Of the importance of form in intelligence: I
I call that format SPECS, by the way, because it allows you to see two similar ideas stereoscopically, so to speak, and thus gain an extra dimension — neat trick, eh?
What if collecting SPECS was part of your training as an analyst, and you practiced the form a few hundred times and kept 150 mind-blowing examples — as Shakespeare did with his ABAB CDCD EFEF GG sonnets?
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Why, you’d be training yourself in pattern recognition — formal thinking — horizontal thinking — lateral thinking — analogy — thinking by leaps and bounds.
Inteligence happens in the Intelligence Community, and in the human population as well. I can’t speak to the ways in which animal and plant mimicry, or the artistry of birdsong, correspond to pattern recognition, although that would be a fascinating topic for another post.
What I can say is that analogical, horizontal, cross-disciplinary thinking is in its own away more powerful than logical, rational, vertical, silo-bound thinking.
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In terms of Intelligence and intelligence, the strategies of linear / vertical thinking are like your fingers: it’s your skill at lateral / horizontal thinking that gives your mind an opposable thumb.
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zen:
October 4th, 2012 at 4:10 am
Hi Charles,
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Excellent post. Has me thinking.
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“Form” isn’t just a shape or a pathway or sequence of information, it’s a structure too. It imposes hierarchies of value on information. If done purposefully in intel ( confidence) that’s ok but seldom do ppl stop and think of the implicit values the form is also communicating they may not be intending by emphasizing some data points at the expense of others or excluding some kinds of info a priori.
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As this is unavoidable, the best thing to do is employ may ways (forms) of looking at the same information, especially ones that might seem radically unsuitable, when you are doing further and further out-year projections as time does not always permit that kind of methodological thoroughness in an emergency. A career of having done that trains the mind to intuit differently
Derek Robinson:
October 5th, 2012 at 6:37 pm
Marshall McLuhan – “The medium is only truly the message when the form and the content are one and the same.” (Or words to that effect .. I’m paraphrasing from memory, from “The Medium and the Light”, a book of McLuhan’s collected writings & interviews on the subject of religion.)
Charles Cameron:
October 5th, 2012 at 9:06 pm
Quote taken, Derek, thanks for the reminder.
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As I move this towards book form, I’ll also be having to think about the Heart Sutra, and “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.”
Doug Breitbart:
October 9th, 2012 at 3:04 pm
Charles,
A terrific way of closing the conceptual gap between the meta of analogic correspondence and the rigidities of structured, hierarchical, logical, ontologically framed, temporally organized traditional analysis. The tangible form of the diagram and the intangible translation of the random and ethereal to new comprehension and understanding evokes for me the phenomenon of thoughts being transformed into in-“form”-ation – from thought to tangible expression or publication, then enabling the conceiver to base action on that information and impact the physical realty being created as a result.
Thought/perception/insight/correlation/inspiration ————-> information/publication/expression————–> action/result/output/outcome/creation/physical manifestation.
That translation to information, and your capturing that instance is so on target, and Zen’s highlighting the need to effect that step from orientations and perspectives that avoid the risk of limitation/pre-conception/convention is why, I think your orientation towards these intelligence domains is so critical to surfacing insights that map directly to averting blind spots and saving lives.
Bravo!