Center for Personal Protection & Safety - CPPS

People don't just snap.

That's what the phrase "going postal" gets wrong.

For decades, it has shaped how the public thinks about workplace violence, framing it as sudden, random, and unpredictable. That framing has set back prevention efforts in ways that are hard to measure.

The incidents at the United States Postal Service in the 1970s and 80s were not random. They were the product of a punitive culture, chronic stress, and observable behaviors that went unaddressed. The warning signs were there. The pathway to violence existed. It just went unrecognized. That distinction matters because if violence is truly random, there is nothing to be done.

If there is a pathway, and there almost always is, then there is an opportunity to intervene. The USPS eventually learned this. By 2007, the organization that gave us the phrase "going postal" had become one of the pioneers of behavioral threat assessment guidance in the country.

The lesson is not about the postal service. It's about what happens when organizations learn to recognize the pathway early enough to act on it.

Prevention is possible, and it starts with letting go of the idea that people simply snap.

Travel risk isn't just about the destination. It's also about the traveler.

The same location can carry completely different risk profiles depending on the traveler. Executives visiting a factory carry a different risk level than mid-level managers.

Even the traveler's mode of transportation matters. A private jet landing in one part of Africa might support the local economy and is something the community wants to protect. In another area, that same jet could be seen as a symbol of decades of exploitation. Same continent. Same mode of travel. Completely different risk calculus.

This is why generic travel plans fall short. Effective travel risk management has to account for the destination and the traveler, because the risks aren't the same for everyone going to the same place.

As a business traveler, are you prepared for detainment by a foreign agency?

Most business travelers aren't, and that isn't an alarmist statement. This is a real gap that shows up in almost every travel risk program we assess.

Detention doesn't always look the way people expect...

Being pulled into a secondary conversation at customs isn't the same as being detained, but without context, it can feel that way. The distinction is that situations matter, because how someone responds in those moments can determine what happens next.

The risks vary depending on who's traveling and who they represent. An individual traveler faces a different threat profile than an executive from a large multinational organization. Both need to understand what they're walking into before they get there.

It's not just about worst-case scenarios either. Driving on the other side of the road in Ireland is a different kind of risk than navigating a secondary inspection in the Middle East. Both are real. Both require preparation.

Travelers face a wide spectrum of issues, and that's exactly why preparation needs to be specific.

Workplace violence happens in several ways. Unfortunately, some organizations only prepare for one or two.

In fact, OSHA recognizes four types of workplace violence: criminal, customer or client, worker on worker, and interpersonal or domestic. Each one requires a different prevention approach. Each one carries its own warning signs.

The type organizations most often miss is also the most dangerous. Intimate partner violence does not stay at home. It follows people to work, and when it does, the entire workplace is exposed.

Preparation that only accounts for what you see most often leaves gaps that do not show up until something goes wrong.

Workplace violence prevention is not just about policies. It's about understanding all four sources of risk, building cultures where people feel safe reporting concerns, and having real support systems in place before they are needed.

If your program is only built around one or two of these, it's worth taking a closer look at what you might be missing.

Safety is not just the security team's job.

That's easy to say but often hard to operationalize. Frontline employees assume security has it covered. Executives push back on protection because they don't see themselves as targets. Organizations move forward without ever building the culture that actually prevents, or at least detects, potential incidents.

This is starting to change. Boards are pushing executives to take their own security seriously. Organizations are recognizing that single-issue extremists and grievance-driven threats do not target only the most recognizable names in an industry. The healthcare sector learned that lesson in a very public and painful way.

But the cultural shift that matters most needs to happen at every level of an organization, not just the top.

When frontline employees understand what to look for and feel confident reporting it, they become part of the prevention system. The expertise to act on those observations already exists inside most organizations. The gap is usually observation and reporting.

Security is everyone's role. It does not require a badge or a title. It requires awareness and the confidence to say something when something feels wrong.

A potential mass casualty event was stopped because a family noticed something was wrong.

The individual's behavior had been shifting. Something felt off. When he posted something vague and unsettling on social media on his way to the airport, his family connected the dots and called it in. When police located him, he was conducting surveillance at the terminal. His vehicle had weapons.

A policy didn't do that; awareness did.

Relating this to organizations, most targeted violence involves someone with some connection to the organization, a current or former employee, a relative, a past student. That connection is actually an advantage, because their behavior is observable by people who know them.

The question is whether those people know what to look for.

Awareness training is not just for security professionals. When employees, families, and communities understand the warning signs of someone on a pathway to violence, they become part of the prevention system.

See something. Say something.

That is how incidents get stopped before they start.

Threat assessment only works when the right people are at the table.

In one case, the difference between identifying a serious domestic violence threat and missing it entirely came down to access to internal messaging. The threat signal was there. It just lived in a communication channel that a siloed security team would never have seen.

This is why multidisciplinary threat management teams matter. Security sees behavioral and physical warning signs. HR sees performance changes and disciplinary concerns. Cyber sees suspicious digital activity. Legal sees liability exposure. When those teams do not talk to each other, each one is working with half the picture.

Organizations often want to keep threat assessment contained to one department. It feels cleaner. More controlled. But that instinct is exactly what creates the gaps that allow serious situations to escalate undetected.

If your threat management team only includes one function, you are likely missing something important.

There are resources for people experiencing domestic violence.

Safe houses. Support systems. Plans for getting out.

But there’s one place an abuser can still predict.

The workplace.

If organizations are aware, they can take simple steps to reduce risk. Adjust schedules, increase visibility, notify security, and create a plan before something escalates.

But none of that happens if people don’t feel safe speaking up.

Awareness matters. Trust matters more.

The people who pose the greatest risk to your organization may never make a threat.

That is one of the things that makes threat assessment work so difficult. There's no clear signal and no obvious warning. Just behaviors that, when viewed together, start to tell a story.

Sometimes that story ends in violence. Sometimes it ends in sabotage. Sometimes it ends in data theft or, in some other way, a person decides to act on a grievance.

A utility organization recently discovered its water systems were being poisoned by someone inside the organization. The behaviors were there, and the warning signs existed. The threat management process gave the organization the opportunity to get ahead of it.

That is the value of a proactive threat management team. Not just responding to direct threats, but recognizing patterns of behavior before someone decides how they are going to act on them.