Strategic Intelligence Briefs
Oil & Gas Analogy


These notes supplement Alain Paul Martin’s book Harnessing the Power of Intelligence,
Counterintelligence and Surprise Events published in 2002 by Executive.org.

This operational phase comprises intelligence collection, processing, analysis, evaluation, interpretation, knowledge construction and dissemination of finished intelligence. It consists of seven major sequential and iterative tasks. Taken together, they form a cycle because intelligence production never stops. Not only is the exercise repeated continuously, but there is also frequent overlap between tasks.

1. Asking the right questions
2. Broad scanning or screening (excerpts below)
3. Focused scanning & information validation
4. Analysis: sketching the forest from the trees
5. Interpretation: advancing to harvest the forest
6. Seeding the future: nurturing the knowledge repository
7. Communicating actionable intelligence

Any strategy, be it competitive or corporate, cannot succeed without high-quality intelligence collection. The intelligence-collection cycle goes from broad to focused scanning. Both types of scanning include analysis and interpretation tasks as outlined below.

Broad scanning(1) is the foundation of intelligence gathering. Its purpose is to build informed judgments about what should be scanned and how. Brainstorm with trusted intelligence professionals (within and outside your firm) who know your business environment and its constituencies to draft a set of needs, search assumptions and qualification of information sources.

Start with clear goals. Consider Mission-Critical Intelligence: Ten Vital Goals defined in Chapter 1 and the questions above as a starting point. Keep an open mind and do not confine the exercise to what you consider significant to the organization. Consider the assistance or coaching of a computational linguistic expert. It is well worth the training time and cost involved. Broad scanning is iterative but should not be open-ended. Experiment with new trails but constantly prune the scope to weed out dead ends.

Unfortunately, this critical exercise is frequently done hastily. It is often skewed by intuition that tends to overlook important information trails, thus yielding misleading results. With globalization and the information explosion, broad scanning is akin to trying to detect low-incidence forms of cancer in a very healthy population or find a needle in a haystack. Yet our mind is set on a narrow range of clusters within that universe.

Starting from a large set of internal and external information sources containing a potentially infinite universe of data and variables, broad scanning aims at narrowing the search by:

• Validating original search assumptions including the protocol for rejecting sources of questionable or misleading value, be they people, Internet web sites or other information sources;


• Creating or revising a set of qualifying attributes for information sources;


• Finding search criteria (key words) that determine the context of each scanning iteration;


• Pre-qualifying sources, topics of interest and embryos of change to be subjected to focused scanning or continuous monitoring;
  
• Ensuring that the value of scanning outweighs the costs and risks of collection.

Rather than scanning newspapers and magazines manually, intelligence collectors should first call on intelligence service providers(2), who can deliver the information sought at a small fraction of the cost.

A good part of broad scanning is facilitated by search engines, news aggregators and online news "clipping" services to be discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. The awesome power of this technology is not a substitute for judgment. Broad scanning is interactive and iterative. Each search stream produces a host of information trails that must be evaluated for further analysis.

The acid test in qualifying information is the potential relevance of the source or the meaning of its data to your organization's constituencies and business environment as defined by the brainstorming team. Repeat the process when the outcome deviates significantly from expectations (blind spots) or when you uncover promising trails (intermediaries).

Blind spots with minimum relevance should be subjected to focused scanning. They can turn out to be a valuable piece of the intelligence puzzle under focused scanning, and can uncover an impending event by a competitor or a great accidental opportunity. Consider Johnson & Johnson's baby powder products, introduced in 1921 merely to replace its irritating construction plaster, and which "remain important products and major components of corporate equity"(3). Keep in mind that 3M Post-it Notes(tm) also originated with an accident.

Check for redundancy and mixing. "Redundancy simply means ensuring that your information can be verified by several different sources. Mixing your sources helps ensure that they are not all simply repeating information from the same primary source. Using multiple sources involves a tradeoff - you can potentially double your effort, but by using several sources you not only have a better chance of finding the information you need, you'll be able to feel more confident in the authenticity of the information. It also helps guard against deception."(4)

A detailed coverage of intelligence, counterintelligence, strategy, risk, F-Scale and strategic negotiations is the subject of the management seminar:

Strategy, Risk, Negotiation & Leadership.
For seminar objectives, outline and upcoming sessions in the US and Canada, contact www.executive.org.

2. Dow Jones, Luceonline, U.S. Newswire and Federal News Services (www.fnsg.com) provide customized electronic clipping of Internet, print and broadcast media. Google Directory features a current and comprehensensive list of news monitoring services at
https://directory.google.com/Top/News/Services/Media_Monitoring
https://directory.google.com/Top/News/Personalized_News/Desktop_Software

3. Gerald M. Ostrov, Company Group Chairman, Johnson & Johnson in an e-mail to the author, August 11, 2002.

4. Darwin Nickel: Intelligence & the "Net": Managing the Mayhem, 26 Sept 2001, www.intelligenceexperts.com