by Sam Culper III
Coming up, we were always told that our analytic conclusions would never be criticized as long as our logic and reasoning were sound. The result was that our logic and reasoning were always criticized, and therefore our conclusions rarely attracted criticism. Analysis is like putting together a thousand-piece puzzle: if you put pieces together that don’t fit, your picture is going to be wrong. If you focus on the process of conducting analysis, and continually work at refining your analytic processes, then your conclusions will largely take care of themselves.
Intelligence analysts have two jobs: 1) arrive at accurate and timely conclusions; and 2) refine their analysis by removing bias and improving methodology. You can’t do the first job unless you’re also doing the second. If you’re not focused on your second job, then you’ll be backing yourself into a credibility issue in the future. Once a liar, always a liar as the saying goes. I see a good number of folks in this community continually backing themselves into credibility issues, especially when some proper analysis could have prevented it. The unfortunate thing is that the attention spans of so many are so short. (But I digress…)
Let’s talk about the analytical leap. It’s like the leap of faith — sometimes there’s just no better option. The problem here is two-fold: a) we’re even making that leap in the first place; and b) we don’t always know how far we’ll fall before we feel the consequences of misjudging our leap.
