A reasonable percentage (3)

One piece of intelligence was accurate.

A man described as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's "spiritual adviser" inadvertently led US forces to the spot where the militant leader was finally located and killed, the US military says.

Major General William Caldwell said the operation to track down the most wanted man in Iraq was carried out over many weeks, before he was killed after two US air force F-16s bombed a house in a village north of Baghdad.

"The strike last night did not occur in a 24-hour period. It truly was a very long, painstaking deliberate exploitation of intelligence, information gathering, human sources, electronic, signal intelligence that was done over a period of time - many, many weeks," Gen Caldwell said on Thursday.

[BBC News]

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One piece of intelligence was flawed.

Anti-terror police raided a house at Forest Gate last week after saying they received "specific intelligence" that a chemical device might be found there.

Scotland Yard later said they had "no choice" but to act while the prime minister said it was essential officers took action if they received "reasonable" intelligence suggesting a terror attack.

Tony Blair said he backed the police and security services 101% and he refused to be drawn on suggestions that the armed operation had been a failure.

[BBC News]

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It's a reasonable percentage. (Previous posts: April 9th, April 18th.)

But that's part of the problem with intelligence - it delivers probability rather than certainty. Perhaps the outcomes are the right way around this time - the presumed-guilty man was killed, and the presumed-innocent man merely injured. (So we shouldn't complain, should we? Imagine the complaints if it had been the other way around!)

But over the long run, are there too many errors? (Difficult to tell, as we only know of some of the better publicized successes and failures.) Should we be uneasy about the errors of intelligence, and the consequences of acting upon erroneous intelligence? There are fundamental questions here about the relationship between knowledge (or ignorance) and action (or inaction).

Intelligence or Fear?

Bruce Schneier has drawn some security lessons from a recent scare on a flight from Sidney to Los Angeles. Shortly after take-off, the air crew found an airsickness bag in the toilet, interpreted the word "BOB" scribbled on the bag as a bomb threat, and decided to turn the plane back. Schneier's account was published in the Sidney Morning Herald and reprinted in his CryptoGram newsletter (August 2004).

We can analyse this incident in terms of organizational intelligence, as follows.

perception monitoring	A member of the crew found the bag and noticed the word "BOB"	Good observation
communication	This finding was shared with the pilot and other crew	Enables collective response
appreciation sensemaking	The word "BOB" was interpreted as "Bomb on Board"	Schneier points out that there are several more likely interpretations.
reasoning action	The captain decided the risk was serious enough to turn the plane around and land back in Sydney.	Schneier writes: "Even a moment's reflection is enough to realize that this is an extreme overreaction to a nonexistent threat."
learning	The Australian transport minister blamed the person who wrote on the bag, calling him "irresponsible at the least and horrendously selfish and stupid at the worst".	Schneier writes: "Irresponsible for what? For writing his name? For perpetuating common flight-attendant slang? It wasn't the writer who did anything wrong; it was those who reacted to the writing."
	Prime Minister John Howard praised the crew for their quick reactions, diligence, and observation skills.	Schneier writes: "I'm sorry, but I see no evidence of any of that. All I see are people who have been thrust into an important security role reacting from fear, because they have not been properly trained in how to sensibly evaluate security situations: the risks, the countermeasures, and the trade-offs."
knowledge memory	Now every wacko in the world knows that all he needs to do to ground an international flight is to write "BOB" on an airsickness bag.	Schneier writes: "Somehow, I don't think that's the outcome any of us wanted."

Further comments and examples in Schneier's blog (October 7, 2004).

Demise of the Super Star

Military thinkers are moving away from reliance on individual expertise, and developing strategies that depend on collective expertise and organizational intelligence.

In the organizational equivalent of natural selection, leaders in industry and senior commanders in the military have long been selected for their superior intuition. ... Experts use intuition rather than rational decisionmaking to make sense of situations. These experts discern patterns and relate these patterns to their prior experience and/or knowledge to determine the nature of the situation and the appropriate response. ...

It is becoming increasingly clear that the complexity of the situations faced and the responses needed have outpaced not only decision theoretic approaches, but have also outpaced the ability of even the best of experts (super stars) to deal with the complexities involved.

• First, the sources of complexity are accelerating. These sources of complexity include the variety of events and entities that are connected, the density of the interactions, and the speed of interactions that make it difficult to relate a cause to an effect and almost impossible to predict cascading effects.
• Second, it takes a long time for individuals to become experts and senior decisionmakers in industry and the military, spending decades to arrive in positions of leadership. This means that the bulk of their experience is well aged, increasingly out-of-date, and of questionable relevance.

Intuition is not only unlikely to help (in the face of growing complexity and volatility), but may often be misleading. Rather than rely on individual genius, Information Age processes tap collective knowledge and collaboration.

from Power to the Edge, pp 88-89

Bearing Limit

From the Butler Report on WMD:

"... more weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear ..."

A notion of bearing limit is widely found in mechanical engineering, although it can also be found in horticultural systems. (Fruit Thinning)

In our risk management practice, we have for many years been using the term "bearing limit" to refer to the capacity of a unit to contain risk or uncertainty. (Among other things, the term is a punning reference to the downfall of Barings Bank, brought down by the activities of Nic Leeson, a so-called rogue trader who exceeded his bearing limit.)

The term "risk-bearing limit" is used in a Sept 2001 paper Reflections on New Financial System in Japan (pdf)

The example of WMD intelligence now extends this notion of bearing limit to cover knowledge and intelligence.