Helping Intelligence Analysts Gain Insight

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Decisionmakers 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.

This article is related to:

The Psychology of Intelligence

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

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12 Ibid.

13 Ohlsson, “Information-Processing Explanations of Insight and Related Phenomena,” pp. 1–44.

14 Ibid.

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16 Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), p. 9.

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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.x

19 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.pdf

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Adrian Wolfberg

Adrian 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 [email protected]