On Creativity in Intelligence Work

I stress in all of the courses I teach the importance of creativity, the paramount importance of not just following checklists, and of avoiding the obvious but un-insightful answers to questions. But like many concepts we throw around, I realized I wasn't doing a good job at explaining more deeply what I mean by creativity. So I've been wrestling with how to define creativity in the context of intelligence collection and analysis.

Here's the definition I've settled on:

"Creativity is the ability to fluidly adapt what you know to whatever you are facing in the moment. It's the capacity to connect disparate and seemingly unrelated ideas to create fresh insight. And it is the willingness to combine insights and ideas from different domains."

In other words, you're taking what you know and applying it in unexpected ways to new situations and looking in non-obvious places for solutions and parallels. I don't think this is fundamentally different from what we mean by creativity in art or any other domain but sometimes we forget that intelligence and analysis also should be creative.

The Problem with Expertise

But there's a paradox here. To be truly creative in intelligence work, you need two seemingly contradictory things: deep expertise and the willingness to look beyond that expertise.

This connects to Philip Tetlock's research on expertise and his theory of foxes and hedgehogs. Hedgehogs have deep knowledge within a specific domain, while foxes have breadth across domains. Tetlock's work shows that foxes are better forecasters, and I think they are more creative problem-solvers too.

Here's why both matter for creativity: To come up with creative solutions, we first have to define our questions properly and ensure we're asking the best questions relative to the problem we're facing. Take the Israel-Hamas situation. If I ask "how do we solve the conflict between Israel and Hamas?" I'm not going to get very far. It's too obvious and overly broad, with answers that could take years to develop. It’s a worthwhile goal, but a terrible question.

A hedgehog, with knowledge of the region, should be able to ask more targeted questions: "What factors would need to come into play for the citizens of Gaza to back away from supporting Hamas?" or "What factors allowed the West Bank to be more functional than Gaza, and how could these be applied to change the dynamic in Gaza?" And in reality, a true hedgehog should be able to asking much more penetrating questions than these.

Getting to better questions is critical but also highlights the limitations of hedgehogs. The hedgehog likely already has ready answers to these questions because they have already created synaptic connections within their body of expertise to answer the question.. Based on their expertise and experience, they'll apply what they know. But they will not adapt it well to an evolving situation.

Their answers will not be creative. It does not mean the answer will be wrong, and they may provide some level of insight, yet a committed hedgehog will not provide anything new and will not provide the depth of insight necessary to bring rapidly evolving situations into focus and under control.

The Fox Advantage

Creative analysis goes beyond expertise. It looks to history for insight and looks to analogy to help us better understand complex situations and makes connections between seemingly unrelated pieces of information to create new understanding.

A fox is more likely to pursue this route and to cast a wider net, looking for parallels in unexpected places. Considering the situation in Gaza, a fox might examine the East-West Pakistan situation after the 1948 partition of India to better understand the Gaza dynamic. This would provide greater insight into how connected populations evolve and change when separated geographically by a hostile country and what the future may hold for Gaza and West Bank.

Or they could study Eastern Europe during 1989-1991 period around the collapse of the Soviet Union to understand better what happens when external support for regimes is withdrawn.

But even this fox perspective doesn't go far enough. True creativity happens when you completely step outside the bounds of your discipline and look for examples in entirely different domains that could provide greater insight into system change.

Stepping Outside the Domain

Consider the concept of network theory. In electrical grids, the failure of key nodes can trigger rapid cascading failures across the entire network. But the reverse is also true - networks can rapidly reorganize around new hub nodes if they're robust enough. This suggests that political support networks might similarly reorganize quickly around new centers of authority if key connective tissues remain intact.

Going back to the analogy of the fall of the Soviet Union, we see certain examples where the network rapidly dissolved into chaos with the loss of the dominant node (e.g. Yugoslavia and a decade of ethnic violence in the Balkans) and other examples where the network quickly reorganized around new hubs (e.g. Poland and the Solidarity movement).  In network terms, Poland had developed alternative leadership structures during the 1980s that could smoothly assume power, while Yugoslavia's federal structure created competing ethnic-nationalist networks that couldn't coexist and in competing for primacy made organization impossible.

Looking to chemistry we could use chemical catalysis to provide greater insight into geopolitical events. In short, a chemical catalyst reduces the activation energy necessary for a reaction to occur and speeds up that reaction. Several reactants may already be present but a reaction does not occur without the addition of a catalyst, and then it occurs immediately and with lower energy input.

Let’s look at the December 2024 fall of the Assad regime in Syria to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). I’ve previously written that this event shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone (despite it being so) because the near destruction of Hezbollah by Isreal and Russia’s mess in the Ukraine should have made it clear that the time was ripe for HTS to strike. Yet in writing this piece I realized I was not being creative enough and was not looking deeply enough to find what catalyst so rapidly moved the situation from that stasis that had prevailed for years.  

Numerous reactants were present: the collapse of the Syrian economy, the presences of an active and increasingly competent opposition, almost universal dislike of Assad by the Syrian population, and the aforementioned weakening of Assad’s allies. As part of the generally static situation, in November 2024 the regime and HTS had been exchanging fire. During this, Turkish President Erdogan began pushing for negotiations with Assad to "determine Syria's future together." Assad responded negatively to Erdogan and the result was Erdogan making the decision to allow the Turkish controlled opposition troops around HTS to begin their offensive.

The rebuff of Erdogan and his response proved to be the catalyst that lowered the energy potential necessary for HTS to sweep to control of Syria in less than 12 days.

This is exactly what I mean by creativity in intelligence work – using frameworks from completely different fields to allow us to find deeper, more creative, and more insightful insights into often unseen mechanisms driving events. And if you are promoting change within your organization…consider what catalyst you are missing but that is necessary to start the change process.

Getting Out of Our Own Way

This is where creativity really lives - in our willingness to get out of our own way. We have to be willing to see beyond the obvious expert answers and approach questions with a beginner's mind. We need to step outside our domain and look for connections that aren't immediately apparent.

The creative intelligence professional is someone who has built deep expertise but hasn't become trapped by it. They can draw on what they know while remaining open to what they don't know, and they're constantly making unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated pieces of information or experiences.

It's less about having brilliant flashes of inspiration and more about maintaining the cognitive flexibility to see familiar problems from unfamiliar angles.

Building Creative Intelligence Organizations

If creativity is this important to intelligence work, how do we systematically cultivate it? The answer isn't more training on creative thinking techniques - it's about building organizations and professionals that reward intellectual curiosity across domains.

This means hiring people with diverse educational backgrounds and encouraging them to maintain interests outside their specialty. It means creating environments where asking naive questions from other fields isn't seen as wasting time, but as potentially breakthrough thinking. And it means structuring assignments and career paths so that deep expertise doesn't become intellectual imprisonment.

Most importantly, it means recognizing that the most innovative insights often come from the margins - from someone applying marine biology to cybersecurity, or using game theory to understand terrorist recruitment. The challenge isn't identifying creativity after the fact, but creating the conditions where it can be developed before we desperately need it.