podcast over the past week or so yes I've seen yeah yeah thank you for doing that thank you for doing that well Julian before we wrap up is there anything else you'd like to

[01:06:39] recognizing that a refresher on some of the very straightforward aspects of personal relationship building will do us good is not a negative thing it's a really positive thing and I really want people to bring their own experiences to the workshops I

[01:07:09] I have a methodology if you like that I'm going to be talking about I have a framework within which to analyze some of the key concepts that lie at the heart of the workshop but I don't have all the answers and what I'm really hoping for is a fascinating cohort of people who have as many answers as they have questions and that's what I mean everybody has got a fascinating story

[01:07:39] I'll be looking forward to hearing some of those stories alongside the other participants so I guess what I'm saying is come and work with me fantastic well Julian I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation thank you so much for today me too thanks very much for having me on again Chris

[01:08:26] thanks for listening this is Secrets and spies nice