Collaborative Intelligence by J. Richard Hackman

Author:J. Richard Hackman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Type Two Norms: Formulating Appropriate Performance Strategies

The enemy of a good task performance strategy is mindless reliance on a team’s habitual performance routines (see Chapter 3). The strategy that is most familiar or obvious to an intelligence team is not necessarily optimal, and a that’s-the-way-it’s-always-been-done strategy virtually never is. Only by taking thoughtful account of both the team’s resources and the opportunities and constraints in its context is a team likely to come up with the best way of going about its work. A norm that promotes active strategy planning, therefore, can be especially valuable in helping a team figure out how best to proceed.14

Analytic teams have many carefully developed structured techniques from which to choose, as well as alternatives such as crowdsourcing and prediction markets that can be adapted for the team’s work (see Chapter 4). Several of these techniques undoubtedly would work better than a lowest-common-denominator approach in which all data that anyone would like to see are scooped up, generating a large, undifferentiated, and potentially overwhelming pile of information. The same logic applies to other kinds of intelligence teams. For example, a counterintelligence manager described to me how attempting to identify and plug all possible leaks actually can lessen the likelihood of achieving overall counterintelligence objectives.

As an alternative to dealing with everything that can be gathered up and examined, a team might consider inventing an entirely new strategy, one uniquely suited to its particular objectives and circumstances. Or it might adapt to its own purposes a strategy previously developed for use in other contexts. Consider, for example, the two analytic strategies described next—constrained brainstorming and cognitive reframing. These strategies emerged from analyses of the difficulties encountered by the blue teams in PLG simulations, but they appear to have applicability far beyond that particular setting.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.