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Author : Center for the Study of Intelligence Publisher : Lulu.com Page : 48 pages File Size : 14,11 MB Release : 2012-05-28 Category : ISBN : 1105810887
This primer highlights structured analytic techniques-some widely used in the private sector and academia, some unique to the intelligence profession. It is not a comprehensive overview of how intelligence officers conduct analysis. Rather, the primer highlights how structured analytic techniques can help one challenge judgments, identify mental mindsets, stimulate creativity, and manage uncertainty. In short, incorporating regular use of techniques such as these can enable one to structure thinking for wrestling with difficult questions. Originally published by the CIA in color. Previously available online only as an e-file.
This primer highlights structured analytic technique--some widely used in the private sector and academia, some unique to the intelligence profession. It is not a comprehensive overview of how intelligence officers conduct analysis. Rather, the primer highlights how structured analytic techniques can help one challenge judgments, identify mental mindsets, stimulate creativity, and manage uncertainty. In short, incorporating regular use of techniques such as these can enable one to structure thinking for wrestling with difficult questions.
This primer highlights structured analytic techniques-some widely used in the private sector and academia, some unique to the intelligence profession. It is not a comprehensive overview of how intelligence officers conduct analysis. Rather, the primer highlights how structured analytic techniques can help one challenge judgments, identify mental mindsets, stimulate creativity, and manage uncertainty. In short, incorporating regular use of techniques such as these can enable one to structure thinking for wrestling with difficult questions. Originally published by the CIA in color. Previously available online only as an e-file.
Contents: (1) How Do People Reason?; (2) What is Critical Thinking?; (3) What Can Be Learned from the Past?: Thinking Critically about Cuba: Deploying the Missiles; Assessing the Implications; Between Dogmatism and Refutation; Lacking: Disconfirmation; The Roles of Critical Thinking in the Cuban Crisis; Winners and Losers: The Crisis in Context; Ten Years Later, They Meet Again; Judgment; (4) How Can Intelligence Analysts Employ Critical Thinking?; (5) How Can Intelligence Analysts be Taught to Think Critically?; (6) How Does Critical Thinking Transform?; (7) What Other Points of View Exist?; (8) What Does the Future Hold?; (9) NSA¿s Critical Thinking and Structured Analysis Class Syllabus. Charts and tables.
This primer highlights structured analytic techniques-some widely used in the private sector and academia, some unique to the intelligence profession. It is not a comprehensive overview of how intelligence officers conduct analysis. Rather, the primer highlights how structured analytic techniques can help one challenge judgments, identify mental mindsets, stimulate creativity, and manage uncertainty. In short, incorporating regular use of techniques such as these can enable one to structure thinking for wrestling with difficult questions.
Using the analytic techniques contained in this primer will assist analysts in dealing with the perennial problems of intelligence: the complexity of international developments, incomplete and ambiguous information, and the inherent limitations of the human mind. Understanding the intentions and capabilities of adversaries and other foreign actors is challenging, especially when either or both are concealed. Moreover, transnational threats today pose even greater complexity, in that they involve multiple actors-including nonstate entities-that can adapt and transform themselves faster than those who seek to monitor and contain them. Finally, globalization has increased the diversity of outcomes when complex, interactive systems such as financial flows, regional economies or the international system as a whole are in flux.The first hurdle for analysts is identifying the relevant and diagnostic information from the increasing volume of ambiguous and contradictory data that is acquired through open source and clandestine means. Analysts must also pierce the shroud of secrecy-and sometimes deception-that state and nonstate actors use to mislead. A systematic approach that considers a range of alternative explanations and outcomes offers one way to ensure that analysts do not dismiss potentially relevant hypotheses and supporting information resulting in missed opportunities to warn.Cognitive and perceptual biases in human perception and judgment are another important reason for analysts to consider alternatives. As Richards Heuer and others have argued, all individuals assimilate and evaluate information through the medium of "mental models" (sometimes also called "frames" or "mind-sets"). These are experience-based constructs of assumptions and expectations both about the world in general and more specific domains. These constructs strongly influence what information analysts will accept-that is, data that are in accordance with analysts' unconscious mental models are more likely to be perceived and remembered than information that is at odds with them. Mental models are critical to allowing individuals to process what otherwise would be an incomprehensible volume of information. Yet, they can cause analysts to overlook, reject, or forget important incoming or missing information that is not in accord with their assumptions and expectations. Seasoned analysts may be more susceptible to these mind-set problems as a result of their expertise and past success in using time-tested mental models. The key risks of mind-sets are that: analysts perceive what they expect to perceive; once formed, they are resistant to change; new information is assimilated, sometimes erroneously, into existing mental models; and conflicting information is often dismissed or ignored.
In this Second Edition of Structured Analytic Techniques for Intelligence Analysis, authors Richards J. Heuer Jr. and Randolph H. Pherson showcase fifty-five structured analytic techniques—five new to this edition—that represent the most current best practices in intelligence, law enforcement, homeland security, and business analysis.
Author : Wayne Michael Hall Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA Page : 458 pages File Size : 49,29 MB Release : 2009-12-22 Category : Political Science ISBN : 0313382662
This book offers a vast conceptual and theoretical exploration of the ways intelligence analysis must change in order to succeed against today's most dangerous combatants and most complex irregular theatres of conflict. Intelligence Analysis: How to Think in Complex Environments fills a void in the existing literature on contemporary warfare by examining the theoretical and conceptual foundations of effective modern intelligence analysis—the type of analysis needed to support military operations in modern, complex operational environments. This volume is an expert guide for rethinking intelligence analysis and understanding the true nature of the operational environment, adversaries, and most importantly, the populace. Intelligence Analysis proposes substantive improvements in the way the U.S. national security system interprets intelligence, drawing on the groundbreaking work of theorists ranging from Carl von Clauswitz and Sun Tzu to M. Mitchell Waldrop, General David Petraeus, Richards Heuer, Jr., Orson Scott Card, and others. The new ideas presented here will help the nation to amass a formidable, cumulative intelligence power, with distinct advantages over any and all adversaries of the future regardless of the level of war or type of operational environment.
Quantitative Intelligence Analysis describes the model-based method of intelligence analysis that represents the analyst’s mental models of a subject, as well as the analyst’s reasoning process exposing what the analyst believes about the subject, and how they arrived at those beliefs and converged on analytic judgments. It includes: Specific methods of explicitly representing the analyst’s mental models as computational models; dynamic simulations and interactive analytic games; the structure of an analyst’s mental model and the theoretical basis for capturing and representing the tacit knowledge of these models explicitly as computational models detailed description of the use of these models in rigorous, structured analysis of difficult targets; model illustrations and simulation descriptions; the role of models in support of collection and operations; case studies that illustrate a wide range of intelligence problems; And a recommended curriculum for technical analysts.