The Intelligence Cycle just got a little more complicated

Last month the Space Training and Readiness Command (STARCOM), a component of U.S. Space Force published their doctrine on Intelligence (https://tinyurl.com/nhbs93s5), this prompted me to write these ramblings.

People like structure. I think that’s why we have things like roadmaps, diagrams, cycles, checklists, and directions. ?Scratch that last one, like most men, I don’t read instructions before diving in, and I have only been 50% successful with that approach.?Meaning that on my second attempt, after reading the directions I usually get what I want.?I have been a student of these structured processes for decades.?My first introduction to them was in my quality advisor days and I came across the Deming Cycle.?Named after W. Edward Deming, only because he used it, taught it and was a champion of it, after all it was a way to implement continuous quality improvement. ?Sometimes called the PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) cycle it was invented by American physicist, engineer and statistician Walter Shewhart, the father of statical quality control.?A simple cycle, deceptively so that most ignore it, thinking like I did, “yea thanks for that Captain Obvious”. ?Here it is, simple to use, when you are starting a new improvement project, planning data collection, or implementing a change:

Easy to use with easy instructions:

Plan:?Recognize an opportunity and plan a change.

Do:?Test the change. Carry out a small-scale study.

Check:?Review the test, analyze the results, and identify what you’ve learned.

Act:?Take action based on what you learned in the study step. If the change did not work, go through the cycle again with a different plan. If you were successful, incorporate what you learned from the test into wider changes. Use what you learned to plan new improvements, beginning the cycle again.

I think it was this loop the influenced people to totally butcher John Boyds “OODA” loop, which is not a loop at all and is not a term he liked but used it because it became popular.?The “wrong” version of Boyd’s decision model looks like it was taken from Walter Shewhart, and it probably was, but not by Boyd, but people that don’t understand the true nature of what Boyd was designing.?It looks like this:

Again, thank you Captain Obvious. Since we are talking about simplicity here, let me make this even simpler for those that don’t want to take the time to understand Boyd. Try this “look before you leap” that’s what the simplified OODA says, prove me wrong. Before anyone else thinks about it I hereby call this phrase Caldwell's Razor (with apologies to William of Occam).?What Boyd invented was not a cycle but a rather complex decision model, built on hours of computer time running complex operational research models. It was built for war, not business. Can it be used for business? Perhaps. There are some that swear to it, but I prefer to stick to models built for business, because it’s a totally different ecosystem than war. ?Would be happy to debate anyone on this anytime. ?To be fair to Boyd his actual decision model he designed looks like this:

A little more complex than a loop isn't it? Now that that’s settled, at least in my mind, let’s move on to something a bit more complex, more complex than a loop but a cycle, the intelligence cycle to be specific.?The origin of the modern-day intelligence cycle, according to historian Michael Warner, comes from the French revolution where leadership needed a simple way to explain intelligence collection.?I don’t know if that’s true but let’s go with it.?What I do know is what the U.S. military and other foreign military’s have been using for some time.?Found in Joints Chief of Staff Publication 2.0, Intelligence it’s a five-step cycle that looks like this:

If you ask me this looks a lot like Shewhart’s PDCA cycle with a few more steps, but that’s just me.?I got to experience this cycle in the heart of the Pentagon when I was on the Joint Staff in a center called the National Military Command Center. ?I was working counter terrorism, totally out of my wheelhouse, but was doing the Dissemination part—because I was good at hitting the enter button to send the email to the right people—that I could do.?It was structured, allowed for non-intelligence trained people like me to contribute and for the most part worked. Does this work for business? Not convinced.?This was designed for war, business is not war and has its own ecosystem consisting of customers, competitors, buyers, suppliers and new entrants impacted by various economic, social, regulatory, environmental, technological and political pressures. Sound familiar? It should to trained Business Competitive Intelligence professionals. ?I will leave it up to you if you want to use this.?The real thing I wanted to address is that the U.S. Space force just published their own doctrine on Intelligence for space published as Space Doctrine Publication 2.0.?Curious, I started reading through it to see if we learned anything new since the French Revolution, and to my surprise we did! We learned to take something vague and simple and make it complex and confusing.?They made it worse!?In case you did not see it at the top here it is again for your viewing pleasure:

Yikes! Run that a few times and see what you get!?To be fair they overlayed decision processes on top of the intelligence cycle and got artsy trying to make it look spacey with what looks like orbits and a star.?A little confusing in the sense that there is no definitive starting or ending place, unless they assume you know the intelligence cycle. Oh by the way the original intelligence cycle diagram is neither numbered nor has no beginning or end. I guess you just jump in wherever you feel like it. Well they do say it's iterative, a chicken and egg paradox. ?Don’t get me wrong I am not against these various military intelligence processes, they work for the GIs (did I just date myself?) and are often tied to operational cycles, but I am not a fan of ripping these out of doctrine and using them for business, they just don’t work. They are a good teaching guide, but if you want simplicity use PDCA it covers the basics.?For me I stick with what I learned in the Academy of Competitive Intelligence and have built on for over 20 years—business has its own ecosystem, it is part of an economy, it had identifiable parts that put together correctly allows you to run structured analytical techniques. ?Okay ready for the criticism….. Disclaimer: no CI interns were harmed in the development of these ideas, well at least no good interns.