United States Military Academy

ABSTRACT: Intelligence analysis is a high-stakes domain that poses challenges to effective individual and collaborative cognition. The design of support tools and analytical ped-agogy could benefit from an understanding of how challenges that are reported in other decision-making literature generalize and are manifested in more naturalistic settings. The objective of this research was to elicit challenges for cognition in collaborative intel-ligence analysis. Two complementary research methods were used: unstructured inter-views with 46 analysts and supervisors, and observations of eight teams of military intelligence analysts conducting a training scenario. Interviews with designers, educa-tors, and practitioners in the intelligence community revealed trends in unsupported cognitive work and cultural challenges, whereas observations from a training exercise for army intelligence analysts instantiated other cognitive challenges of collaborative analysis. This study indicates that analytical style (part tradition and part due to indivi-dual reasoning tendencies) can result in premature narrowing, difficulty in reframing, and getting lost in the details. The study also illustrates the effects of friction within and across federated teams, how variable tempo can produce inexpert behavior, and con-siderations for the design of analytical support tools. This work suggests the value of complementary research methods in the study of other domains involving collabora-tive work. It is likely that these cognitive challenges affect other domains involving collaborative analysis. Finally, this study suggests that the effects of individual cogni-tive challenges are difficult to isolate in naturalistic settings and should most likely be considered collectively rather than independently. Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril. – Sun Tz