http://blogs.hbr.org/frontline-leadership/2010/11/intelligence-failure-w\ hat-the.html <http://blogs.hbr.org/frontline-leadership/2010/11/intelligence-failure-\ what-the.html> The Intelligence Challenge: Lessons from the Private Sector 3:00 PM Thursday November 18, 2010 by Jake Cusack, Matt McKnight, and Renny McPherson | This post is part of an HBR Spotlight examining leadership lessons from the military <http://hbr.org/special-collections/spotlights/2010/november> .
Since 9/11, the need for increased collaboration and information sharing within the military and intelligence communities has become a constant requirement. As Marine intelligence officers in Iraq and then as analysts at national-level security organizations, each of us has directly witnessed failures caused by weak communication and poor information sharing practices. These experiences have pushed us to look to the private sector to understand how the military can most effectively leverage innovation in information collection, management, and analysis to support the national security mission. Many of the recent HBR blogs on the subject of military leadership <http://blogs.hbr.org/frontline-leadership/> show what the armed forces can teach the private sector. We fully agree with many of these arguments, but in line with Tim Kane's earlier contribution <http://blogs.hbr.org/frontline-leadership/2010/11/bleeding-talent-the-u\ s-militar.html> we also contend that there is much to learn from knowledge transfer in the opposite direction. We have begun to identify a few key problems facing the defense and intelligence community that we believe should be prime areas for private contribution to the public mission. The list below highlights our experiences, but is by no means an exhaustive catalog of the current challenges being encountered by defense and intelligence officials. Further, we recognize that the many excellent technology transfer efforts run by government organizations such as In-Q-Tel <http://www.iqt.org/> , Army OnPoint <http://www.onpoint.us/about-us/index.shtml> , the Small Business Innovation Research <http://www.sbir.gov/> grant program, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency <http://www.darpa.mil/> have had much success both fighting these challenges and in increasing the number of technology firms (Palantir Technologies <http://www.palantirtech.com/government> , Endeca <http://www.endeca.com/> , Keyhole <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyhole,_Inc> , and others) who focus on these issues. Nonetheless, we hope that this comment might help reinvigorate and expand a dialogue around how the private sector can better work with our national security community. Here are two illustrative areas where private sector expertise is needed: Failure to Share Information The flow of intelligence information is generally poor between insular military units with overlapping mandates and between military and civilian intelligence organizations. Even knowing where to find information is tough and time-consuming. It is frustrating how often analysts who have been working on a particular region or target for long periods of time will come across new information that they did not know existed because there is minimal interaction between two different organizations. Even when information does make it across boundaries, we have seen regulatory and bureaucratic barriers cause delays of weeks to get an internal intelligence report to the people who need it. Misaligned incentives also complicate information flow. Access to information is the currency of intelligence. Both analysts and organizations are sometimes reluctant to share an insight with others not in their fiefdom because it might be replicated without credit and they could lose their perceived value (and funding). Only strong leadership can overcome a basic psychological bias: sharing often requires more work without direct personal reward. To solve these problems, the best analysts have had to recruit and develop their own "human sources" outside of their unit and within the American defense apparatus ironically, they do this just as a CIA case officer would strive to cultivate a source within an enemy organization. This is not the way information should be shared. Relying on proactive analysts with good networking skills is not a long-term solution, but a desperate work-around. Failure to Identify and Hold Accountable the Relevant Centers of Expertise Right now, hundreds of analysts are churning out virtually identical slides and memos for their respective bosses within the 16 intelligence agencies <http://www.intelligence.gov/about-the-intelligence-community/> and the 10 military combatant commands <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Combatant_Command#Combatant_Comman\ ders> . When things go wrong, the blame is easy to diffuse because so many different people in many different places could have caught the problem. Duplication dilutes responsibility. Additionally, during our time in civilian security organizations, we sometimes observed senior analysts treat solving a complex puzzle with real national security implications like an academic exercise. Like researchers who neglect to publish their studies, analysts often fail to ensure that their intelligence work is translated into operations. It doesn't seem to cross their minds to check how their report is disseminated, and whether the relevant watch list manager, commander, or policymaker has seen their work. While the intelligence community now espouses a "responsibility to provide" information to other agencies, it often remains unclear to analysts exactly where that responsibility falls and who will be held accountable. Ironically, "understaffed" intelligence units can actually be more capable and driven because their analysts are closer to the information sharing and decision making process, and have ownership of their particular issue. The Way Ahead While there are different tools meant to bring together intelligence analysts with like interests, no one has truly solved the issue of continuous informal and formal collaboration across agency, network, and classification level. General Stanley McChrystal <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_A._McChrystal> , despite his recent loss of command, achieved great success in special operations by reducing staff size and flattening organizations. He was able to put all the people with information on a particular problem in the same room, so if a piece of information was not shared, accountability was clear. Moving beyond programs that begin to solve the problem, such as A-Space <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-Space> and Intellipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellipedia> , we need to emulate McChrystal's strategy within a fully integrated virtual environment. Moreover, the military can take a lesson from recent slim-downs in the private sector reducing unneeded billets and spending that money on best-in-class collaboration tools and acquiring top human talent. Such flattening measures will have the additional benefit of decreasing the level of separation and lack of accountability between decision makers and analysts. These problems are not new. Dedicated professionals work to solve them every day, but we believe more can be done. As we address these and other issues bearing on leadership, we must understand and learn from private organizations that have successfully attacked these same problems. It would be irresponsible not to take advantage of valuable lessons learned by many of the world's best corporations. In particular, we should focus on identifying and transferring better business intelligence tools: real-time situational awareness, integrated information management, and simple communication enablers. We need to adapt many of the customer intelligence innovations being used so effectively in the advertising industry to find insights into behavior of threat groups and individuals, as well as the behavior of our own analysts. We need to send intelligence personnel to successful private companies to learn how these tools are used, and then give them the time to imagine the security applications. Last year's Christmas Day attack on Northwest Flight 253 was stopped when passengers took personal responsibility, seized the initiative, and worked together. The intelligence community and the private sector can do the same. Jake Cusack, Matt McKnight ,and Renny McPherson all served as Marine Corps intelligence officers in Iraq, and are graduate students at Harvard Business School <http://www.hbs.edu/> and Harvard Kennedy School <http://www.hks.harvard.edu/> . They currently advise clients in defense policy and intelligence technology for the Mayflower Strategy Group <http://mayflowerstrategygroup.com/MayflowerStrategyGroup.html> . <http://blogs.hbr.org/frontline-leadership/2010/11/intelligence-failure-\ what-the.html> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, discuss-os...@yahoogroups.com. -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor biso...@intellnet.org http://www.intellnet.org Post message: osint@yahoogroups.com Subscribe: osint-subscr...@yahoogroups.com Unsubscribe: osint-unsubscr...@yahoogroups.com *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 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