Category: Decision-Making & Decision-Support

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Review: Open Source Intelligence in a Networked World

6 Star Top 10%, Complexity & Resilience, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Democracy, Diplomacy, Economics, Education (General), Environment (Solutions), Information Operations, Information Society, Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Priorities, Public Administration
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Anthony Olcott

5.0 out of 5 stars 6 Star Insider-Outsider Unique Offering, March 24, 2012

This is my final review. If you are interested in what the US Intelligence Community does NOT know about open source intelligence and the global network of sources in 183 languages, this is without question the only book available in English, and a six star rating is earned by virtue of its uniqueness. This is NOT a book that will teach you anything about Open Source Intelligence (OSINT).

The author, an academic rather than a CIA body, has done a phenomenal job of integrating multiple literatures in studying the history and culture of the CIA's open source endeavors as well as its overall culture, and in his conclusion, offers up sound ideas that need to be implemented if we ever get a national leadership that is interested in intelligence with integrity.

I certainly recommend that this book be read along with Hamilton Bean's No More Secrets: Open Source Information and the Reshaping of U.S. Intelligence (Praeger Security International).

Dr. Olcott has done a tremendous service to all who care about the future of the craft of intelligence (decision-support), and I have been so impressed with this book that I reworked my chapter for Routledge at the last minute to ensure this book's inclusion in the bibliography and credit to the author on two points within the chapter. A “must read” for anyone interested in bureaucracy, public administration, intelligence, information pathologies, obstacles to innovation, and so on.

I made ten pages of notes. Below I offer a distilled summary.

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Review: Polarity Management – Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Democracy, Information Society, Intelligence (Public), Priorities, Survival & Sustainment, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution
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Barry Johnson

5.0 out of 5 stars Much Less Complicated Than Expected, a Great Workbook,April 16, 2012

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I bought this back in December 2011 when I was scrounging around for books on panarchy (see for instance, Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. It stayed in my pile as other books moved because my first impression was that it was more complicated than I cared to deal with and might – shudder — even include mathematical formulas. I was wrong.

This is a very straight forward book that I recommend as a read-ahead or work book for any group seeking to radically evolve their internal decision making processes away from the current standard of “I talk, you listen; I decide, you obey.” It has clear charts, the right amount of white space, and I put it down thinking very well of the book.

Panarchy is an evolution of the whole systems approach to anything, with the clarity and integrity of FEEDBACK LOOPS among the elements being the core of any successful system. If everyone does not talk; if everyone does not listen; if everyone does not decide; if everyone does not act in harmonization with all others, system failure is inevitable.

Interesting to me, because Harrison Owen is a friend and mentor, this book is a restatement, in panarchic terms, of his path-finding work, Open Space Technology: A User's Guide–I also recommend his more recent Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance in a Self-Organizing World.

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Review: Rescuing the Enlightenment from Itself – Critical and Systemic Implications for Democracy (C. West Churchman’s Legacy and Related Works)

5 Star, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Information Society, Intelligence (Public), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Priorities, Public Administration, True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution
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Janet McIntyre-Mills

5.0 out of 5 stars Original Solution Not Chosen by Club of Rome, They Blew It,March 4, 2012

This is a seminal work going back in time, integrating reflexive practice, what is now known as third phase science and dialogic design science. A major contribution within this book is A. N. Christakis, “A Retrospective Structural Inquiry of the Predicament of Mankind, Prospectus of the Club of Rome.”

The short story: the Club of Rome chose the Meadows/Randers top-down micro-management solution now famous as the Limits to Growth model. They rejected the reflexive / third order science solution that recognized that all humanity must be engaged, all humanity must comprehend and agree on solutions, or the solutions would never be implementable nor sustainable.

Other vital books that close the circle on where a few of us continue to try to make progress:

Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track (paperback)
Idealized Design: How to Dissolve Tomorrow's Crisis…Today (paperback)
How People Harness Their Collective Wisdom And Power to Construct the Future (Research in Public Management (Unnumbered).)
Architecture in Transition
The Talking Point: Creating an Environment for Exploring Complex Meaning (PB)
A Democratic Approach to Sustainable Futures: A Workbook for Addressing the Global Problematique
Science of Generic Design: Managing Complexity Through Systems Vol 1 and Vol 2
A Handbook of Interactive Management
Reflexive Practice: Professional Thinking for a Turbulent World
Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure

My own book that I cannot link to but am allowed to mention, is THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust. Find it here on Amazon. I believe Western “democracy” (largely a fraud) and Western capitalism (largely predatory and now gravely wounded by the legalized global financial fraud of Goldman Sachs, Morgan, Citi-Bank, and Bank of America, among others) are both going to implode in the near term (by 2014). Solutions are going to come from bottom up. All of these books are critical design-related texts for bottom-up holistic design, what Buckminster Fuller called “comprehensive architecture.” We need to future-proof our cities, one block at a time. This book is a fine starting point.

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Review: Too Big to Know – Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Culture, Research, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Information Operations, Information Society, Intelligence (Public), Public Administration, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution
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David Weinberger

5.0 out of 5 stars Simple Enough to Shake the Most Obtuse Leaders, February 10, 2012

First the disclosures. I asked for a copy of this book to review, David Weinberger being one of my heroes and I being unemployed at this time. They gave it to me and now that I have read it, I will be donating it to the Oakton, VA public library.

Second, the subtitle. The subtitle of the book captures the entire field perfectly, and richly merits emphasis: “Rethinking knowledge now that the facts aren't the facts, experts are everywhere, and the smartest person in the room is the room.” This is the final nail in the coffin of secret intelligence communities and companies devoted to proprietary software. There is nothing intelligent — nor substantively valuable — about “closed” environments if ones purpose is to optimize both the allocation of resources and outcomes beneficial to the public.

Third, the historical context. Many people have been focused on the changing role of knowledge coming into the 21st century, and I list just five of the books below to make the point that in the context of all else, this book says it better, more easily graspable for the non-digital leaders struggling to decide where to go next –this book is highly relevant to the 1950's mind-set leaders of all eight tribes of intelligence: academic, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-governmental / non-profit.

The exemplar: The exemplary performer in the age of productivity
Radical Man: The Process of Psycho-Social Development
The Knowledge Executive
Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era
Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century

Summarizing the book concisely: everything we do now with hierarchical organization, hoarded information, restricted accesses, and isolation from the full range of external sources and methods, is wrong for the times.

Here are the five recommendations the author discusses in his last chapter, every single one of them poorly addressed by most organizations, and especially those that are highly bureaucraticized:

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Review: Thinking, Fast and Slow

4 Star, Decision-Making & Decision-Support
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Daniel Kahneman

4.0 out of 5 stars Mixed Feelings About This Book,January 17, 2012

As one who was brought up with Herbert Simon and”satisficing,” I have mixed feelings about this book. As an intelligence professional I know for a fact that corrupt politicians have zero interest in the facts, only in what will profit them personally in the short-term. As much as I would like to see integrity restored as the core value of government, economy, and society, in the larger context in which we live this book is a curiosity.

There are gems and it is certainly worth reading, but as one other reviewer points out, it is not the easiest reading nor the most delightful. Here is what I got out of it (my summary notes, I donate all books right after I read them, to a nearby university).

For those instances when BOTH intelligence (decision-support) officers and their clients (politicians, policy makers, acquisition managers, operational commanders) have integrity–a condition that does not exist today, this book is very useful as a training aid.

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Review (Guest): Fixing the Facts – National Security and the Politics of Intelligence

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Censorship & Denial of Access, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Government), Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Leadership, Military & Pentagon Power, Politics, Priorities, Public Administration, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
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Joshua Rovner

5.0 out of 5 stars It Takes Two: Strategic Intelligence and National Security Policy, September 30, 2011

By Retired Reader (New Mexico) – See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

In the U.S., the relationship between strategic intelligence and the formulation of national security policies has been to say the least complex and often confusing. This book provides what has long been needed, an objective and scholarly review of this relationship.

Rovner provides an excellent theoretical background to guide his examination of specific case histories that he has chosen to illustrate the relationships between strategic intelligence and policy. Ideally intelligence analysts should be able to operate without interference to produce strategic intelligence reports that are honest, objective, and supported by the best information available. Again ideally policy makers should be free to challenge such reports. Finally both analysts and policymakers should be able to hold rational discussions over differences in interpretation and conclusions in which the supporting evidence is considered objectively. Unfortunately this ideal is often thwarted by what Rovner calls “the pathologies of intelligence-policy relations.” He has identified three such `pathologies':

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Review (Guest): No More Secrets – Open Source Information and the Reshaping of U.S. Intelligence

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Budget Process & Politics, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Democracy, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Information Operations, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Misinformation & Propaganda, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
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Hamilton Bean

5.0 out of 5 stars The Folly of Secret Intelligence,July 28, 2011

ByĀ  Retired Reader (New Mexico) – See all my reviews

Ever had someone try to undercut your position by alluding to “secret” information whose details, alas, cannot be shared but allegedly trump your arguments. How much worse when it is the government who is seen to bully its own citizenry in this way?

The hallmark of our free society is the First Amendment, which stipulates that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…” Had it occurred to the framers that the Executive Branch would acquire equivalent law-making powers–Executive Orders with the “force of law”–they likely would have constrained that branch of government similarly …and perhaps an activist judiciary, as well.

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