Why big business needs intelligence managers

You may have noticed that there is an awful lot of information out there. Some of it good, some not so good and much that is, well… wrong.

Hopefully most people would agree with the premise that good decisions are based on good information, and that the most relevant and accurate information will lead to the best outcomes. It is perhaps though at this point within business that we hit a problem as many companies do not have someone responsible for looking at the information available and deciding on its reliability and utility. Who does a branch head turn to when they have reports on the same subject, but with conflicting facts? And, as happens often, different departments work with different datasets and, not surprisingly, are drawing different conclusions.

Frequently the only way to resolve such discrepancies is to elevate the problem through the management chain. In the absence of the authority or remit en route to make the required decision, contradictory details, courses of action and recommendations will end up with senior executives. Top level managers are then forced to weigh up the facts for themselves, which seems to me to be a really inefficient and risky way of doing business.

There is an element here of someone somewhere lower down the chain not having done their job, but it is difficult to identify exactly within the departmental silos of most business structures who that person is.

Let us say, just for example, that Business Development has identified gains from a potential M&A deal, whilst General Counsel believe there may be corruption allegations in the peripheries of such a deal, whilst the Government Relations people say there is a presidential succession issue in the target country, whilst the security section has some doubts with inherent lawlessness in the region. Finally, the PR people say they have identified no reputational issues with the venture.

There are challenges facing the decision-makers in pulling this together into a coherent and successful strategy…

Firstly, there will be many details behind these fairly bland summary statements, most of which will have been stripped away during the journey up the management chain. In fact, the wording may have undergone so many iterations that it bears no relation to the original information at all.

As noted by the US writer Margaret J. Wheatley, “Too many problem-solving sessions become battlegrounds where decisions are made based on power rather than intelligence.” In other words there are vested interests, biases and assumptions that will play a significant part in a Board Room discussion of this kind. It is also well known in intelligence circles that the greater the ambiguity for the decision-maker, the more likely they will adopt pre-existing ideas and expectations… if in doubt, stay with what you know already.

Putting all that to one side and the fact that the Board is often just too busy to get into the detail of such matters, in all likelihood additional information will be required in order to clarify what is going on. This necessitates a detailed knowledge of information sources and their capabilities along with the skill to formulate the right diagnostic questions to move the matter forward. More information, as a quantity, will almost certainly not be the answer.