Horror movies and intelligence analysis

A little while ago I sang the praises of the John Carpenter movie, The Thing. After thinking about the movie a bit and checking out an unofficial fan site (which made me realize that I’m not nowhere near the ‘big leagues’ of fandom like I thought I was) it occurred to me that the movie could serve as an excellent vehicle for teaching many of the principles of intelligence analysis. The traditional way analysis is taught (at least as I’ve seen it in military and law enforcement circles) is to give a block of instruction and then give a highly scripted practical exercise that gives participants little opportunity to make mistakes or any encouragement do anything other than regurgitation. Also, usually blocks of instruction are taught as self contained units with few examples of how different techniques can support each other and not even much discussion of how these isolated skills fit into a coherent, systematic strategy of analysis.

Most teaching is also heavily focused on skills (which is pretty easy to demonstrate competence in) and very light on critical thinking (hard to teach/demonstrate/evaluate) and production (which is time consuming and varies considerably between agencies).

I’ve often thought that training would be more effective if it revolved around a scenario and skills could be taught around the flow of an analytical process. If done properly, this would enable analysts to see how various skills fit into the bigger picture as well as demonstrating the need for critical thinking skills throughout the process. Of course, for a scenario to be effective it would need to be rich enough to allow analysts to take different paths and end up with different results. This can be really difficult to do in scenarios with a law enforcement or military focus because participants bring their knowledge and biases to the scenario which can tempt them to take shortcuts that circumvent the skills and processes you want them to learn. It’s very difficult to counter without making the scenario large, unwieldy and very difficult to create.

I’ve thought about using a historical event as the basis of a scenario but there are some difficulties with that as well. You can’t use something too well known (like 9/11) or people who know the outcome of the event will make their analysis fit the end result. In any case, if you do use a real event you’ll have to create a host of additional information to put around it so everything you hand the trainees doesn’t have a huge (virtual) neon light on it that screams “This is relevant to your scenario! Make sure you include it!” Some information should be relevant, some irrelevant and some intentionally misleading.

The movie would lend itself well to acting as a training scenario because it has the following characteristics:

• Multiple characters (12 humans and at least one ‘thing’)
• The movie does not provide a ‘god’s eye view’ of the situation so there is information hidden from viewers
• Ambiguous ending (so it doesn’t matter if trainees have already seen the movie)
• Extended time line (with breaks of unknown duration where activity is only hinted at)
• The subject matter is such that previous knowledge isn’t going to be of much help

In a 109 minutes therefore, you can have a complete scenario set up. At a minimum, the sorts of things you can teach from a scenario like this are:

• Analysis of Competing Hypothesis
• Link Analysis
• Event Flow Analysis
• Presentation

For those who haven’t seen the movie before I think there’s a natural break just before the blood test scene where the movie could be stopped and analysts could be asked to present their description of what’s gone on thus far as well as their assessment of who has been ‘infected’ by the thing.

The movie presents great opportunities for trainees to present the evidence for their hypothesis and argue their cases with others.

I don’t imagine we’ll be seeing any training like this though. I can almost picture the response such a proposal would get…

“Great, training for intelligence analysts! Just what we need. Wait…you want to show a movie? A horror movie? Uh, we’ll get back to you on that. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

That’s the ironic part. For a job that requires imagination, thinking from different perspectives and benefits from collaboration, training for such positions (when it occurs at all) remains stuck in the old lecture format with minimal interaction with instructors or classmates.