More intelligence

A few days ago I posted observations from a session with the CIA.

Decentralized Intelligence Agency (Jay Cross)
What a great way to learn: spend a day and a half with friends you really respect having a free-flowing group conversation with fifty or sixty people who yearn to change but are mired in the last century’s clutches.

It’s interesting to see how other participants posted on the same event. Here are the first few sentences from the blogs of my fellow panelists:

So David Weinberger, Clay Shirky, Jerry Michalski, Eugene Kim, Marcia Conner, Ross Mayfield and Jay Cross Walk Into a Bar….. (Mark Oehlert)
Sometimes things just fall into your lap – you find a great parking space at the mall, you find $20 in your pocket – and then sometimes you find yourself tasked with sitting in a room and listeneningto some of the smartest folks in the world talk about issues like collaboration, learning and the future of technologies like blogs and wikis.

The Cult of Expertise (David Weinberger)
I just got back from 1.5 days of meetings with members of the CIA’s intelligence analysis community who are interested in what social software can do for them. There were six of us “experts” and about 50 CIA folks. These are the people who put together analyses and “estimates” about what’s going on in the world so that our leaders can ignore them and do what will get them re-elected (or, in some particularly Oedipal cases, do what will make Mommy love them more than Mommy loves Daddy). In short, these folks are among the few representatives of the Reality Principle in our government. I would like them to be able to do their job ever better.

Decentralized Intelligence Agency (Ross Mayfield)
The agency perhaps has the greatest to gain from adopting social software, but also has the greatest hard coded structural barriers (need to know) and a culture that reprimands against participation. Nevertheless, an Intellipedia and blogging at all levels in the organization is burgeoning. There is a shared understanding that these tools, with the right practices and change in culture could transform intelligence from a manufacturing model that delivers reports to a complex adaptive system where intelligence is a conversation with decision makers, an inherently counter spin.
The Future of Intelligence, Part 1 (Eugene Kim)
About six months after 9/11, I came across a book by Gregory Treverton, who served as the Vice Chair of the National Intelligence Council under Bill Clinton. The book, Reshaping National Intelligence for the Age of Information, was published shortly before 9/11, and its insights into the state of national intelligence were both revealing and prescient. I

The Future of Intelligence, Part 2 (Eugene Kim)
First things first, though. For the past two days, I and several esteemed colleagues participated in a CIA workshop on blogs and Wikis, organized by MarkOehlert at BoozAllenHamilton. The intention was for people within the CIA to learn more about blogs and Wikis from us, but the learning was decidedly bidirectional. We got a glimpse of how the intelligence community works, and we got a chance to further guide the CIA’s thinking on how to improve the way it collaborates, both internally and with others.

Intellipedia Shovel (Eugene Kim)

On The Clock Goofiness
At the workshop earlier this week, one woman raised concerns over whether blogging about one’s personal life at work could be considered wasting tax payer’s money. This question isn’t just limited to the government. Many companies ask similar questions about similar tools. For example, a lot of companies were reluctant to adopt IM, because they were afraid that employees would spend all their time gabbing online.

The Agency’s CLO, Calvin Andrus, joined the session. His visionary white paper (2005) has awakened the CIA to what’s possible — and necessary. Here it is:

The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community (Calvin Andrus)
US policy-makers, war-fighters, and law-enforcers now operate in a real-time worldwide decision and implementation environment. The rapidly changing circumstances in which they operate take on lives of their own, which are difficult or impossible to anticipate or predict. The only way to meet the continuously unpredictable challenges ahead of us is to match them with continuously unpredictable changes of our own. We must transform the Intelligence Community into a community that dynamically reinvents itself by continuously learning and adapting as the national security environment changes.

Calvin Andrus at Learning 2005