Author
Guvernul SUA (CIA, Center for the Study of Intelligence)
2 reading cards from 1 book · 2009.
2 cards
A Tradecraft Primer: Structured Analytic Techniques for Improving Intelligence Analysis · 2009
Start with the forces nobody in the problem controls, then descend to what the actors control.
The technique is designed for the start of an analytic project, when the goal is to identify all the critical external factors that could influence how a situation develops. The primer's method has four steps: describe the problem generically; list all the key forces (social, technological, economic, environmental, political — the STEEP grid) that could have an impact but over which you can exert almost no influence (globalisation, social stress, the Internet, the global economy); then move to the factors over which an actor or policymaker can exert some influence (market size, customers, competition, partners; in the government domain, policy actions or the behaviour of allies and adversaries); assess how each force could affect the problem and check, on the evidence, whether it actually does. The value added is twofold. The first is preventing a mundane and expensive mistake: the primer gives the example of a database built with too few categories, where analysts realise too late that fields are missing and have to recode every file — outside-in, with modest effort, reduces the risk of missing important variables early. The second is getting out of the "inbox": the analyst who looks from the inside sees what he controls and what his actors control; the external changes that can profoundly affect their field stay invisible until they become a crisis. Lesson 22 (PMESII) answers "what is the environment"; outside-in answers "what from outside the environment can change it". They are used together, but the questions differ.
“Most analysts spend their time concentrating on familiar factors within their field or analytic issue. That is, they think from the “inside”—namely, what they control—out to the broader world.”
A Tradecraft Primer: Structured Analytic Techniques for Improving Intelligence Analysis · 2009
Generate without evaluating, then evaluate without generating; and put everything on a sourced chronology.
The primer puts brainstorming ahead of all the other techniques, as an aid to forming hypotheses (lesson 9) or indicators (lesson 11). Its rules run against intuition: never censor an idea, however unconventional; ask what prompted it, because an unstated assumption may sit there; allow time — usually an hour until the rules are set, the group relaxes and the conventional wisdom runs out, and only then do the truly new ideas appear; bring at least one "outsider", someone with a different training or culture but familiar with the topic. The divergent phase produces; the convergent phase groups the ideas around key concepts and makes them usable. The primer describes a two-phase, twelve-step process, but the essence is the separation: do not evaluate while you generate. The chronology is the sister technique, less spectacular and more often useful. You put the events in the order they happened, with the source of each, and look at three things: gaps (what should have happened between two points and appears nowhere), coincidences (two things in the same week that no source connects) and order (the effect is reported before the cause — either the source is wrong or the cause is something else). A well-kept chronology is also the antidote to selective memory: what contradicts the current hypothesis stays on the list, with its date. Both are start-of-project techniques. The most frequent mistake is doing them after the conclusion has formed, as decoration.
“Paradoxically, brainstorming should be a very structured process to be most productive.”