Editor's note: This is the first part of a two-part series. Check back next Wednesday for the second installment.

Spend enough time around firearms instructors, and sooner or later you will hear some version of the same explanation. 

“This is how I was taught.” 

“We’ve always done it this way.” 

“The academy has run this drill for 20 years.” 

“I learned it from so-and-so.”

Sometimes those statements carry legitimate weight. Good instructors learn from other good instructors. Institutional memory matters. Some training traditions survived precisely because they solved real problems, reduced injuries, improved performance, or preserved hard-earned lessons that previous generations paid dearly to learn. I am not interested in throwing out tradition simply because it is old. That would be just as intellectually lazy as preserving something simply because it is old. What concerns me is what happens when lineage becomes evidence, when the identity of the person who taught a method becomes the principal justification for continuing to teach it, and when nobody remembers what problem the method was originally designed to solve. 

Firearms training has a family tree. Every instructor was taught by somebody. That instructor was taught by somebody else. Drills, commands, diagnostic cues, qualification standards, techniques, and even the language we use on the range move through generations of instructors. This is cultural transmission in a very practical sense. Human beings are extraordinarily efficient social learners, and our tendency to learn from successful or prestigious models is not inherently irrational. Henrich and Gil-White argued that prestige itself can function as a mechanism for identifying potentially valuable sources of socially transmitted information. Cultural transmission research likewise demonstrates how knowledge, practices, and conventions can spread through populations without each individual independently rediscovering them (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001; Mesoudi & Whiten, 2008). (PubMed) 

That efficiency is one reason instructor lineage matters. I do not want every new firearms instructor reinventing muzzle discipline, range commands, emergency procedures or the basic mechanics of safe gun handling from scratch. Some knowledge should be inherited. We stand on the shoulders of the people who came before us precisely so that every generation does not have to relearn the same lessons through failure. Gary Klein’s work in naturalistic decision-making also reminds us that genuine expertise can create sophisticated pattern recognition. Experienced practitioners can recognize meaningful configurations and courses of action that novices simply cannot yet see (Klein, 1993). 

The problem begins when transmission continues, but understanding does not.

When Instructor Lineage Becomes the Evidence

In Unlocking the Brain Code, I describe a process I call generational instructional inbreeding. The manuscript puts the problem plainly: “This process produces what can accurately be described as generational instructional inbreeding” (Hanson, 2026, p. 25). The idea is not that instructors within the same lineage are incompetent. It is that a closed instructional ecosystem can reproduce its own assumptions so consistently that those assumptions become increasingly difficult to recognize as assumptions. Everyone learned the same drill. Everyone uses the same terminology. Everyone evaluates performance using the same metric. Everyone was certified under roughly the same architecture. Agreement then begins to look like validation. 

That is where instructional lineage can become dangerous. 

Imagine that an instructor develops a drill for a specific purpose. Perhaps the goal is to isolate one mechanical component of a complex skill. The distance, target, cadence and sequence are deliberately constrained because the instructor wants students to concentrate on that single element. Within that context, the drill makes perfect sense. The instructor teaches it to the next generation but does not fully explain its design logic. Those instructors preserve the visible structure because it worked for them. A decade later, another generation inherits it. By then, the original objective may be only vaguely understood. Eventually the drill is no longer described as a narrow exercise designed to solve a particular learning problem. It becomes “the way we do it.” 

The drill survived. Its rationale did not. 

How Good Drills Become Rituals

That is why another passage from Unlocking the Brain Code matters so much to this conversation: “What began as intentional method becomes ritualized routine” (Hanson, 2026, p. 132). That sentence captures the distinction between tradition and ritual. Tradition can preserve knowledge. Ritual preserves behavior. Tradition can answer why. Ritual frequently answers only who taught it and how long it has been around. 

We see this everywhere in firearms instruction. An exercise originally intended to teach a foundational motor component gradually becomes treated as evidence of tactical competence. A qualification course designed to establish a minimum administrative standard becomes interpreted as proof of operational readiness. A particular ready position, reload sequence, malfunction procedure, or movement pattern gets taught as universally correct because it was embedded in an instructor school decades ago. Range commands developed for safety and administrative control begin creeping into tactical assumptions. Students become extremely proficient at responding to predictable stimulus sequences because generations of instructors have used the same sequences, and the resulting improvement is interpreted as evidence that the method works. 

Often, it does work, but only for the thing it is actually training. 

That distinction is critical. If a drill reliably improves a specific mechanical skill under controlled conditions, then it may be an excellent drill. The error occurs when we quietly expand the claim. Mechanical proficiency becomes “combat proven.” Passing a qualification becomes “prepared for the street.” Repeating a rehearsed response becomes “automaticity.” A drill that successfully teaches one component of performance acquires a mythology far larger than the evidence supporting it. 

Human cognition helps that mythology survive. Confirmation bias makes us more likely to notice evidence supporting what we already believe and to discount information that challenges it (Nickerson, 1998). (Sage Journals) If I was taught that a particular drill builds an essential capability, I will notice students improving while performing that drill. Their groups tighten. Their times decrease. Their movements become smoother. I see what looks like proof. What I may never test is whether the skill survives a week later, whether it transfers when the environment changes, whether the student can select the correct response when the signal is ambiguous, or whether the behavior remains functional when stress consumes attentional resources. 

This is precisely where the difference between performance and learning becomes so important. Soderstrom and Bjork’s review of the learning-performance distinction explains that what instructors can observe during acquisition is performance, and that performance can be an unreliable indicator of the relatively durable change that constitutes learning. Conditions that make practice look smooth can produce excellent short-term performance without producing equally strong retention or transfer (Soderstrom & Bjork, 2015). (Association for Psychological Science) If instructors inherit both the drill and the belief that end-of-session improvement validates the drill, each generation receives a self-confirming system. 

Students get better at the thing we repeatedly ask them to do. 

The Cognitive Traps That Keep Training Stagnant

We then cite that improvement as evidence that we were correct to repeatedly ask them to do it. 

There is another cognitive trap operating underneath the surface: the Einstellung effect. Bilalić, McLeod and Gobet demonstrated that a familiar solution can actually interfere with discovery of a better one. Even experts who report searching for alternatives may continue allocating attention toward the familiar solution that first came to mind (Bilalić et al., 2008). (ScienceDirect) On a firearms range, that can become an instructional reflex. A shooter throws a shot, and the instructor sees grip. Another sees trigger control. Another sees stance. Another sees visual discipline. We tend to diagnose through the conceptual tools our own lineage gave us. 

Sometimes the familiar answer is correct. Sometimes it merely arrives first. 

Expertise itself can complicate the problem. Erik Dane describes cognitive entrenchment as the increasing stability of domain-specific schemas that can accompany expertise and reduce flexibility in problem solving (Dane, 2010). (Academy of Management Journals) Pamela Hinds found that experts could be worse than less-experienced individuals at estimating how difficult a task would be for novices, apparently because the knowledge that had become obvious to experts was no longer psychologically available in the same way it had been during their own learning (Hinds, 1999). (ResearchGate) More recently, Zhang, Harrington and Sherf reviewed how expertise and the self-efficacy accompanying it can contribute to cognitive entrenchment, reduced perspective taking and decreased willingness to seek or incorporate outside feedback (Zhang et al., 2022). (ScienceDirect) 

That combination should make every instructor slightly uncomfortable. 

Expertise Can Create Blind Spots

The more experienced we become, the more valuable our experience can be. At the same time, the more familiar our internal model becomes, the harder it may be to see its boundaries. That does not mean expertise is a liability. It means expertise requires maintenance. An instructor who stops interrogating his assumptions does not freeze his knowledge in place. He allows the world, the science, and the profession to move past it. 

Prestige can accelerate that process because firearms culture places enormous value on lineage. There is nothing necessarily wrong with saying, “I learned this from X.” Knowing where an idea came from can help establish context. The mistake is finishing the argument there. The identity of the instructor who developed or taught a method tells us something about provenance. It does not independently establish validity. 

I have trained under exceptionally accomplished people, and I have benefited enormously from what they taught me. Respecting them does not require believing that everything they taught must remain untouched forever. In fact, I would argue that the highest form of respect for a good instructor is taking the lesson seriously enough to test it, refine it, and improve it as better information becomes available. If an instructor taught me to think rather than merely mimic, then questioning the technique is not a betrayal of the lineage. It is fulfillment of it.

Survivorship bias makes that interrogation even more important. Training communities naturally tell stories about success. We hear from the veteran officer who trained a certain way for 30 years and survived. We hear about the technique that “worked in a shooting.” We hear about the academy that has used the same qualification course for decades without an obvious catastrophe. What we rarely possess is a complete denominator. We do not systematically collect every instance in which a learned behavior failed to transfer, was never retrieved, degraded under stress, produced hesitation, or simply happened not to be relevant. 

Jerker Denrell demonstrated this problem in organizational learning. When organizations learn by observing other organizations, they often observe a biased sample because failures disappear while survivors remain visible. That undersampling of failure can create convincing but false beliefs about which practices actually produce success (Denrell, 2003). (PubsOnline) The same logic should concern us in training. “Nobody I know ever had a problem with it” is not the same thing as evidence that a practice is optimal. Sometimes it means only that the failures were never captured. 

Once a practice becomes institutional, changing it becomes harder for reasons that have little to do with its instructional value. Hannan and Freeman’s classic work on structural inertia described how organizations develop resistance to change as structures become established and embedded (Hannan & Freeman, 1984). (JSTOR) Sydow, Schreyögg, and Koch later described organizational path dependence as a process in which self-reinforcing mechanisms can progressively narrow available choices until the organization becomes locked into a particular path (Sydow et al., 2009). (Academy of Management Journals) 

Anyone who has worked inside an academy can probably translate that into plain English. The drill is in the lesson plan. The lesson plan is tied to the qualification. The qualification is referenced in policy. The targets are already purchased. The instructor cadre knows how to administer it. Scores from previous years provide comparison data. Changing the drill would mean changing instructor materials, documentation, schedules, scoring systems and possibly policy. At some point, the original question, “Is this still the best way to accomplish the learning objective?” becomes buried underneath a much larger administrative question: “Do we really want to change all of this?” 

That is institutional inertia. 

Institutional Inertia and the Cost of Change

It is also why I think the worst phrase in training may be, “We’ve always done it this way.” The statement usually masquerades as an argument for effectiveness, but logically it establishes only duration. If anything, the longer a method has existed, the more important it becomes to ask whether the conditions that originally justified it still exist. Firearms changed. Holsters changed. Body armor changed. Optics changed. police equipment changed. Use-of-force law evolved. Vehicles changed. Research on motor learning, cognition, and stress advanced. The operational environment changed. A drill designed to solve a problem in one era may still be valuable, but longevity alone cannot tell us that. 

Police training research makes the expectation of evolution explicit. Di Nota and Huhta argued that as policing, science, and technology change, training practices should change as well. Their review emphasizes that police performance integrates motor learning, perception, situational awareness, and decision-making, all of which must ultimately function in occupationally relevant contexts (Di Nota & Huhta, 2019). (Frontiers) That does not mean every square-range drill needs to become a scenario. Component practice remains necessary. It means instructors should be precise about what a training method develops and equally precise about what it does not establish. 

This is where tradition deserves a more sophisticated defense than either side usually gives it. Organizational routines are not automatically barriers to improvement. Feldman and Pentland argued that routines can provide both stability and the capacity for change because people actively enact, adapt, and modify them over time (Feldman & Pentland, 2003). (DOI) A healthy training tradition should function the same way. Its core lessons remain available, but its expression is continuously evaluated against current requirements and evidence. 

Good tradition has a memory. It remembers why the practice exists, what problem it was intended to solve, which elements are safety-critical and therefore resistant to casual modification, which elements are instructional choices rather than commandments, and most importantly, it knows what evidence would cause the practice to change. 

That is fundamentally different from ritualized replication. 

Respect Tradition, But Test It

Within NeuralTac, I approach this as a kind of instructional genealogy. Before treating a drill or methodology as doctrine, I want instructors to ask where it came from, what it was originally designed to produce, what learner population it was designed for, what conditions surrounded its creation, how its effectiveness was evaluated, and whether those conditions still resemble the environment in which we are using it today. If the only available answer is, “That’s how my instructor taught me,” then we have provenance without validation. 

NeuralTac is not built around destroying lineage. Quite the opposite. It attempts to separate inherited value from inherited assumption. A technique that survives scrutiny becomes stronger because we now understand why it deserves to survive. A drill that produces excellent retention and transfer should remain in the curriculum regardless of whether it is 30 days old or 30 years old. A safety practice grounded in sound risk management should not be discarded because someone wants to appear innovative. Evidence-based training is not a fetish for novelty. 

But neither is professionalism a fetish for tradition. 

The instructor I worry about is not the old instructor. It is the incurious instructor. Age has nothing to do with it. I have encountered extraordinarily experienced trainers who remain intellectually hungry, constantly testing what they think they know. I have also seen comparatively new instructors become doctrinally rigid almost immediately because their identity became attached to a particular school, instructor, technique, or tribe. 

The antidote is intellectual humility coupled with disciplined evaluation. When an instructor says, “This has worked well for us, and here is why I think it works,” I am interested. When that same instructor can explain the learning objective, acknowledge the limitations of the drill, identify the conditions under which it may not transfer, and describe what evidence would cause him to modify it, I trust him more, not less. Certainty is easy. Calibrated confidence is harder. 

That is ultimately the lesson of the training family tree. Every instructor inherits something. We inherit good ideas, bad ideas, incomplete ideas, obsolete ideas, safety lessons, personal biases, elegant solutions, and occasionally complete nonsense. We cannot choose whether we have an instructional lineage. We can choose whether we examine it. 

Our responsibility is not to preserve every branch of the tree exactly as we found it. Our responsibility is to preserve what is healthy, prune what no longer serves its purpose and make certain that the next generation understands why. 

The question “Who taught your instructor?” is, without a doubt, important. The more important question is, “Did anyone ever go back and test what they taught?” 

In a high-liability profession, lineage deserves respect. It does not deserve immunity from examination. 

References

Bilalić, M., McLeod, P., & Gobet, F. (2008). Why good thoughts block better ones: The mechanism of the pernicious Einstellung (set) effect. Cognition, 108(3), 652-661. 

Dane, E. (2010). Reconsidering the trade-off between expertise and flexibility: A cognitive entrenchment perspective. Academy of Management Review, 35(4), 579-603. 

Denrell, J. (2003). Vicarious learning, undersampling of failure, and the myths of management. Organization Science, 14(3), 227-243. 

Di Nota, P. M., & Huhta, J. M. (2019). Complex motor learning and police training: Applied, cognitive, and clinical perspectives. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1797. 

Feldman, M. S., & Pentland, B. T. (2003). Reconceptualizing organizational routines as a source of flexibility and change. Administrative Science Quarterly, 48(1), 94-118. 

Hannan, M. T., & Freeman, J. (1984). Structural inertia and organizational change. American Sociological Review, 49(2), 149-164. 

Hanson, K. A. (2026). Unlocking the brain code: Exposing the limits of traditional firearms instruction and high-liability training through neuroscience, psychology, and human performance research. Applied Threat Science Publications.

Henrich, J., & Gil-White, F. J. (2001). The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22(3), 165-196. 

Hinds, P. J. (1999). The curse of expertise: The effects of expertise and debiasing methods on predictions of novice performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 5(2), 205-221. 

Klein, G. A. (1993). A recognition-primed decision model of rapid decision making. In G. A. Klein, J. Orasanu, R. Calderwood, & C. E. Zsambok (Eds.), Decision making in action: Models and methods (pp. 138-147). Ablex Publishing Corporation. 

Mesoudi, A., & Whiten, A. (2008). The multiple roles of cultural transmission experiments in understanding human cultural evolution. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 363(1509), 3489-3501. 

Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175-220. 

Soderstrom, N. C., & Bjork, R. A. (2015). Learning versus performance: An integrative review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 176-199. 

Sydow, J., Schreyögg, G., & Koch, J. (2009). Organizational path dependence: Opening the black box. Academy of Management Review, 34(4), 689-709. 

Zhang, T., Harrington, K. B., & Sherf, E. N. (2022). The errors of experts: When expertise hinders effective provision and seeking of advice and feedback. Current Opinion in Psychology, 43, 91-95.