Built by people who read people for a living.
Double Take is built by one team, with backgrounds in human intelligence (HUMINT) operations, kidnap for ransom and extortion (K&R) response, interrogation, and security risk management. Their work depended on building trust with strangers and keeping control when a conversation turned hostile. Front-line teams need the same skills.
Definition
HUMINT is intelligence gathered from people, through conversation. It is the opposite of a script: you listen, read what the other person wants and hides, and decide your next sentence in real time.
Why this background matters for de-escalation
Our specialists know from their own work that an angry person rarely wants what they first ask for, and that tone matters as much as the words.
That knowledge is in every character: what makes them angrier, what calms them and what they will accept.
How we build a scenario
The whole team works on every scenario. Each one goes through the same five steps before a trainee sees it.
Write the person
What they want, why today matters to them, how they speak and what they will accept. A character with a real motive behaves like a person, not a script.
Hide the facts
Each character knows things they do not say. A trainee who listens and asks the right question finds them, and finds the way out.
Build the agitation ladder
A start level from 0 to 10, and the specific behaviours that raise or lower it. This is where the team’s experience counts most.
Set the limits
How far the character goes at their worst, and what they never do. Realism stops before harm.
Test with scripted trainees
We run a good and a bad trainee script against each character many times. Technique, not luck, must decide the outcome.
Tell us what your team faces.
Register interest, and tell us the situations your team meets most. Our specialists use the answers to choose the next scenarios.