Games of telephone and counter-telephone?
• “High confidence” generally indicates our judgments are based on high-quality information and/or the nature of the issue makes it possible to render a solid judgment.
• “Moderate confidence” generally means the information is interpreted in various ways, we have alternative views, or the information is credible and plausible but not corroborated sufficiently to warrant a higher level of confidence.
• “Low confidence” generally means the information is scant, questionable, or very fragmented and it is difficult to make solid analytic inferences, or we have significant concerns or problems with the sources.
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You could think of these as counter-telephone measures — attempts to avoid the distortions and corruptions that tend to arise when a message is passed from one person to another, And that’s important a fortiori when an ascending food-chain of transmitters may wish (or be persuaded) to formulate a message that will assure them the favorable attention of their superiors — but also because the higher the report goes, the closer it gets to decision-time..
As the Atlantic article says, this kind of “linguistic dodging” (aka attention to nuance) makes sense “in report after report where individuals are discussing information below the level of actionable intelligence.”
Inevitably there’s a shift in tempo between contemplation and action.
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Anyway, messages tend to get distorted as they’re passed along.
Consider, for instance, the caption to the photograph that graces the Atlantic piece at the top of this post:
The U.S Embassy in Benghazi burns following an attack in September. (Reuters)
There’s only one problem there. The US didn’t have an Embassy in Benghazi — they had a Consulate — and that’s not a distinction that lacks a consequence. Whatever else may be the case, Ambassador Stevens would certainly have been better guarded had he been back in Tripoli in his embassy.
Whoever wrote that caption wasn’t as deeply immersed in the situation as the former CIA analyst who write the article. And when you’re not deeply immersed, it is perilously easy to get minor but important details wrong.
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zen:
October 3rd, 2012 at 2:14 am
Well, there is also unrelated(!) decisions to contract security on the cheap by State:
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http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/09/contractors-benghazi/
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Contrary to Friday’s claim by State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland that “at no time did we contract with a private security firm in Libya,” the department inked a contract for “security guards and patrol services” on May 3 for $387,413.68. An extension option brought the tab for protecting the consulate to $783,000. The contract lists only “foreign security awardees” as its recipient.
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$ 387 k for a quasi-anarchic war zone? Never mind Benghazi, anywhere.
Charles Cameron:
October 3rd, 2012 at 2:26 am
Yup — that’s precisely the sort of thing I was thinking of when I wrote “Whatever else may be the case”… in fact I’d probably seen that exact same article.
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One of these days I hope to write about your early diagrams Benefits of horizontal thinking to vertical thinkers and Benefits of vertical thinking to horizontal thinkers — and the ways in which any node in a strand of thought, vertical or horizontal, can give rise to a plethora of other strands, each potentially orthogonal to some of the others… and so the world is woven.
zen:
October 3rd, 2012 at 2:47 am
I am glad the horizontal thinking diagram comes up on the first page of Google, it keeps the concept out there for others to run with and, frankly, I wish they would. We might then get a cutting edge of thought leaders to progress to “Orthogonal thinking” and generate a different class of insights.
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All we can do is chip away but in time mountains get moved
Charles Cameron:
October 3rd, 2012 at 3:04 am
Yup.
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Incidentally, I tweeted about the photo caption, and the folks at the Atlantic have corrected it.