Insight to Intelligence: Facilitating Creative and Imaginative Analysis with Bernard Lonergan’s Insight Methodology

Abstract

This thesis intends to demonstrate the applicability of Lonergan's Insight Method to intelligence analysis by seeking to answer three questions: How can the field of Conflict Analysis and Resolution contribute to analytic efforts of the Intelligence Community? How effective are current alternative and structured analytic techniques in evaluating contemporary intelligence questions? Is there a way to supplement analytic tradecraft to facilitate creative assessments that yield progressive and cumulative intelligence? Grounded in Richard Heuer’s Psychology of Intelligence Analysis and work on cognitive limits, this thesis examines the vulnerability of the human mind to cognitive error and evaluates the alternative analytic techniques designed to mitigate those errors, proposing Bernard Lonergan’s Insight Method as an alternative approach to better capture what it is we do when we analyze intelligence.