Intelligence analysis is often described as “trying to find a needle in a haystack,” but it’s a much harder problem than that. The idea of finding a needle in a haystack makes several assumptions:
- There is a needle in the haystack
- There is exactly one needle in the haystack
- You’re looking in the right haystack
- You know the needle when you see it
- A needle is what is supposed to be found
In this analogy, the analyst knows what to look for and where to look for it. Improving intelligence performance, then, is a matter of doing things faster. In practice, intelligence analysts are rarely presented with such textbook problems. The analogy is more like finding hay in a stack of hay. It goes something like this:
- I’ve got all this hay, and it is in a stack
- This piece of hay looks unusual; it is bent funny
- And it’s located right next to this other piece of hay that is perfectly straight
- And most of the hay looks straight – is that normal?
- And over there is one piece of hay that is blue
- By the way, there are ten other stacks of hay there, there and there
This is a much harder problem because the analyst doesn’t know what he or she is looking for, or even where to be looking. Solving hard intelligence problems requires a new perspective, a new methodology, and new tools.