Promoting Cross-Cultural Competence in Intelligence Professionals

Recent publications have highlighted alternative analytical thinking strategies to inform and facilitate improved intelligence analysis. Red teaming, fast and slow thinking, divergent thinking, as well as other strategies have been identified as essential to understanding today's radically different, nontraditional landscape that analysts and collectors are expected to operate in: to understand, to provide meaning and context, and at times forecast likely outcome scenarios. However, parsing out skill-based competencies that are essential to alternative thinking strategies and methods have not been undertaken. Mitigating cognitive, cultural and a host of tradecraft biases is essential for intelligence professionals to navigate through today's culturally complex environments. Adopting the perspective of contemporary cultural groups, including nation-states, often defies understanding because the intelligence professional is challenged to both appreciate and consequently discern meaning of behavior that is predicated on vastly different beliefs and value systems. Fundamental to this dissonance is a markedly different cultural reality resulting from different histories, traditions and the stasis of culture. The professional's western and deeply seated worldview impedes either the analysis itself, or is perjured by the cognitive restrictions imposed by the structured analytic strategies used. Cross-cultural competence is a collection of baseline skill-based competencies, such as perspective-taking, cultural sensemaking, and cultural self-awareness that when combined with regional and cultural knowledge can mitigate the conscious and even unconscious influence of the professional's worldview --their Weltanschauung-and tradecraft analytic strategies while expanding the aperture of potential meaning to foreign behavior. Culture is a framework used to put one’s environment (physical, social and cultural) in context and perspective –it is a manifestation of one’s worldview—a personal Weltanschauung. Crosscultural competence is ownership to a conscious awareness that gives meaning and understanding to human behavior while mitigating intervening cognitive and cultural barriers that exists between and among individuals and groups.