Analyzing Haystacks
posted Jan. 6 by Patrick Biltgen“Intelligence Analyst” was ranked by CNN as the 9th Best Job in America in their 2009 survey. Analysts solve problems dominated by ambiguous, conflicting, incomplete and deceptive information. For these reasons, analysis is a lot harder than merely “finding a needle in a haystack.” Let me explain:
“Finding a needle in a haystack” requires several key conditions:
1) There is a needle in the haystack.
2) There is exactly one needle in the haystack.
3) You are looking in the correct haystack.
4) You have the ability to detect the needle when you come across it.
5) You are actually supposed to be looking for a needle.
If all of the above are true, then, by definition, you know what you are looking for and where to find it. Improving performance is really only a matter of doing things faster.
Activity-based intelligence (ABI) analysts aren’t usually presented with this textbook problem. The analogy is more like finding hay in a stack of hay. It goes something like this:
1) I’ve got all this hay, and it’s in a stack.
2) I don’t know what it means or if I should even be looking at it.
3) This piece of hay looks unusual. It’s bent kinda funny.
4) And it’s located right next to this other piece that looks perfectly straight.
5) And I found a couple of other straight ones over here.
6) And this piece is blue.
7) Oh by the way, there are 10 more haystacks over there.
This is a much harder problem because you don’t know what you’re looking for or where you should be looking. In fact, as Daniel Simons illustrates, sometimes you don’t notice obvious things even when they are right in front of you. Finding the unusual hay in a stack of otherwise normal hay requires curiosity, creativity and cultural awareness. You must question everything and try multiple hypotheses. You must understand the culture of those you’re studying to determine if something is really abnormal or if it just seems weird to you. Don’t bother training the next generation of ABI analysts to solve textbook “needle-in-a-haystack” problems. Critical thinking and reasoning skills are the keys to this tradecraft.
Activity-based intelligence analysts discover abnormal observations, trends and patterns by correlating multiple sources of information together in space and time. Sometimes we call this “multi-INT(elligence) correlation.” Sometimes it’s called “data fusion.” In ABI, this principle is called “georeference to discover.” When multiple things happen in the same place and time, we may have discovered something interesting – or at the very least, a place worthy of further investigation. The ABI approach extends the concept of a georeferenced place across the haystacks of geospace, time, cyber and even the human dimension to discover interesting activities and events.