[15 June 2022] For generations, intelligence analysts have been instructed to shroud their products in empiricism and the scientific process, and to shield them from emotions. The latter are associated with sentimentality, excitement and feelings, which, by their very nature, are opposed to analytical logic. But that dichotomy is false, and is not necessarily the key to arriving at successful analysis products. Don’t take my word for it. Read instead a remarkably insightful article by Carmen Medina, which was published earlier this month in the Cypher Brief. Medina spent over 40 years as an analyst, eventually retiring from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as its Deputy Director of Intelligence.
Medina argues that numbers don’t always tell the whole story. Take the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which —by all measurable standards of intelligence analysis— should have been a cakewalk for the Kremlin. But it wasn’t. How are we to explain the reality of that war, which diverges drastically from our analytical expectations? Medina claims that intelligence analyses of the invasion were based on “concrete, objective things”, like the “quantity and quality of military equipment”, as well as military and paramilitary tactics on both sides.
But that left out some non-quantifiable parameters of the war, which “traditional intelligence reports could not account for, no matter how meticulously they were assembled”. These include emotions —not in the sense of an individual’s emotional response to stimuli, but in the sense of some kind of “national mood”, in both Ukraine and in Russia. These kinds of parameters, Medina claims, exceed cognitive explanation. And yet, they can mean the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful intelligence product.
Medina argues that intelligence analysis shops, including the CIA’s, should begin to actively “appreciate the awesome potential of human cognition”. In doing so, they should reject the traditional view of intelligence analysis as a form of “rational thinking” that is “protected from emotional contamination”. Instead of pursuing only “rational, cognitive approaches toward making sense of the world”, intelligence analysts should begin to seriously explore “nonlinear and more impressionistic mental practices”. Intelligence institutions more broadly should begin to prioritize “the improvement of our intuition”, Medina suggests, and should explicitly encourage analysts to “incorporate [their] intuitive faculties into analytic tradecraft”.
This is not about replacing analytic reasoning with emotion-based intuition, Medina explains. But it is about combining the two in order to achieve better results overall. It is an intriguing suggestion that deserves some serious consideration. [EIA]