Our Secret                                                                                                       by josuter

Corruption in the CIA is closely linked to keeping secrets, those things that only you and a few others know.  It’s real power.  Ask any 6-year old.  Corruption, as defined by an engineer, is about elements on a circuit board that are simply not working as they should, so we say they have become corrupt and need to be replaced.  It’s not about being good or bad.  We all have good and bad in varying ratios.  

Graham Fuller, ex-CIA analyst, says “I don’t know how you ‘un-corrupt’, if you will, an organization like CIA   . . . and I suspect ‘un-corrupting’ really means establishing an organization in which there is an openness and willingness to speak truth to power and not be afraid and twist it.”   This may be wishful thinking.  After all, finding hidden information is the nature of the work of the CIA. 

Take a group of top-level business people meeting in a secluded room.   The first thing they do is fix prices.  The walls that surround these people offer privacy and secrecy.  Common sense would suggest more transparency, but if secrets are exposed a scapegoat will be offered for public humiliation, leaving the system unchanged.  This happens at all levels and areas of society.   It’s a part of how social hierarchies are made and maintained.  We may not need transparency per se, but a way to separate useful information from the person who has that information.  

Finding good questions will help.  Finding good people can help too, but good feedback is really the key and can make up for weak questions and imperfect people.  Good feedback depends greatly on the immediate environment.  Who is in the room with you?  What are their expectations, spoken or unspoken?  What is their position and power over you?  How confident can you be of their advice or of other options?  Is one surrounded by people who celebrate a New Gaza Resort – all the while looking at others around them, carefully watching for the reaction in others too?  Or is one surrounded by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), generally a saner group of people.   

Recognizing the impossibility of getting the whole truth, one can get a good approximation with a structured approach.  A “First Person Reviewer”, i.e. the boss who wants better information, can assign a question to 2 or 3 small teams with several people on each team, hand-picked by the boss of course.  The questions should be hand delivered and include the names of others on each team.    “I want a one-page report back tomorrow with all your signatures.”  This may remove some of the boss’s ability to reward or punish but he or she will get better information.  

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that one cannot know both the exact position and the momentum of any particle.  It’s either one or the other.  So a boss can either retain his or her ability to reward and punish individuals – or get better information – but not both.   The goal is to trap the truth, not the person.  Still, it may be important to get rid of compulsive liars, something that can be done using a similar approach.  

Herb Simon was known for his study of decision making and the theory of Bounded Rationality.  Many people say that this means you simply get someone with a lot of experience who will just make their best guess.  But what does the word “bounded” mean?  It is more than simply trimming off the less probable options.  Rather, it may reflect the importance of the group structure and process.