Intelligence Analysis Behavioral and Social Scientific Foundations (2011) / Chapter Skim
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13 Implementing Change: Organizational Challenges--Amy Zegart
13 Implementing Change: Organizational Challenges--Amy Zegart
Pages 309-330
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. Intelligence officials have the toughest time of all, confronting bounded rationality problems in spades.
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The chapters in Part II (Analytic Methods) of this volume mine an array of relevant literature for the best analytic tools to improve intelligence analysis.
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4 Intelligence budget calculations based on an Office of the Director of National Intelligence press release, which reported the first post-9/11 declassified National Intelligence Program budget: $43.7 billion for FY 2007 (Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 2007)
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On the one hand, competition can stimulate ideas, sharpen analysis, guard against groupthink and other pitfalls, and generate new ways of doing things. Yet because intelligence agencies compete without the shadow of organizational death, weak practices in one agency are likely to linger alongside better ones elsewhere.
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director holds a 10-year fixed term, the Bureau's top counterterrorism position has been held by eight people since 9/11, averaging just 1 year each (Stein, 2006) .7 These figures are particularly noteworthy given the fact that organization theorists consistently have found that frequent leadership turnover hurts firm performance.8 In sum, organization theory tells us that adaptation is difficult under the best of circumstances.
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organizational structure can influence learning in profound and often hidden ways. This last point is particularly important for intelligence agencies because they are in the information learning business, confront extreme levels of uncertainty, and have faced persistent calls for structural overhaul since World War II.
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The director will alert the President about a possible impending attack only if at least two of the three bureau chiefs report that they are concerned about terrorist activity patterns in their domains. Bureau chiefs, in turn, operate with the same decision rule: A bureau chief will send a report expressing concern to the director only if at least two of his three subordinates raise a red flag.
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Bureau A's information suggests that 20 percent of al Qaeda-affiliated groups (10 of 50) are planning terrorist attacks, while no Iran-affiliated groups are planning attacks.
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The Bendor and Hammond examples provide a cautionary warning: Robust analytic techniques are not enough. Organizational structures can exert enormous, unseen, and unexpected influence over how information is aggregated and what hypotheses emerge (Bendor and Hammond, 2010)
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Although March and Simon's (1958) classic work finds many benefits to standard operating procedures,10 more recent research finds that standard operating procedures are a double-edged sword, increasing organizational reliability but hampering innovation.11 Standard forms, automated computer systems, and reporting procedures help managers across an organization to perform the same tasks in the same ways each time.
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. In sum, organizational learning research suggests that structure matters much more than most people believe, that organizational reliability and innovation are often mutually exclusive, that managers must work outside standard operating procedures to identify obsolete practices and foster innovation, and that officials must be vigilant about monitoring how structural arrangements aggregate, or fail to aggregate, information to guard against misleading analytic judgments.
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Insight #1: Institutional Incentives Drive Behavior Although the political science literature is vast, the discipline's dominant approach for the past 20 or 30 years has been rational choice. See Chapter 3, this volume, by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita for discussion of rational choice analysis in much greater depth and for an examination of
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. For intelligence analysis, rational choice theories remind us that leadership is not a panacea; institutional incentives frequently explain why people and organizations behave in the ways they do -- for example, why constituent elements of the IC historically resisted centralization under the CIA, and why they are likely to continue resisting centralization under the new ODNI, including efforts to improve analytic practices, even now.14 At the ground level, rational choice theory suggests that bad incentives often prevent good people from improving organizational performance.
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This same basic logic explains in part why intelligence agencies in the Pentagon and other parts of the IC historically have fought against centralized control by the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) and its ODNI successor, even though doing so hinders the coordination and collaboration essential to intelligence success.
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. Starting in the 1930s and 1940s, Harvard Business School produced an alternative "human relations" approach that found workers also needed to be motivated to be productive.16 After World War II, business programs skyrocketed, producing major changes and a growing popular orientation.
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Selecting the "right people" hinges as much on identifying intangible qualities -- a willingness to embrace change and take intellectual risks, a drive to get things done, an aptitude for working well with intelligence customers and colleagues -- as substantive knowledge or other measurable skills. Finally, for decades intelligence agency cultures have prized lifetime service to the mission and country, not "here today, gone tomorrow" labor markets where organizations and employees alike expect to move on as conditions warrant.19 Getting on and off the intelligence bus is not so fast or easy.20 The second limitation of this work is methodological.
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It is to shine a light on which social science research paths offer dead ends and which offer promising avenues to improve the implementation of analytic practices. In the final analysis, organization theory and political science offer some important, relevant insights.
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1996. Pathologies of rational choice theory.
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E Williamson, ed., Organization theory, from Chester Barnard to the present and beyond.
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Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Rainey, H
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329 IMPLEMENTING CHANGE Wohlstetter, R
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