Teaching analysts to think differently
By Mike Ochse, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Denver, Strategic Communications
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is “in the midst of a professional revolution,” according to Director Robert Cardillo. In an open letter introducing NGA Strategy 2015, he assured customers and the workforce that the agency will remain a key defender of national security in the future, but he stressed, “what got us here won’t get us there.”
Too much has changed.
For starters, the nation’s adversaries are less recognizable than ever. Non-state actors can turn up anywhere in the world. They mingle with civilian populations, even within friendly nations. To keep up, the NGA workforce cannot rely on the traditional approach of analyzing targets or images or data but rather must work to make sense of activities and trends within those targets, images and data. What do the activities and trends likely mean? What are the implications and opportunities for NGA’s customers? How do the puzzle pieces fit together?
Information sources have also changed. The sky-darkening small-satellite “revolution” is already bringing a deluge of geo-tagged open-source data. Analysts are no longer limited to using highly specialized classified assets; they now have a wealth of commercial GEOINT in the open environment that can help them solve key intelligence questions. As we move forward, geospatial data will come from all directions, and it will come fast —
faster even than it does today.
“The rapid innovation in the commercial remote sensing industry provides NGA new opportunities to deliver consequence to our customers,” said John Charles, who leads the NGA Commercial GEOINT Accelerator Team.
“We need to invest and prepare the analytic workforce to operate in a data-centric, information rich, multistream environment supporting emergent capabilities,” said Ruth Thomas, director of the NGA Talent Management Office. The TMO guides the agency in developing workforce expertise to ensure it has the right talent for every mission.
Maintaining an analytic edge
NGA’s support to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa and the catastrophic earthquake in Nepal prove the agency can provide customers with the power of GEOINT openly, innovatively and agilely; but the future requires that those attributes become the norm. The agency must evolve its analytic training to keep on that path of transformation.
And that isn’t simply a matter of pushing new buttons; it’s a matter of teaching analysts to think differently.
The shift in analytic thinking is perhaps most evident in Activity Based Intelligence, or ABI, which provides an alternative, non-linear methodology designed to mitigate gaps and exploit sparse datasets. NGA analysts have employed ABI since 2005, especially in the areas of counterterrorism and irregular warfare, but now the demand signal calls for training and employment of ABI principles across the agency.
“I continue to say ‘ABI is a mindset’ because, to me, mindset is analytic methodology,” said Cardillo, who has made ABI one of the agency’s top priorities.
“It’s how you think about unpeeling, unraveling, understanding an enigma. In many ways, it’s an architecture to enable analysts to more freely attack a problem.”
The agency’s more robust ABI training is an instructor-led course that incorporates a mix of lecture, interactive discussions and guest speakers into a problem-based learning approach. The course targets imagery analysts, geospatial analysts and source strategies analysts, engaging them with
an ill-structured, authentic problem and challenging them to
employ ABI tradecraft to develop a solution.
In November 2015 the agency piloted a new ABI training course, “Leading the ABI Tradecraft.” The new course will provide managers, technical executives, staff officers, analytic supervisors and decision-makers across the NGA enterprise a working knowledge of the ABI tradecraft and how to effectively and efficiently manage resources, officers and personnel.
Non-traditional training
Not all current and future ABI training is instructor led. The agency has available a variety of training videos for the workforce. Additionally, the NGC is assessing a National System for Geospatial Intelligence, or NSG, training request for an “Introduction to ABI” computer-based training course.
There is also an informal element to ABI training that is nevertheless crucial, according to Mike Foster, who leads the agency’s ABI initiatives. Many of the agency’s ABI tools and tradecraft are homegrown within different analytic
pockets across the enterprise, he contends, and bringing these best practices to light, indoctrinating them and spreading them across the agency is critical.
“That analyst who has worked an account for 20 years…how do we leverage and expose the knowledge that is often tacit and that manifests itself in their reporting? I think we can do more to expose and report that information to create dialogue among communities of interest [that] work common mission threads,” said Foster.
It’s not just about information, though, said Foster.
“When you talk about transforming, you have to start with the people,” he said.
Teaching the technical knowledge and analytic skills of the future is only one of many components necessary for advancing analytic training. Holistically speaking, it begins by having and hiring the right people with the right attitude and the right skills.
“We need to focus on the core GEOINT analytic skills, such as critical thinking and problem solving; data science; advanced analytic techniques; communication — oral, written and visual; and phenomenology,” said Gary Dunow, director of Analysis. “We need to make sure the environment supports the desired behaviors by providing the right tools, technology and support for risk taking.”
The analytic training team is targeting these competencies in their current training plan, looking to strengthen them across the analytic workforce through defined and to-be-determined training offerings over the next five years. Elements of the approach include surging course offerings related to advanced thinking and problem solving, increasing student throughput to a recently revamped analytic writing course and instituting a certificate-based data-sciences program with entry-level through advanced coursework.
The approach includes a mix of internally developed courses, in close partnership with the National Geospatial Intelligence College, as well as the possibility of leveraging external training where applicable, affordable and appropriate. It also features initiatives and forums to advance peer-to-peer tradecraft knowledge-sharing — echoing Foster’s and others’ belief that sometimes the best source of training can be the very experts within the workforce.
Challenges
Despite plans and strong partnerships, NGA’s analytic training faces a familiar foe: time. Training development, when done properly, is rigorous and time-consuming. Finding the right experts to support development and delivery of training is hard. Often the true experts are analysts whose full-time roles preclude them from supporting development efforts or delivering training to the masses. Sometimes, when a course is finally piloted, the original requirement has gone stale. It’s a challenge that training teams commonly face, and NGA is not immune.
And there is the distance challenge as well. How do you reach a global workforce, especially when many courses are designed for in-classroom instruction? The NGC already has mobile training teams that deploy certified
instructors to customer sites to deliver specific training courses. Some MTT-enabled course offerings come equipped with their own laptops, allowing for training delivery anywhere in the world.
Not all courses are mobile, however; some, including many leadership courses, still require analysts to travel to NGA’s east or west campuses or to one of the NGC’ s five extended learning sites in Denver, Tampa, Dayton, Hawaii, or Molesworth, U.K. The agency is hoping its investment in video-enabled classrooms, called Enhanced Video Instructional Capabilities, or EVICs, will improve distance learning by allowing more analysts to virtually attend instructor-led courses.
Despite the challenges, those responsible for training NGA’s analytic workforce of tomorrow know they have support from the agency’s highest offices. For proof, they need look only to the same NGA strategy that lays out the agency’s goals for the road ahead. In it are the director’s own words: “We will invest in our people to develop in them the skills and perspectives that will carry us forward. We will get better at our craft.”
