here is a snippet from the author’s preface to the CIA’s Psychology of Intelligence Analysis. It is an excellent free resource from our CIA.
He captures for me the essence of the challenge of being the practitioner scholar: being the transmission gearbox between the world of rigorous, focused, research-oriented scholarship and the broad, immediate world of the practitioner: who is looking for tools to help with the current problem or opportunity. Hopefully a tool that have some grounding in the world of theoretical soundness as well as utility.
The practitioner-scholar has to co-exist in both worlds: staying connected to the cutting edge of reported research to remain current, and yet living in the practical world of projects, issues, problems, opportunities and results; in other words grounded in what the immediate needs on the cutting edge of practice are. This requires skills in: research, searching, filtering, integrating, summarizing essentials without oversimplifying, communicating, and most of all accepting the limits of our ability to progreess in both directions simultaneously.
here’s the snippet:
This volume pulls together and republishes, with some editing, updating, and additions, articles written during 1978-86 for internal use within the CIA Directorate of Intelligence. Four of the articles also appeared in the Intelligence Community journal Studies in Intelligence during that time frame. The information is relatively timeless and still relevant to the never-ending quest for better analysis.
The articles are based on reviewing cognitive psychology literature concerning how people process information to make judgments on incomplete and ambiguous information. I selected the experiments and findings that seem most relevant to intelligence analysis and most in need of communication to intelligence analysts. I then translated the technical reports into language that intelligence analysts can understand and interpreted the relevance of these findings to the problems intelligence analysts face.
The result is a compromise that may not be wholly satisfactory to either research psychologists or intelligence analysts. Cognitive psychologists and decision analysts may complain of oversimplification, while the non-psychologist reader may have to absorb some new terminology. Unfortunately, mental processes are so complex that discussion of them does require some specialized vocabulary. Intelligence analysts who have read and thought seriously about the nature of their craft should have no difficulty with this book. Those who are plowing virgin ground may require serious effort.