Problem Reframing: Intelligence Professionals' Role in Design

摘要

As design emerges throughout the U.S. Army's planning and operational doctrine, the intelligence community must leverage this structure of inquiry to identify and refocus the scope of what is collected, analyzed, produced and disseminated. Design is defined as 'a methodology for applying critical and creative thinking to understand, visualize, and describe complex, ill-structured problems and develop approaches to solve them.' In other words, design is the holistic process of looking at the environment, framing the problem, and deriving possible solutions. The use of design by the intelligence community broadens the scope of collected and analyzed information, providing more relevant intelligence to commanders in the current operational environment. With this in mind, the knowledge and application of design should play an integral role in synthesizing the intelligence driving current and future operations. The purpose of this study is to propose that by employing design methodologies the intelligence community can provide improved and fused intelligence to operational-level commanders, resulting in more focused and relevant operations. When intelligence professionals use available data together, they fuse sources into a more reliable product. The use of design provides intelligence officers with a better understanding of the environment and can provide better recommendations on courses of actions to commanders. The monograph examines the months of September 2005 and July 2007 during the Afghanistan conflict. These cases are examined using four criteria from design theory: experimentation, learning, discourse, and application of generating tools. The findings show that varied indicators within the environmental frame lead intelligence professionals to potentially propose a problem reframe to their commanders. In September 2005, the analysis indicated that problem reframing was unwarranted. But in July 2007, all four criteria indicated the necessity of reframing.