What can you learn from spies? It seems a great deal. Here’s how what they do can be applied in your business.

In this interview, Kenneth Knight (who describes his job as helping the president of the United States and his administration “avoid surprise”) shares insights into how he evaluates threats, overcomes cognitive biases, and constructs scenarios—challenges familiar to most private-sector strategists.

In his job as the national intelligence officer for warning, Knight oversees a small team of analysts who serve as an institutionalized safeguard against risk—monitoring and challenging the analyses and assumptions of the broader intelligence community.

So what does he say are the Challenges facing Strategists?

• In today’s world, there are a tremendous number of issues that don’t lie within a nation state, that don’t involve a military or defense-related kind of background. So trying to transform that system to be more adept, more dynamic, more able to deal with and anticipate emerging challenges in this global environment we’re in today is the hardest thing, because it’s not an organizational change as much as it is a mind-set and focus change.
• Most experts become experts and rise to the top of our community because they have a very good analytic framework for looking at their issue. That allows them to process lots of information, put it in some kind of strategic context, and say something relevant and useful to the policy people.
• A lot of times surprises occur when those analytic frameworks that the experts have—and have built their career on, and have built their experience on—no longer apply. And so we are constantly kind of pushing that and causing tension, where a nonexpert from my office is engaging with an expert and challenging their expert bias. I think the ways to get around that: there’s really two. And we’ve tried in both areas, and I think have made progress in both areas.
• to me, it’s this constant articulation of what are you trying to accomplish? What are you trying to avoid? And then a conscious examination of the world and the information you have in front of you to try to, from a possibilities-based perspective, imagine how this information and the situation you see developing could make an impact on those things you’re trying to accomplish.
• I think this constant need to look at your own business model or your own, in our case, intelligence model, and to look at what are the baseline assumptions that you have that that model rests on and to challenge those—and not just in a check-the-box way, not just do an alternative assessment at the end of your baseline analysis and reconfirm your analysis, but to truly challenge them—to me it’s the only way, I think, to stay current and perhaps stay ahead of the curve.
• I would say that not all analytic problems are the same. I think the kinds of issues we’re trying to deal with fall on a spectrum from the known knowable to the more complex chaotic. I think it was Joe Nye, when he was chairman of the National Intelligence Councils, who described this as mysteries and secrets, which is not a bad shorthand.

See the full transcript at McKinsey Quarterly.

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