Such an wonderful piece! highly recommended.
Please read the whole thing here:
Because learning institutionally is hard?
Learning institutionally is hard. Not only is it hard to do, but it's also hard to measure and to affect. But, if nothing else, practitioners became more thoughtful about the profession of intelligence. To me, that was really important. The CIA is well represented by lots of fiction, from Archer to Jason Bourne. It's always good for the brand. Even if we look nefarious, it scares our adversaries. But it's super far removed from reality. Reality in intelligence looks about as dull as reality in general. Being a really good financial or business analyst, any of those kinds of tasks, they're all working a certain part of your brain that you can either train and improve, or ignore and just hope for the best.
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What do American intelligence analysts do if not the fun stuff from the Bourne movies?
They read, they think, they write. They write some more, they edit, they get told their writing sucks. They go back, they start over again. Some manager looks at it and says, "Is this the best you can write?" And they say, “No.” And they hand it back to them, and off they go to write it again. It’s as much of a grind as any other analytic gig. You're reading, thinking, following trends, looking for key variables.
Analysts who are good on their account generally have picked up very specific tips and tricks that they may not even be able to articulate. The best performers in the agency had a very difficult time explaining how it was they went about their analysis, and articulating their expertise. That's not unusual. Experts really aren't very good at articulating why or how they're experts, but we do find that after 10,000-ish cases, they get better, because they're learning what to look for and what not to.
That comes with some penalties. The more hyper-focused you are on topic X, the less likely you are to think that topic Y is going to affect it. And often it's topic Y that comes in orthogonally and makes chaos. “How do you create expert-novice teams?” was a question that we struggled with: finding the right balance between old and new hands, because you wanted the depth of expertise along with the breadth of being a novice. Novices would try anything because nobody told them they couldn't. That's a very valuable thing to learn from. If you're an analyst or an analytic manager, the challenge is how to balance that structure.
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That old model seems more James Bond-y. The character goes more places for the movie at the cost of effectiveness.
A consistent problem is that the effectiveness measures are poorly articulated and poorly understood by both the consumers and the customers. The best consumer of intelligence that I have ever interacted with was Colin Powell. He had a very simple truism: "Tell me what you know, tell me what you don't know, then tell me what you think, so that I can parse out what you're saying and make sense of it.” He was a remarkably savvy consumer of intelligence.
Not all consumers are that savvy. Many of them would benefit from spending a little time learning more about the community, understanding the relationship with their briefers and analysts. The more engaged the policymakers are in learning about intelligence, the more savvy they'll get as consumers. Until then, you're throwing something over the transom and hoping for the best. It's not a great way to operate if you have consumers who want your product.
Who were some relatively poor consumers of intelligence information?
There are so many. Dick Cheney was not a poor consumer of intelligence. He just had an agenda, and he understood the discipline well enough to exercise that agenda. [Donald] Rumsfeld was not good. And [Paul] Wolfowitz was much worse at it than he thought. There were some others in that administration, and I don't mean to pick on them. There were plenty of lousy consumers under Obama and under Clinton. Not a lot of them take enough time to really think about what they're getting.
The biggest problem that I have found with ambassadors, generals, or other consumers is they'll go out into the world, shake hands with their counterpart, and decide based on that interaction that they understand their counterpart better than anybody else does. "I went to lunch with so-and-so, I should know." The problem is that so-and-so is not going to tell you the truth. If so-and-so is going to do something, going to lunch with him probably isn't going to be very revealing. He's probably going to tell you what you want to hear. You'd be surprised how many consumers don't even think about that possibility. It boggles my mind.
It is funny you mention Donald Rumsfeld as a poor consumer of information, because one of his famous truisms was, he wanted you to explain your “known knowns” and your “unknown unknowns.” My first impression would be that he’d be a good consumer.
The problem with the Rumsfelds and the Kissingers is that maybe they are the smartest person in the room, but maybe they should stop believing that for a while. That gets in their way. They just assume from the jump that they're smarter than everybody. Not just everybody individually, but everybody collectively. There's a certain amount of ego that goes along with all of this. When the ego gets sufficiently inflated, you reject information that is contrary to your own values, mental model, and thought processes. You assign outlier status to anything that doesn't conform with the way you think about a problem. That's expertise run amok.
That's where people like Rumsfeld or Kissinger come off the rails. They just assume, "Well, I'm smarter than everybody, so I'll figure it out. You just give me raw data." I have not seen a terribly successful model of that. It's better to walk into a room and assume that you're not remotely the smartest person there. You're doing yourself a cognitive disservice if you think you're cleverer than everybody else. It's a rookie mistake, but you see it over and over, and if it works for you and you keep getting promoted, eventually you start to believe it.
It doesn't seem like a rookie mistake to me. It seems like the mistake of a seasoned professional.
You're right. It is a longevity error.
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