PART I Teams in Intelligence

WHAT MAKES FOR A GREAT INTELLIGENCE TEAM? The three chapters that follow set the stage for answering that question. We will see how intelligence teams actually deal with hard problems, the different ways members can collaborate with one another, and what it means to say that an intelligence team has been “effective.” The first chapter (“Teams That Work and Those That Don’t”) opens with an extended example of two teams—one planning a terrorist act, the other trying to head it off. Among the reasons one team succeeded and the other failed are the inherent advantages of playing offense vs. defense; team dynamics that inhibit the full use of members’ resources; and the ways that stereotypes of other groups (including groups embedded within one’s own team) can cripple team processes and performance.

The second chapter (“When Teams, When Not?”) lays out the many different kinds of collaboration that exist within the intelligence community, ranging from communities of interest whose members never actually meet to teams whose members work together face to face over an indefinite period. We will see that teams are not always an appropriate means for accomplishing a particular piece of work, that certain kinds of tasks are better done by solo performers. And even when a team is called for, there remains the question of the type of team that should be created. The chapter identities five different types of teams and discusses the circumstances under which each of them is and is not appropriate.

The final chapter in this part of the book (“You Can’t Make a Team Be Great”) digs into what team “effectiveness” means and how it can be assessed. Although one cannot make a final judgment about a team’s performance until its work is completed, three team processes can be monitored in real time to assess how a team is doing. These processes are: (1) the level of effort a team is applying to its work, (2) the appropriateness of its performance strategy for the task it is performing, and (3) the degree to which the team is using well the full complement of its members’ knowledge, skill, and experience. When a team shows signs of slipping on one or more of these three process criteria, a coaching intervention may be appropriate. Or, more frequently, it turns out that the conditions under which the team is operating—how it is structured and the context within which it operates—are flawed in some way. The second part of the book is devoted to those conditions: what favorable conditions are, how they help, and what is needed to get them in place and help a team take full advantage of them.