Learning from how spies think

[Music]

i pose the question

what do we need to know in order to take

sound decisions

i was director of gchq

i spent seven years sitting on britain’s

joint

intelligence committee

which since 1936 has been trying to give

british governments the basic

information it needs

to take sensible decisions on national

security and i watched the intelligence

analysts

i learned very quickly the first lesson

in intelligence which is that our

knowledge

of the world is always fragmentary it’s

incomplete

and it is sometimes wrong

but when i looked at the analysts and

the work they did

it’s clear that if you approach these

things

you know with a method and if you’re

self-aware

about the ways in which you can get it

wrong then you can actually achieve

some remarkable results

in the national security

field it really matters to have good

intelligence assessment

i have written up in the book i was the

person who showed margaret thatcher

in her room in the house of commons

three intercepts

from gchq that revealed in april 1982

that the argentine junta had already set

sail

uh an invasion force heading for

the falkland islands which came

as a terrible terrible shock

but it gave just

enough notice for an extraordinary

meeting to take place in her room

in the house in which the decision was

taken

to have a task force set a task force

and sail it for the south atlantic and

that announcement was ready

for when the public news came in on us

that

indeed the argentine junta had

invaded the falkland islands without

that prior notice

even of a few days i think her

government would have fallen

as it was it was a close run thing to

regain

confidence after that uh after that

uh shock i will never forget ringing

from her

office the duty commander in the

ministry of defense

with the historic instruction

ready the fleet for sea so

it matters in matters of national

security

and having some forewarning matters too

in our everyday lives so

what i’ve done is i’ve tried to distill

the experience of those intelligence

analysts

into a simple model and it has four

parts

and i want to walk you through them and

illustrate

each of them the first is situational

awareness which is knowing what is going

on the ground or these days knowing what

is going on

in cyberspace without a basic

understanding of the facts on the ground

you can’t even start to work out

what to do just think of all those

coveted statistics

the hot spots the hospital admissions

you need to nail down the facts

so the first part of the model the first

output that you look for

is situational awareness to answer the

questions that all start with

what when and where

but and it’s quite a big but

facts by themselves are dumb

you can interpret facts even solid facts

and

not everything is solid but even solid

facts

need interpretation uh you’ve got to put

meaning into them and so

the next part of my model is explanation

defense lawyers know this very well

fact the fingerprints of the accused

were on the bottle that was thrown at

the police

explanation was this because he threw it

or did the mob rushing past his house

pick up a bottle

from the recycling bin outside his front

door

facts need explanation

now one of the problems about explaining

facts

is that when you come to compare

possible explanations

it’s very easy to fall into

emotional framing of the issue you’re

looking at

your emotion your feelings towards the

issue

creep in if you’re not careful so

imagine that you’re on the last train

from heathrow

it’s late at night and it’s dark a large

burly man comes in sits behind you and

starts shouting and swearing

aggressively

your first instinct is probably to look

for the emergency cord

how far away is it but then you notice

dangling from his ear as a little

earpiece

your whole mental map turns over

and you realize this is a cross and

tired man off a transatlantic flight

berating the mini cab company that

didn’t pick him up

how you frame the issue and if you’d

been watching halloween

or a film horror film like that yourself

on the flight

you might have been even more ready to

jump to the wrong

conclusion so that’s an important lesson

uh in intelligence analysis

but if you’ve got a good explanation

and you’ve got enough reasonably solid

evidence

then you can move on to the third output

which is estimation the intelligence

community doesn’t like the word

prediction nobody has a crystal ball

in cheltenham gchq in cheltenham but you

can

estimate how events might unfold

and if you’ve got a good explanation you

can try your hand

at modeling different assumptions

and then looking at what the possible

futures

uh might be that’s what we’re seeing

every day now with covid

and with the work of sage so estimation

is the third and then i add

in another uh output which can be

extraordinarily useful

which is what i call strategic notice

which is looking over the horizon at the

possible big thing to come and hit you

and if you use strategic notice sensibly

it might be it will lead you to take out

a bit more insurance

if you’re a government it might be to

commission some research

on the possible different pandemic

or the flooding risk or whatever it

might be that’s ahead of you

then you can and this is really about my

fourth lesson in intelligence

you don’t have to be so surprised by

surprise

itself so those four outputs

taken together really help make

better decisions and we can all apply

this way

of unpacking the big problems

that may or issues choices that may face

in government great care is taken to

separate

two kinds of thought this kind of

thought

the careful analytical stuff from

the political stuff the democratic

mandate

of the decision makers

their hopes and passions for the future

their fears for things they want to

avoid

and we try as happens today with sage

to keep the professional stuff as

objective as possible

and then you can as it were judge the uh

uh more passionate side

the problem when it comes to our

personal decisions of course we have to

do all of that

inside one head our head

and if the emotional stuff leeches too

far

over into the analytical stuff

then you can find you’ve severely

prejudiced

the kind of decision you ought to be

taking

that was always hard it is hard

but i think it’s getting harder and the

reason it’s getting harder

is so much of our information comes from

the internet

and what we see there is to large extent

deceptive manipulative

emotional those who are crafting the

material

know very well how to give us

an emotional hit rather than to put out

a rational argument that’s the basis of

the political advertising that we see

that’s the basis of the sort of stories

the conspiracy stories

that flow across the internet the latest

coming out of russia is about

the oxford vaccine which is

totally disreputable but that’s what’s

out there

and we have to learn how to live safely

with that material so much of it is

deliberately designed to put us at each

other’s throats

when actually what we should be doing

particularly in the face of a pandemic

is coming together so i strongly

recommend thinking rationally

the book i’ve i’m publishing on the 29th

is really a call to arms for

shifting the balance more in favor of

rationality

it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be

passionate it doesn’t mean that we

shouldn’t care

about the outcomes of our decisions but

if we’re going to take sensible

decisions

they’ve got to be firmly based on a

rational

analysis to conclude

buddhists would say there

are three mental poisons

anger attachment and ignorance

anger and emotions like that can blind

to the nature of the truth

attachment particularly to comfortable

ideas we feel familiar with

can blind us to the fact the world has

changed and we need to recognize that

but the most dangerous of the three is

ignorance

and that’s what my model is designed to

try and help us

cope with thank you all very much

you