What Do Decisionmakers Want From Intelligence? (Global Intelligence Forum)

globalintelligenceforum.com

One of the most important questions any intelligence professional can ask is "What do the decisionmakers I support want from me?"  Historically, it is also one of the most difficult questions to answer.

That is the reason why the faculty at Mercyhurst nominated Intelligence and the Decisionmaker as the theme for this year's Global Intelligence Forum in Dungarvan, Ireland (July 11-13, 2011).

Looking at the line-up of speakers -- GEN Mike Hayden, Charlie Allen, Hayden Peake from the US, Kathleen O'Toole from Ireland, Anthony Campbell from Canada, Niki Ekman from Sweden, Cees Wiebes from the Netherlands, etc. etc. -- and it easy to see why I think we are going to make some progress on this question.

Two other things make this conference one of a kind.  The first is the attendees.  This conference draws people from all three major sub-disciplines of intelligence:  National security, law enforcement and business.  Not only does it draw people from all areas of intelligence, it also draws people from all over the world.  

So you are going to see guys like Tom Carr, the executive director of the Washington Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program rubbing shoulders with Liam Fahey, founder and executive director of the Intelligence Leadership Forum, the organization for senior corporate intelligence professionals.  

There is simply no other conference that brings together this kind of mix of professionals for this kind of conference.  Everyone I spoke with last year took as much away from the interaction between the participants as they did from the speakers.

Which is a nice segue to the second big advantage:  Dungarvan.  What a beautiful place!  Located on the southern Irish coast in the midst of one of the prettiest parts of Ireland, Dungarvan is a perfect place for mixing, making new personal and professional relationships and carving out some time to think about some of the important questions facing the profession.  Extraordinary hospitality, simple pleasures and (my personal favorite) an outstanding local beer make this event both physically relaxing and intellectually energizing. 

We had to turn away people last year so this year we found a larger space and have expanded to 200 (and only 200) attendees.  

Registration and more info about the conference is available online here.  We are also offering two, one day workshops to round out the week. More information on the workshops here.

Questions regarding sponsorship opportunities for your company or organization should be directed to Bob Heibel, Executive Director of the Mercyhurst College Institute For Intelligence Studies at rheibel at mercyhurst dot edu.

Global Intelligence Forum Slides And Notes Now Available To Everyone!

The recently completed Global Intelligence Forum discussing analytic best practices and held in Dungarvan, Ireland was, by all accounts, a huge success.  

We have just finished compiling all of the notes, slides and speeches into a single place for viewing and download and are now making those slides and notes available to anyone interested.

If you are not sure where to start, look at the menu on the far left of the landing page (you can see a screenshot of what the landing page looks like in the picture to the right).  Kathleen Moore, one of our grads (and recent recipient of an AFIO Scholarship for graduate school -- Hooray, Kathleen!) has put together a very useful conference re-cap that points to all of the various presentations and puts them into the broader context of the conference.

If you just want the conference slides and speeches, though, they are all in one place for downloading.  We are still pulling together a number of other resources (we hope to get the full text of Gov. Ridge's speech, for example, as well as some video) but most of the stuff is up there now.

If you are interested in any of the press or other commentary surrounding the conference, our public relations department has helpfully compiled it all on the Facebook page dedicated to the conference.

Enjoy!  

Why I Am Not Writing About Dungarvan... (Liveblogging The Global Intelligence Forum)

Image by cole007 via Flickr

First, let me say unequivocally that is not because I don't want to write about it.  It was an amazing conference.

The problem is that Murphy is Irish and he had somehow found his way into my computer and anything associated with it.  I knew that my liveblogging days were short-lived when my not-so-universal electrical socket adapter could not be configured to an Irish socket. 

Without electricity, my attempts to keep up with the pace of this conference were doomed.  

My intent now is to wait until we can get the slides uploaded to our website sometime next week and then add my notes along with some links to anything else that seems relevant.

If you are starved for feedback in the meantime, you can see Meghan Corbin's updates on Facebook.

I Am Off To The Global Intelligence Forum... (Liveblogging Dungarvan)

...in Dungarvan, Ireland!

I am very much looking forward to this, not only becasue it is in Ireland but also because it represents a kind of re-start on one of my favorite conferences of all times -- the annual Mercyhurst Colloquium.  

Anyone who ever went to one of the old Colloquia knows they were great conferences.  With much less focus on presentation after mind-numbing presentation and much more emphasis on educated discussion and networking over...ahem..."libations" of one sort or another, it was the perfect conference to not only relax but also to think and talk about intelligence in new ways with interesting people.  

Mercyhurst put the colloquium on hiatus for a few years to help IAFIE get up and running but with that organization moving forward on its own with a healthy head of steam, and with Mercyhurst starting to hold classes in Dungarvan, it seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up (By the way, the very generous sponsors who helped make it all happen seemed to think so too...)

So, I am pretty pumped!  I am told by everyone who had an hand in the preparation that the Irish have pulled out all the stops and some of our students, who spent the last term studying over there, say the absolute best things about the people of Dungarvan.  

While I am sure the hospitality will be great, the company I'll be keeping will be even better.  If you have not had the chance, check out the speaker list.  I will try to blog some of the events from over there but a more complete report may have to wait until I get back.

If you are not going to be able to go, besides this blog, you can also follow some of the action on Facebook or on the Mercyhurst website (where they are posting the news coverage of the event).

And if you are one of the lucky ones that get to go?  Look for me at Downey's on Main St.  I'll be the big Yank in the back enjoying Dungarvan Brewing Company's exceptionally fine red ale!

Exciting Opportunity: Analytic Best Practices Conference, July 11-13, 2010 In Ireland!

Analysts and decisionmakers...
Academics and practitioners...
From both sides of the Atlantic...
From the business, national security and law enforcement intelligence communities...
For three days...
In Ireland!

I gotta say, I am pretty pumped about the 2010 Dungarvan Conference on analytic best practices, July 11-13, 2010.

Mercyhurst is sponsoring the conference in order to begin a more robust dialogue between and among all of the stakeholders and sub-disciplines of intelligence. We want to explicitly recognize both the common ground and the good thinking that exists across the entire field of intelligence analysis.

We are holding the conference in Dungarvan, Ireland to make it relatively easy for US participants and easier for our European friends (and our US friends living in Europe) to attend the conference. Likewise, Mercyhurst is expanding its campus to Dungarvan and we want to take maximum advantage of this uniquely beautiful location for all attendees.

You can find more information about the conference on the Conference website. Registration is now open! Hope to see you there!

Brenda Brathwaite Is Amazing (Game Education Summit -- Part 4)

Everyone has played a game that was enormously engrossing; that became the focus of their lives for at least a short period.

Everyone has had at least one great class in their lives, where, at the end, they "got it"; where they learned the lesson deeply on both an intellectual and emotional level.

Everyone, finally, has seen a work of art that communicated, through its attention to detail, a broad, deep message.

Brenda Brathwaite, a professor of game design at the Savannah College of Art and Design has accomplished all three of these goals in a single "installation" -- and she has done it not once, but twice.

I used the word installation above because I cannot think of a better term for what Brathwaite has done. It is not a good word because it conveys no sense of the dynamic quality inherent in her work. Artists would call it art and educators would no doubt see it as an incredibly effective way to teach a lesson.

Brathwaite is a professional game designer, however, with scads of popular video games to her credit and she proudly refers to these as games. I say "proudly" because one of her explicit goals was to show that games could educate, be seen as art and still be good games. She seemed to me to want to push her understanding of the limits of her discipline in ways that few within the discipline would recognize.

The first game is called Ni ceart go cur le cheile (Where my people come from in Gaelic) though it is invariably referred to as "The Irish Game". It is a game that explores the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland in the 1600's. In it, the players participate as Irish factions trying to manage the displacement of their people in the face of a relentless British invasion. Failure to find room in a country that is rapidly running out of space results in some of the Irish inevitably getting sent to Barbados as slaves -- a fate that befell many at this time. The faction that loses the least wins.

At some trivial level, this game is like lifeboat (you get thrown off the boat; you get thrown off the island) or, as I clumsily suggested, the zombie level in Call of Duty 5 (relentless assault where you cannot win, only lose the the least).

A single second imagining the playing pieces as members of a family displaced, dispersed or abandoned to the fate of slaves brings a different lesson crashing home. People -- it becomes hard to think of them as game pieces -- had to decide where to go, had to uproot their lives, abandon their property, increasingly move to areas where there were more and more people and fewer and fewer resources.

The game design doesn't allow for momentary pangs of discomfort, however. Each turn, the toll increases; each turn the lesson becomes less of a historical artifact and more real for the student.

The game board (the photo at the right does not do it justice) and associated pieces are filled with the kind of detail that it is hard not to appreciate. The Irish pieces are the "right" color of green, the British pieces the right color of orange. The smooth, sleek beveled glass separating the playing pieces from the ground below is a stark contrast to the burlap "board" that drives much of the game play.

Brathwaite's ability to explore historic and tragic events through the medium of the game is not limited to her own Irish heritage. Her other game/installation on display here at the Game Education Summit is, if anything, more powerfully rendered.

In this game, called Train (see the photo to the right), Brathwaite asks the players to move 60 yellow playing pieces -- "people" -- down one of three tracks to their destination as quickly as possible. Along the way, the players draw cards that result in delays or events which accelerate the trains. To overcome these obstacles, players are encouraged to exhibit an almost ruthless efficiency, to carefully balance the risks and rewards of various strategies to accomplish the goal in the most rapid way possible.

There is a strong physical component to the play as well. The playing pieces do not fit nicely into the toy trains so filling the train cars to the maximum capacity requires players to jam the pieces in. The payoff is obvious. The more pieces jammed into the cars the fewer trips the cars will have to make.

Each time a car arrives at the end of the line, the player draws a card that tells them where the train ended up. In stark black and white the game reveals itself on each card turned over -- Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz...

Then back to the beginning to fill another car.

Again, the attention to detail in the game itself puts the game in the realm of art as well. The three pages of rules were typed on an old SS typewriter purchased specifically for the purpose. The rules themselves help reveal the story (players are required to take a hammer and break a piece of glass before each game). There are few other games that I can think of (Hush is one) that can begin to generate this type of emotion.

Finally, what makes Brathwaite truly amazing is her ability to explain what it is she has done. She is clearly able to communicate to artists on the level of art, gamers on the level of the game and educators on the hidden power of her medium to teach at depth few other techniques can match.