Everything I Learned About Threat Assessment I Learned by Watching Waffle House Staff

I spend a fair amount of time at Waffle House. Enough that somewhere along the way I started watching the staff almost as much as I watched the grill.

If you have spent any time in a busy Waffle House, you know there is a lot happening in a very small space. Orders are being called. Plates are moving. Customers are coming and going.Somebody needs coffee. Somebody else has decided their eggs are a matter requiring immediate intervention. The staff are constantly taking in information, deciding what matters, communicating with one another, and adjusting without stopping the whole operation every time something changes.

After watching this enough times, I started thinking about BIT/CARE and threat assessment teams. That may say more about me than it does about Waffle House, but once I saw the connection, I couldn't stop seeing it.

Everyone Is Watching the Room

One thing I notice at Waffle House is that situational awareness is distributed. The server sees one part of the room. The cook sees another. Someone working the register may notice something neither of them does. Nobody needs to stop the operation and announce that they are now conducting situational awareness. They are simply paying attention while doing their jobs, and what each person sees becomes part of how the whole crew understands the room.

Good BIT/CARE teams work similarly. The professor sees the student in class. Residence Life sees what is happening at 1:00 in the morning. Campus police sees an interaction that never reaches the classroom. Counseling may understand something about the student's current functioning. Conduct knows about a previous incident. Financial aid may know the student is facing a problem nobody else at the table has heard about.

None of those people necessarily has the whole picture, which is one of the reasons they aresitting together. The value is not simply that different departments are represented. It is thatthe information they hold has somewhere to meet.

The Person Closest to the Problem May See It First

Expertise matters, but proximity matters too. The person who notices something important maynot be the person with the most impressive title or the most threat-assessment training. It maybe the administrative assistant who has spoken with the student four times this week. It maybe the residence-hall desk worker who notices that someone's behavior has changed. It may bea faculty member who cannot quite explain why a student's latest email feels different from the previous twenty.

One of the easiest mistakes for a multidisciplinary team to make is assuming that expertise and information always arrive together. They don't, and sometimes the person who knows the least about threat assessment knows the most about what just happened.

Nobody Has the Whole Ticket

A Waffle House order moves through several people, and each person is responsible for a different part of getting it to the table. The operation works because those pieces eventually become one meal.

Campus cases are rarely that cooperative. One person knows about the classroom disruption.Someone else knows about the breakup. Police know about the welfare check. Counseling knows something else. The Dean of Students knows the student's mother called. Maybe nobody knows yet that the student just lost a job.

The work of a BIT/CARE team is not simply collecting those pieces. It is figuring out what they mean when placed next to one another, including whether they mean anything at all.That is where team cognition becomes important. The quality of an assessment does not reside solely in the assessment instrument or in whichever person around the table has the most experience.It also depends on whether people notice useful information, communicate it clearly, challenge one another when necessary, and develop a shared understanding of what is happening.

Not Everything Needs Attention at the Same Speed

A busy Waffle House always has multiple things happening at once, but they are not equally urgent. The staff have to keep deciding what needs attention now and what can wait thirty seconds. BIT/CARE teams make versions of that decision constantly. Some cases need immediate action. Others need another piece of information. Some need monitoring. Some need support but very little in the way of threat management.

I watched this play out in a fairly literal way one day when an older man got up from his booth in a busy Waffle House, carried his plate to the counter, and effectively brought the operation to a halt so he could explain that his eggs were not over easy as ordered. They were something else, he informed everyone, and he would not be coming back.

My internal assessment was roughly, "It's a Waffle House, dude. Relax." He certainly had everyone's attention, but that did not make him the most important thing happening in the room. Teams can make the same mistake. A loud case, an angry student, a demanding parent, or an administrator who wants something handled immediately can consume enormous amounts of attention. Attention and risk are not the same thing, even though institutional urgency can sometimes make them feel that way.

The Room Keeps Changing

Assessment would be much easier if circumstances would hold still while we did it. They rarely do, and some of the most important changes happen after we think we understand the case. A student gets an academic decision. A relationship ends. Someone moves out. A parent arrives on campus. A social-media post appears. Police make contact. The student stops responding. Something that looked manageable Monday can look quite different Thursday.

The same thing happens during a breakfast rush. The room the staff were managing five minutes ago is not quite the room they are managing now, and they have to adjust without pretending everything they noticed five minutes ago has become irrelevant. Teams have to resist becoming overly attached to their first understanding of a case for the same reason. An assessment should give us a way to think about what we know, not a reason to stop noticing what changes.

Roles Matter, but the Student Does Not Live in Our Organizational Chart

Waffle House staff have defined jobs, and those jobs matter because a functioning operation depends on people knowing what they are responsible for. The customer, however, experiences one Waffle House. Students experience colleges much the same way. We may see counseling, conduct, police, academic affairs, disability services, residence life, Title IX, and the Dean ofStudents office. The student experiences the institution, usually without much interest in which office technically owns which piece of the problem.

That difference becomes particularly obvious when a case crosses several systems. Everyone can perform their individual role correctly while the overall response still feels fragmented because nobody is looking across the boundaries. A multidisciplinary team gives those pieces aplace to meet. Whether they become integrated once they get there is another question.

Waffle House Has a Language

Spend enough time around a Waffle House grill and you start hearing a language that sounds almost impenetrable from the outside. You might hear something like, “Pull one bacon. Drop two hash browns scattered. Mark order over light plate, scattered, smothered, covered.” WaffleHouse calls part of its system “Pull, Drop, Mark.” Meat gets pulled, hash browns get dropped, and the rest of the order gets marked. The grill operator also uses a visual system of plate markers to keep track of what belongs where.

The system works because the people using the language understand it. There is very littlevalue in having efficient shorthand if everyone has developed their own private definition ofwhat the shorthand means. Threat assessment has its own vocabulary. Escalation. Fixation.Leakage. Grievance. Access. Capability. Protective factors. Baseline behavior. Change in circumstances.

Shared terminology can make a team faster and more precise, but only if people mean roughly the same thing when they use it. If one member says “fixation” and five people around the table are operating with five different definitions, the vocabulary is not helping much. I am also reasonably certain higher education does not need additional acronyms. We have demonstrated sufficient proficiency in that area, so perhaps we can work on understanding the ones we already have.

What Can Your Team Still Do When the Menu Gets Smaller?

There is a disaster-management connection to Waffle House that has become almost as famous as the restaurant itself. Former FEMA administrator Craig Fugate popularized what became known as the Waffle House Index, an informal way of looking at how badly an area had been affected by a disaster based partly on whether local Waffle House restaurants were operating normally, serving a limited menu, or closed.

It is not, to my knowledge, a formally adopted federal hash-brown-based emergency classification system. The underlying idea is useful, though, because Waffle House plans to operate when normal conditions are gone. Power may be out. Supplies may be limited. Staffing may be difficult. The full menu may no longer be possible, but there is still a plan for what the restaurant can do.

BIT/CARE teams usually design their processes under normal conditions too. Then the chair is out or counseling is booked. The student will not respond and the case escalates late Fridayafternoon. Residence halls are closing. Community providers have waitlists. The one person who knows the history is on vacation. I think there is a useful question for teams buried in all of that: What is your limited menu? Ateam does not need to function exactly the same way under disrupted conditions, but it doesneed to know which functions cannot disappear just because the normal resources areunavailable.

And Then There Is Waffle House at 3 A.M.

We should probably acknowledge another part of the Waffle House reputation. I once heard the line, “Bob Evans is for people who don't know how to fight.” That is unfair to Bob Evans, but it tells you something about the cultural mythology surrounding Waffle House. A restaurant that stays open around the clock will eventually encounter intoxicated people, impulsive people, angry people, and people making decisions they may reconsider when the sun comes up (sounds like college amirite). Every so often, the internet gets a reminder of exactly what that can look like.

A few years ago, video circulated widely of Waffle House employee Halie Booth dealing with a chair that had been thrown at her during a brawl. She deflected it with a move that looked considerably more practiced than anyone would expect from someone whose job description presumably focused on breakfast. For the record, catching a flying chair is not a recommended threat assessment intervention. Halie Booth appears to have that particular competency covered for the rest of us, and I am comfortable leaving it with her.

There is a useful point underneath the absurdity. Systems designed for human behavior eventually encounter human behavior at its least cooperative. The question is whether the people inside the system can recognize what is happening, communicate, adapt, and keep functioning when the situation no longer resembles the one described in the procedure manual.

The Team Has to Work When the Manager Isn't Standing There

The best teams do not depend entirely on one person noticing everything, interpreting everything, and telling everyone else what to do. That is especially important for BIT/CARE teams because cases do not reliably arrive when the chair is available.A concern comes in late Friday. Someone receives an alarming email at night. Police encounter a student over the weekend. A faculty member reaches the wrong person first. The system still has to function even when the person who normally holds it together is not immediately available.

If the entire system depends on one experienced person being present, the institution does not really have a team. It has a person with helpers, and that arrangement becomes obvious the first time the person is unavailable. Shared language, clear roles, distributed awareness, and enough common training to recognize when something needs attention make the team less dependent on any single member. They also make the system more resilient when somebody leaves, retires, changes jobs, or simply takes a vacation.

What I Keep Watching

I do not think Waffle House has secretly solved behavioral threat assessment, and I would be concerned if colleges began reorganizing BIT/CARE teams around restaurant operations. Still, I keep watching the staff because there is something recognizable in how the work gets done. I watch how much information moves without a meeting being called. I watch people notice things outside their immediate job. I watch them communicate in a language everyone understands and change priorities without the entire operation stopping.

Different roles remain distinct, but they are still contributing to the same outcome. Those are not bad habits for a BIT/CARE team. They are also a decent reminder that good team functioning is often less about having the perfect structure on paper than what people actually do together when the room gets busy. And since I have spent an entire article talking about Waffle House, I should probably disclose my order. My hash browns are capped, covered, and smothered, and if you're ever in Oxford, Ohio, I'm buying.