Athena's Prism - A Diplomatic Strategy Role Playing Simulation for Generating Ideas and Exploring Alternatives

Intelligence analysts must clear at least three hurdles to get good product out the door: cognitive biases, social biases and self-imposed organizational impediments. Others (e.g., Gilovich, et al., Heuer, and Kahneman and Tversky), explain the cognitive processes that can help or trip us. A less well mapped set of dangers arises in the social dynamics of communicating tasking, working with other analysts, editing and customer interaction. Finally, the mere fact of a unit's published record creates analytic inertia - an argument at rest tends to stay at rest and one in motion (i.e., ambiguous or uncertain) tends to stay in motion. (A variation of this includes groupthink.)