Cognition

Intelligence institutions that want to increase the quality of their work must ensure their intelligence operatives are given a chance to develop their minds. They must be given freedom and oppor- tunities to develop their creativity and as such their integrity, and intelligence organisations, intelligence operatives and consumers therefore need to be attentive, alert, aware and sensitive to the reality of the holistic complexity of threats. The comprehension of this oneness and totality may help intelligence communities to analyse threat structures deeply and understand their order. Ideology, organisation, leadership, manning, funding, supporters and potential breeding grounds for threats are all factors needing exploration. This chapter will give special attention to the relation and structure of these factors and argues that they must never be understood separately. This chapter thus highlights that it is the interplay of the holistic complexity of threats that needs to be acknowledged, the challenge this complexity creates for the brain and how intelligence institutions can reduce this challenge.