Structured Analytic Tools

Structured analytic techniques are tools for externalizing and documenting problems and decisions. The human mind has a limit to the number of things that it can hold and appropriately work with in memory. Making our thinking visual by externalizing and modeling major factors and issues we face when making decisions and solving problems is the idea behind all structured analytic tools. A definition of structured analytic tools includes any method, including computer software, paper & pencil, or whiteboard & marker, that allows us to get our thoughts out of our heads and into a form that we can manipulate in abstract form.

Simply making a list of pros and cons is a common structured analytic tool.

Analysts, particularly in the intelligence community, are trained in several different structured analytic tools, including:

1. pros/cons/fixes
2. causal flow diagramming
3. weighted ranking
4. probability/utility trees analysis of competing hypotheses (ACH).

One popular book is The Thinker's Toolkit, by Morgan Jones, a former CIA analyst, whose popular book outlines 14 different SATs. The company started by Mr. Jones to teach the techniques in his book was acquired by Analytic Advantage, Inc. (AAI) in 2011. AAI still offers workshops on structured analytic techniques.

As Richard Heuer, another former CIA analyst describes it, "Putting ideas into visible form ensures that they will last. They will lie around for days goading you into having further thoughts. Lists are effective because they exploit people's tendency to be a bit compulsive--we want to keep adding to them. They let us get the obvious and habitual answers out of the way, so that we can add to the list by thinking of other ideas beyond those that came first to mind. One specialist in creativity has observed that "for the purpose of moving our minds, pencils can serve as crowbars"–just by writing things down and making lists that stimulate new associations.

With the key elements of a problem written down in some abbreviated form, it is far easier to work with each of the parts while still keeping the problem as a whole in view. Analysts can generally take account of more factors than when making a global judgment. They can manipulate individual elements of the problem to examine the many alternatives available through rearranging, combining, or modifying them. Variables may be given more weight or deleted, causal relationships reconceptualized, or conceptual categories redefined. Such thoughts may arise spontaneously, but they are more likely to occur when an analyst looks at each element, one by one, and asks questions designed to encourage and facilitate consideration of alternative interpretations."

It's interesting to note that in 1772, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to a British friend, scientist and doctor Joseph Priestley, that outlined the "pros and cons" structured analytic tool so widely used today. Notice that he's answering a question, not with an answer (content), but with instructions on how his friend might ascertain the answer himself (process–a SAT, if you will):

"In the affair of so much importance to you, wherein you ask my advice, I cannot ... advise you what to determine, but if you please I will tell you how. When those difficult cases occur, they are difficult, chiefly because while we have them under consideration, all the reasons pro and con are not present to the mind at the same time, but sometimes one set present themselves, and at other times another, the first being out of sight. Hence the various purposes or inclinations that alternatively prevail, and the uncertainty that perplexes us.

To get over this, my way is to divide half a sheet of paper by a line into two columns; writing over the one Pro, and over the other Con. Then, during three or four days of consideration, I put down under the different heads short hints ... that at different times occur to me, for or against the measure. ... And, though the weight of reasons cannot be taken with the precision of algebraic quantities, yet when each is thus considered, separately and comparatively, and the whole lies before me, I think I can judge better, and am less liable to make a rash step ... "

In his book, Morgan Jones says, "The number one reason for flawed analysis is the failure to fully consider alternatives." Structured analytic tools are designed to help us identify and consider alternatives.

For online training on how the mind works and how structured analytic tools can help, check out this resource: thinkersworkshop.com.