A Spy's Guide to Thinking

by John Braddock

--------- The world is overflowing with data, secret and otherwise. It has to be shrunk. That happens in the analysis process. But how do analysts decide what’s important and what’s not? More importantly for spies, how do we decide which secrets are worth risking lives for and which aren’t? We ask the decision-makers. We ask them what decisions they’re thinking about. What’s keeping them up at night? And we ask them to look ahead. What actions do they expect to take next?

Intelligence agencies start with the decision. Like scientists start with the hypothesis.

The first question should always be, “What kind of game do they think we’re playing?”

The best way to win a zero-sum game is to be good at positive-sum games.

--------- Thinking is cheap. Action is expensive. Collecting data takes time and resources, but modern technology makes it cheaper every day. Analyzing that data? Making sense of it? More difficult. More expensive. Making good decisions takes even more resources, usually. But the most expensive thing, nearly always, is taking action.

Actions, no matter how small, commit us to a particular path. Acting on Option 3 means Option 2 and Option 1 just went away. Economists call this losing the “option value.” By taking one action, you lose the value of all the other options.

Even before computers and the information revolution, we could collect more data than we could ever analyze. The weather. The environment. The people around us. There’s always been more data than we could ever analyze.

In terms of quantity, actions are the fewest. Data the most.

The Data-Analysis-Decision-Action chain helps us focus on where we might have holes in our thinking.

The Positive-sum/Zero-sum/Negative-sum framework helps us think ahead.