Not a failure of “intelligence,” but of, well,
Intelligence.
“This was not a failure to collect intelligence,” stated
President Obama in response to the Christmas bomber security briefing.
“It was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence
that we already had.” This statement applies equally well to
analysis of the very real disaster about our economy. As the New York
Times asks, “If the Fed Missed this Bubble, [how] will it See a
New One?” (Jan. 6).
In both cases, decision-makers had information in hand to make very
different choices than they did—choices that could have more
effectively averted catastrophe. The CIA and other security agencies
had received warnings that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab could pose a
violent threat. Likewise, there were plenty of indications in the last
decade that housing prices were rising far too quickly and that
speculation and unscrupulous lending was getting out of hand. The Fed
simply didn’t pay attention to those perspectives.
Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. It’s easy to get all
worked up with 20/20 hindsight. Almost as easy as picking on
cheerleaders. But that isn’t my point.
In both cases, the problem was indeed what I would call a failure of
intelligence—but not the government-speak definition of
“information about an enemy or a potential enemy.” I mean
the more global understanding of intelligence as the ability to
integrate and make meaningful interpretations from disparate sets of
data—i.e., connecting the dots. In a world drowning in seas of
information, this latter kind of intelligence is becoming ever more
vital to our ability to thrive—or even survive. It is also
increasingly rare.
This should not shock us, for a quick glance at our education system
makes it clear that we are raising our youth to become ever more
specialized and compartmentalized in their thinking. If you get really
good at this compartmentalization, you can continue on to graduate
school and get even more specialized. And as faculty in higher
education, you are rewarded in tenure and promotion for your authorship
of original research in your specialty. This system does a great job of
turning us into experts but is not designed to foster the kind of
integrated thinking that allows us to see patterns across disparate
sources of information. The Times editors described the Fed’s
problem as listening to the “echo chamber of conventional
wisdom” within a very narrow world of neoclassical economists,
real estate professionals and homeowners. The national security
agencies’ failure to integrate information was due to the
specialization of different agencies, along with their turf wars and
silos, to prevent communication across bureaucratic barriers. In other
words, the same problem that kept us from seeing the 9/11 attack
coming, the same problem that bedeviled the Katrina response, and the
same problem, on a far more mundane level, that mucks up our daily
lives with hours wasted in customer “service” calls and
other nonsensical bureaucratic boondoggles. And then, there is
Copenhagen.
We desperately need to transform our understanding of
“intelligence” to move beyond specialized data collection
and toward understanding and analysis, and we need to transform our
educational system to nurture and support this type of intelligence. I
spent the last 10 years of my professional life promoting
interdisciplinary environmental curriculum design, only to see the
fledgling results of this work become an easy target of the budget
cuts, being “outside” the traditional structures of
departments and colleges. These traditional structures are entrenched
and powerful, but the crises of our times remind us that we can’t
move into the future if we remain stuck in the towers of the past.