Helping Intelligence Analysts Gain Insight

AbtractDecisionmakers expect intelligence assessments to be insightful. Still, intelligence professionals do not understand the insight process well enough to achieve consistently such indispensable outcomes. Little, if any, research has studied how intelligence analysts achieve insights. A qualitative, interview-based unclassified study was conducted to understand how insight emerges in 36 intelligence analysts who solved novel problems. The results include an emergence process consisting of two interacting elements—internalized tensions and priming—across the emotion–cognition and individual–social dimensions, and that the relationship between the two elements is complex. The emergence of insight is not predictable or controllable, which has significant challenges for the management of intelligence analysts because intelligence agencies typically are hierarchical organizations that emphasize order and control, conditions antithetical for nurturing emergence. This conundrum requires a major individual and cultural shift by management. The study suggests that the findings are generalizable across intelligence analysts in any national security organization, domestic or international. Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Thomas H. Kean and Lee Hamilton, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2004), p. 339. https://www.9-11commission.gov/report/; Laurence H. Silberman and Charles S. Robb, The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2005), p. 560. https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/GPO-WMD2 Jacob W. Getzels and Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, “From Problem Solving to Problem Finding,” in Perspectives in Creativity, edited by Irving A. Taylor and Jacob W. 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Davidson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 329–363.10 Stellan Ohlsson, “Information-Processing Explanations of Insight and Related Phenomena,” in Advances in the Psychology of Thinking, edited by Mark T. Keane and Kenneth J. Gilhooly (Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 1–44; Stellan Ohlsson, “The Dialectic between Routine and Creative Cognition,” in Insight: On the Origins of New Ideas, edited by Frederic Vellee-Tourangeau (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 8–29.11 Ivan K. Ash, Benjamin D. Jee, and Jennifer Wiley, “Investigating Insight as Sudden Learning,” Journal of Problem Solving, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2012), pp. 1–27. https://doi.org/10.7771/1932-6246.1123.12 Ibid.13 Ohlsson, “Information-Processing Explanations of Insight and Related Phenomena,” pp. 1–44.14 Ibid.15 Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), pp. 19–30; William Taggart and Daniel Robey, “Minds and Managers: On the Dual Nature of Human Information Processing and Management,” Academy of Management Review, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1981), pp. 187–195. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1981.4287774; Michael L. Tushman and David A. Nadler, “Information Processing as an Integrating Concept in Organization Design,” Academy of Management Review, Vol. 3, No. 3 (1978), pp. 613–624. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1981.428777416 Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), p. 9.17 John A. Bargh and Tanya L. Chartrand, “Studying the Mind in the Middle: A Practical Guide to Priming and Automaticity Research,” in Handbook of Research Methods in Social and Personality Psychology, edited by Harry T. Reis and Charles M. Judd (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 253–285.18 Seana Moran, “Metaphor Foundations in Creativity Research: Boundary vs. Organism,” Journal of Creative Behavior, Vol. 43, No. 1 (2009), pp. 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2162-6057.2009.tb01303.x19 Thomas Fingar, Reducing Uncertainty: Intelligence Analysis and National Security (Stanford, CA: Stanford Security Studies, 2011), pp. 1–18.20 Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Intelligence Community Directive 203, Analytic Standards, 2 January 2015, https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICD/ICD%20203%20Analytic%20Standards.pdfAdditional informationNotes on contributorsAdrian WolfbergAdrian Wolfberg began his intelligence career as an EA-3B jet aircraft carrier–based naval flight officer and, then, as a civilian intelligence analyst. Adrian’s research has concentrated on challenges within large, complex organizations where knowledge exchange between producers of knowledge and senior-level decisionmakers receive, absorb, and process knowledge. He received his Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management, and a Master of Science in National Security Strategy from the National War College. The author can be contacted at awolfberg@gmail.com