June 3, 2024 • 33 mins
Professor Sir David Omand, former UK security and intelligence coordinator, shares insights from his book 'How Spies Think: 10 Lessons in Intelligence'. He discusses the importance of critical thinking, the SEES model used by intelligence analysts, and the role of creativity in decision-making. He also explores the impact of biases, the Bayesian approach to probability, and the challenges of decision-making in high-stress environments. Omand emphasizes the need for diversity of thought and expertise, especially in the face of emerging technologies like AI and biotechnology. He concludes with the importance of ethical decision-making and recommends the book 'The Three-Body Problem' by Cixin Liu.
Takeaways
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Developing critical thinking skills is crucial for making better decisions and avoiding biases.
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The SEES model (Situational Awareness, Explanation, Estimate, Strategic Notice) provides a framework for intelligence analysis.
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Creativity plays a role in intelligence work, particularly in finding innovative ways to uncover secrets and address challenges.
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Understanding biases and creating a safe space for diverse perspectives is essential for effective decision-making.
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Emerging technologies like AI and biotechnology require careful consideration and preparedness for potential risks.
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Ethical decision-making is important, and doing what is genuinely believed to be the right thing provides a solid defense.
Sound Bites
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"We have a polluted information environment, which AI, I'm afraid, adds to with the ability to make deep fakes and to provide misleading information."
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"You can spot trends in technology, international affairs, domestic affairs and social attitudes, and then have the imagination to say, well, if that were to happen, what would it look like?"
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"The Reverend Bayes was an 18th century cleric in Tunbridge Wells, and he amateur mathematician. And he came across this rule, which we call Bayes rule named after him, which essentially relates the likelihood of something happening to which you've worked out to how you should then recalculate that likelihood when new evidence arrives."
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Background of Sir David Omand
02:32 The Polluted Information Environment and AI
06:18 The Bayesian Approach to Probability
09:00 The Importance of Explanation in Intelligence Analysis
11:34 The Role of Creativity in Intelligence Work
15:34 Navigating Biases and Creating a Safe Space for Decision-Making
23:29 Teamwork and Decision-Making in High-Stress Environments
25:25 The Importance of Expertise in Crisis Management
29:23 Preparing for the Challenges of Emerging Technologies
32:09 Ethical Decision-Ma
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:08):
Sir David Omand was the first UK securityand intelligence coordinator responsible
to the Prime Minister for the professionalhealth of the intelligence community,
national counter -terrorism strategy andhomeland security.
He served for seven years on the JointIntelligence Committee and was permanent
secretary of the Home Office from 1997 to2000, and before that, director of GCHQ,
(00:28):
the UK Signals Intelligence Agency.
Previously in the Ministry of Defence asDeputy Under -Secretary of State for
Policy,
He was particularly concerned with long-term strategy, with the British military
contribution in restoring peace in theformer Yugoslavia and the recasting of
British nuclear deterrence policy at theend of the Cold War.
He was principal private secretary to thedefence secretary during the Falklands
(00:49):
conflict and served for three years inNATO Brussels as the UK defence
councillor.
He's been a visiting professor in theDepartment of War Studies at King's
College since 2005 to 2006 and his latestbook is called
How Spies Think, 10 Lessons inIntelligence, where he shares the
methodology used by British intelligenceagencies to reach judgements, establish
the right level of confidence, and actdecisively.
(01:11):
The British former Home Secretary andForeign Secretary, the Right Honourable
Jack Straw, calls How Spies Think abrilliant book by one of the UK's true
polymaths, author, academic,administrator, mathematician, and former
spy.
But this isn't just a book for thoseinterested in the secret world of MI5,
MI6, and GCHQ, it's for
anyone wanting to know how to make betterdecisions and avoid traps into which
(01:35):
businesses and governments can and do falltime after time.
Professor Sir David Orman, welcome to theSuperCreativity Podcast.
Thanks, James.
Delighted to be on the show.
So this book was first published 2020,then you added a preface on the paperback
edition in 2021.
Since then we've seen the invasion ofUkraine, artificial intelligence enter
(01:56):
very much the mainstream and increasingtensions with the West and China.
If you were publishing this book today, aswe're filming today in 2024, any big
changes that you'd be making to it do youthink?
Not to the guts of the book, which as yousay is about critical thinking, I might
emphasize even more than I did in the bookthat we have a polluted information
(02:22):
environment, which AI, I'm afraid, adds towith the ability to make deep fakes and to
provide misleading information.
So my message, which is how do you thinkclearly and straight, even when?
some of the messages reaching you are nottrue or are designed to be deceptive.
(02:44):
That still holds, I think.
Now you give these 10 lessons towards theend of the book, but then you talk about
the main framework, the way to thinkcritically about situations, whether it's
in business or in other situations aswell.
And you call it the SEAS model, which isreally how intelligence analysts think.
First of all, maybe give us just a bit ofa kind of top line, and then maybe we'll
(03:06):
get into some of those four parts of thisparticular model.
Yeah, I put C's S -E -E -S just to make itmemorable.
But the first S is situational awareness,which is answering questions about what is
going on, where and when.
Facture, questions which ought to beanswerable if you've got a good grasp of
(03:29):
the situation.
But then the first E in C's is aboutexplanation.
And that's the bit we often get wrong.
because that usually involves gettinginside somebody else's mind, an adversary,
a terrorist group, a dictator, and tryingto work out why are we seeing what we are
(03:49):
seeing, what's behind it, what are themotivations?
So those questions that have why in it orwhat for.
And then if you've got enough situationalawareness and you've got some decent
explanations,
You can move on to what the BritishIntelligence Community, the Joint
Intelligence Committee, I spent sevenyears on the committee, what they tried to
(04:13):
do, which is to assess and provide anestimate based on assumptions, but trying
to peer over the hill to give an estimateof how things might work out.
Normally in the sort of short to mediumterm.
So that's why the final S.
I add into my acronym Cs is strategicnotice.
(04:39):
Can you actually spot some way awaydevelopments which could either provide
big opportunities or perhaps more oftencould provide serious challenges?
It's not a prediction.
I'm clear in the book that there are nocrystal balls.
(04:59):
Nobody can produce accurate.
predictions over any length of time.
But you can spot trends in technology,international affairs, domestic affairs
and social attitudes, and then have theimagination to say, well, if that were to
(05:23):
happen, what would it look like?
And are the things we perhaps should donow in order to try and make it
that future more bearable if it were tocome about.
One of the critical thinking tools youtalk about in the book is the Bayesian
approach.
Hopefully I've got that right.
What is this Bayesian approach and how canthis be applied in the work that, maybe
(05:48):
you'll listen to this show in businesswhen you're thinking about probabilities,
the chances of something happening or not?
The Reverend Bayes was an 18th centurycleric in Tunbridge Wells, and he amateur
mathematician.
And he came across this rule, which wecall Bayes rule named after him, which
essentially relates the likelihood ofsomething happening to which you've worked
(06:17):
out to how you should then recalculatethat likelihood when new evidence arrives.
So you have the prior position, which youbelieve, you've read intelligence reports,
you think you've got a grasp of it all.
And then some new intelligence arrives andshould alter your view of how likely your
(06:40):
proposition is to be true.
And of course, all these magical AI neuralnetworks that we've got used to in the
last year or so, they are all based.
on Bayesian thinking you train the modeland every time you provide some new
information to the model, it works out.
(07:01):
Does that help me?
How do I get closer to the accurateanswer?
It adjusts the weights in its neuralnetwork, depending on whether it got it
right or wrong.
And if you iterate that millions of times,you end up with a sort of trained.
AI program, which is rather better atrecognising faces than a human being,
(07:24):
which is what indeed has happened, allplaying chess.
And so this is often expressed in a kindof formula that we might see.
I know you were involved in the creationof contests where we, in the UK, we had
this thing, the Prevent Strategy, forexample, where you expressed, I guess,
risk using this type of formula.
Yes, I mean, the basic approach when weput together the UK counter -terrorism
(07:49):
strategy was to reduce the risk thatterrorism posed to everyday life.
So it was based on this idea of normalityand can you take steps which helps
maintain normality?
And when you think about it, the risk isthe product of the likelihood of bad
(08:09):
things happening.
Your vulnerability.
to those bad things, which is somethingyou might be able to do something about.
And then if they were to get through yourdefenses and something bad happens, what's
the reaction?
What's the impact of that?
Both immediately, how well did theemergency services cope, but also in the
(08:32):
longer term, how resilient are thesystems?
So after, say, a terrorist attack, nextday, is the London Underground working?
Well, on 7 -7 it was.
Now, one of the things you said as acommon mistake you see organizations,
governments make, policy makers make, isthey immediately try to jump from
(08:54):
situational awareness into the third partwith the estimates, making estimates of
what's gonna happen.
But there's this kind of stage before thatthat you need to spend time on.
Can you go into that?
Yes, that's the E that stands forexplanation.
Why are we seeing what we are seeing?
(09:14):
It's a truism in all statistics thatcorrelation is not causality.
Just because you've spotted two thingshappening together, does that mean they
are necessarily related or that one iscausing the other?
You need an explanation.
You need some sort of explanatory model.
(09:36):
And particularly when you're dealing withhuman beings who may mean us harm.
So take the period just before PresidentPutin ordered the invasion of Ukraine a
couple of years back.
All those tanks had been on an exercise,tens of thousands of soldiers.
(10:01):
Was he going to invade or wasn't he?
And that's the point at which you don'tjust jump from those tanks to assuming
he's going to it.
You actually have to work out what's theexplanation.
And in that particular case, UK andBritish and American intelligence, they
had the intelligence to be able to saywith near certainty, yes, we know what he
(10:27):
is up to.
We know he's going to try and mount afalse flag operation to provide a pretext
for the invasion.
We know that the medical supplies andother logistics have been, which you
wouldn't see in an exercise, have actuallybeen activated.
(10:47):
This looks like the real thing.
So that's the explanatory bit.
And it is difficult to do.
It's the bit we most often get wrong.
Now, something I noticed in the book, Ilove the book, and it was just great how
it took through in a very kind ofsystematic, very kind of logical way of
thinking through things to think moreclearly, as you say.
(11:08):
But one thing you didn't speak about somuch in the book was the role of
creativity in this.
And I guess what you were talking aboutthere in terms of the explanation is, is
this is us as humans also using ourimagination to understand, well, what is
the role of this being?
So I wonder, like, what is the role ofcreative thinking?
(11:28):
as opposed to critical thinking in thework of, let's say, the analysts?
And is that different perhaps from thepeople who are, let's say, the agents in
the field, that people are actually havingto be a bit more improvisational in the
work that they do?
Yes, I mean, you don't want yourintelligence analysts to be too creative.
It has to be grounded.
And this is, of course, the great lessonof 2003 to 2003 intelligence leading up to
(11:55):
the war in Iraq.
So you want it to be grounded.
You want critical thinking to be appliedevery step to be tested.
But when you look further ahead,
you certainly do want imagination becauseyou want to be able to see some of these
trends, which may not be obvious, whichcould lead to significant problems in the
(12:22):
future.
If the Chinese were the first to develop aquantum computer that works at scale,
which nobody has yet really done, thenthey would be able to read, get through
the encryption.
that protects all our financialtransactions, our military communications
and so on.
(12:43):
There's no guarantee they'll get therefirst and maybe we will or the United
States.
But if they did, and this is the pointabout strategic notice, if they did, it
would create quite a difficult situation.
Implication, very obvious.
Let's spend a bit more resource onbuilding quantum resistant encryption.
(13:05):
which can be developed and persuade peopleto use it so that we're not stuck with
that position if one of our adversarynations were to get there first.
And that's simple example.
Where creativity comes in is particularlyin the work of the intelligence agencies
(13:27):
to think about how are we going to getaround the determined will of the
adversary not to let us.
see his secrets.
So this is what secret intelligence isabout.
It's about getting better decisions madebecause you have uncovered the secrets of
people who mean us harm.
(13:48):
Dictators, autocrats, people smugglinggangs, terrorists, criminals, and so on.
They have secrets.
They desperately don't want us and ourallies.
to find out those secrets.
So that's where you have to be reallycreative in trying to think of ways they
haven't thought of, which will enable youto penetrate the secrets of the terrorist
(14:13):
group or the narcotics smuggling gang orwhatever it might be.
That requires a diversity of mind.
And that's something I would certainlywant to emphasize.
It's something that my old department,GCHQ, has...
has really developed is to employ peoplewho think differently.
(14:35):
And that diversity of minds makes it morelikely that somebody will make the
creative breakthrough, which is new andhelps.
So with diversity of minds, when I oftentalk with organizations, we talk about,
there's different ways of doing this.
I know we sometimes have things like,going back in history, like Edward de
(14:58):
Bono, six thinking hats, a way of justlooking at things from different
perspectives.
In the book, you talk about one of thebiggest challenges for us as humans,
humans and machine side, that the humanpart is biases that we all have and
recognize that you talk about Dick, Ithink it's Dick Huer of CIA.
Hmm.
and these six key biases that we have.
(15:20):
What are the ones that you often in yourcareer, you've often seen most coming up
in these biases?
And then second to that, how do you createa space, a safe space where these biases
can be discussed, sometimes withcolleagues, sometimes with other
governments, for example?
Yes, I once went on a training course withEdward de Bono himself.
(15:42):
It was fascinating and we wore the hats,his thinking hats.
It's a little artificial.
What I was trying to get people torecognize is we're all subject to
cognitive biases, as they're called.
And it's a natural human instinct,confirmation bias.
(16:04):
We interpret information in the way we...
kind of unconsciously feel that's what webelieve.
That's what we would like to see.
The group think is very well established.
So if you've got an analytic group andit's coming up for closing time at the end
of the day, and there's a lot of pressureto reach an answer, that's where you want
(16:30):
the, perhaps the one analyst who doesn'tagree not to just quietly accept,
the group consensus, but to say, no, Ithink you're missing something.
It's a great skill to be able to work agroup.
There are different techniques that aretaught.
One is empowering individuals to, well,for the next five minutes, tell me what
(16:57):
we're getting wrong here.
What are we missing?
So that an individual doesn't feel thatthey're, particularly junior, that they're
somehow challenging.
the authority, but actually they've beentold to, it's your job to take this
information and then tell us what are wegetting wrong?
Or what would it, an interesting question,what would it take for us to reach a
(17:20):
different conclusion?
And when you apply that logic, you maywell find that your thinking is all based
on one report, which when you examine itclosely, say, well, we don't, we can't be
so certain.
Creating the safe space is one in whichpeople work as a team and they're not
(17:45):
dominated by the most forceful personalityin the room.
Something that I touch on in the book andI've come to talk about even more is that
when you think about any serious decisionthat any of us have to take, whether it's
in the family or whether it's the primeminister or something,
(18:08):
major matter of state.
There are two different kinds of thinkinghave to be integrated within the single
mind of the person taking the decision.
On the one hand, you've got theemotionally based thinking of this is what
I want to achieve.
This is what I must achieve.
(18:28):
This is what the world I want to live inlooks like.
And on the other hand, you've got theanalytical thinking that says,
These are the limits of the possible.
This is what the spreadsheets show.
And so both are necessary.
So if you haven't got the emotionallybased thinking, then you won't have the
(18:49):
right kind of narrative to incentivizepeople.
You know, Churchill in 1940 gave theBritish people the narrative.
Zelensky has given his people thenarrative to enable them to keep going
despite the odds.
but neither of them neglected the analyticpart, which is it's not enough just to
(19:12):
have bombast.
You've got to have grounded analyticalthinking about what armaments are we going
to need?
What steps do we need to take?
Churchill brought in Beaverbrook torevolutionize Spitfire production.
So you need to integrate both.
If you just have the former, then...
(19:34):
Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, it's emotional.
It may sound very powerful, but it's notbacked up with solid analysis.
If you just have somebody talking off aspreadsheet, who's going to put themselves
out to do extraordinary efforts on thebasis of what a spreadsheet says?
(19:56):
So you need both.
And that, I think, is one of the secretsof getting this safe space where...
you have the analysis, but you also canbring out the narrative of why all this
has to be taken seriously and developedinto a public message.
(20:21):
I'm wondering, as I was reading the book,and I was thinking, especially the story
you start with in the book, which is aboutthe beginning of the Falklands War, when
there was a period of obviously highstress, you're in a very intense period,
time is contracted.
I wonder what that does in terms ofpeople's biases, how that safe space is
(20:43):
created.
The other day I was doing an event and Iwas sitting in a dinner next to Willie
Walsh, who'd been formerly the CEO ofBritish Airways.
IAG.
And we were having this discussion aboutstress, because I thought, you know, your
job as CEO must be very stressful, thingshappening all the time.
And he said, one of the things that youoften find is that in high stress
(21:04):
environments, people kind of revert to aversion of themselves that is sometimes
not the best.
And he said, as a leader, your job is overtime to try and nudge that and move that
to a slightly better place as well.
In your own working, I mean, is the
with these skills that you're talkingabout, is this something you can be
(21:25):
trained to become better at under morehigh stress environments where you're
maybe not sitting in the comfort of a niceideation brainstorming room with cups of
tea, for example?
Yes, I mean, I've written another book.
It's the paperback comes out on the 6th ofJune from Penguin called How to Survive a
Crisis.
And this is very much at the heart of howwe survive a crisis, because the point
(21:49):
about a crisis is not we have emergenciesall the time.
So I distinguish between emergencies andcrises.
And when a real crisis arrives, the personin charge won't know what to do.
If they did know what to do, it's just oneof those emergencies that companies have
to deal with all the time.
(22:10):
And British Airways, you know, sometimesthe computers go down, people know how to
sort it, you get on with it.
But a crisis is when events are hittingyou faster than your responses can cope
with.
I have what I call the rubber levers test.
You pull the normal levers and nothingseems to happen on the ground.
(22:33):
If anything, it gets worse.
And some of the steps that you may havetaken early on actually seem to make
things worse and you risk sliding intodisaster.
And that's where it's so important thatthe person at the top, and that's the
person who doesn't know what to do bydefinition, gathers the team.
(22:54):
And this takes you back to the safe spaceand says to the team, we're in serious
trouble.
We're mobilizing.
all the best people we can get our handson.
This is number one priority for survivalof a company or the business, or indeed
the nation.
This is now the priority.
(23:15):
And together we will work out what thesolution is.
And that takes you into teamwork.
Surviving crisis is a team sport and it'snot something that the leader will.
instinctively know exactly what measuresto take.
That's why you need the expertise, youneed the team together.
(23:39):
And it's high stress.
And it's very well documented that inconditions of high stress, tempers fray,
people, there are what I think are calledthe Ds.
So the first is denial.
This can't really be happening to us.
Let's just wait a bit.
(24:00):
Prime Minister Johnson doesn't turn up tothe first five COBRA meetings on the COVID
emergency.
That's a very well -known phenomenon.
You have the disparagement of peoplebringing bad news, so you send them away
to do more work.
You have displacement activity, wherepeople, you get the staff to focus on
(24:24):
anything other than what they really haveto focus on, which is the...
crisis which is looming.
So you can trade, you know, just talkingabout this, having little exercises, being
coached, there's a lot of things can bedone to improve the performance of those
(24:46):
at the top when something unexpectedhappens.
And as the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hasbeen saying this morning, we're entering
an era.
of more and deeper crises over the nextfive or 10 years.
So we better prepare ourselves.
And we had a guest on the show a littlewhile ago, Professor Roger Nibran from
(25:10):
UCL, I think, and also from CambridgeUniversity, who wrote a wonderful book
called Experts.
He's like the world's leading expert onexperts.
So do you think we're in a time now wheremaybe post -COVID experts are coming back
into fashion?
Because it certainly seemed in the UK fora little while, they were deeply
unfashionable for a while.
and we would have been well and trulystuffed if we hadn't had the expertise,
(25:31):
for example, on the vaccines task force.
And if those vaccines had not beendeveloped and innovative ways found of
getting them into people's arms quickly,then we would still be in the depths of a
very major pandemic.
It's still hanging over us and people arestill suffering, but we've got over the
(25:54):
worst of it.
But there are...
more pandemics to come, undoubtedly, andnew diseases will jump the species
barrier.
So we've got to be ready for that.
Technology will turn much of our lifeupside down.
We've already mentioned artificialintelligence, but quantum developments,
(26:16):
bioengineering, we're going to see someremarkable things happening with
bioengineering.
We've already got
DNA being used for genetic diseasetreatments, which are entirely novel.
It's very exciting.
There are lots of opportunities, but, andit's a big but, are those who mean us
(26:44):
harm, our adversaries, will take advantageof some of these.
And we'd better be ready for that.
So you were talking about this idea ofdiversity of mind, having that diversity
of mind, being able to hold emotional andanalytical thinking at the same time.
You're obviously absorbing, taking in lotsof inputs all the time.
You're obviously reading widely, you're apolymath in the work you do.
(27:06):
But where do you go for inspiration?
How do you go to sort and sift this stuffin your head to take, you know, then to be
able to take a step back and think about,well, what is it, AI or climate change or
whatever the thing is, how do you...
set that self and yourself so you've gotthat time to yourself to be that kind of
creative part of you to think in that way.
(27:28):
Well, the best thoughts come to me whenI'm out running early in the morning.
And I think that's quite a well-recognized phenomenon.
You do have to give yourself time, butthis is one of the difficulties that as
technology advances so quickly, youactually got to put in the hard yards to
(27:53):
understand what is actually happening.
So to have the first inkling of what isgoing on with generative AI and what the
magical treatment is that has turnedsimply machine learning into something so
much more.
You've actually got to do the work andyou've got to study it.
(28:13):
But we have a wonderful way.
If you think about going to any hospitalor medical clinic and you'll find lots of
talk about, well, we'd better get an MRIscan.
done and people talk about MRI scans, butthat stands for magnetic resonance
imaging.
And magnetic resonance is one of thoseextraordinary, to understand that is one
(28:38):
of those extraordinary parts of thequantum world that we're talking about the
resonance of molecules and atoms in a waythat the general public has no idea of
what is driving the MRI scanner.
So all advanced technology, you know, itlooks like magic when it first appears.
(29:01):
And then we all get used to it.
I have no idea what is under the bonnet orthe hood of my car.
I used to, 20 years ago, I've been able tosay, well, that's the carburetor.
And there's probably a fuel pump.
You know, there's a bit of dirt cloggingthe fuel pump.
I've no idea whether my car even has afuel pump.
(29:23):
So...
A certain amount of work is needed as wellas relaxation.
And it's interesting, you know, withobviously artificial intelligence, first
coin, 1956 has been around for a long,long time, but obviously we more recently
it's, we've seen this drive primarilythrough big data, which the fuel for it as
well.
(29:44):
what's for me is interesting is now seeingalmost I can imagine a few hundred years
ago, you know, invention of electricitybeing used where suddenly anyone has the
ability, you don't have to know howelectricity works to be able to flip that
switch or to.
add electricity to your business in someway.
Now you see people using it for good andfor bad.
(30:04):
Bad actors using generative AI to createdeep fakes and all this stuff as well.
So we're certainly going into a prettyfascinating time in human history.
Yeah, the parallel is probably with theinvention of the printing press, which has
produced world literature and made itavailable to everyone.
(30:25):
And simultaneously, a lot of other stuff,which we ideally would not have had to
suffer.
So the printing press turned the worldupside down.
It led to decades and decades of religiouswar, AI and
the other technologies, particularlybiotechnologies, are going to do the same
(30:47):
to our world in the next five to 10 years.
So, you know, buckle up.
It could be a bumpy ride.
So just to finish up, a couple of quickfire questions for you.
There's some wonderful quotes in the book,wonderful lines by different folks,
Churchill and all kinds of differentareas.
Is there a quote that you live by you canhave as a bit of a guiding star for
(31:10):
yourself?
that's a difficult question.
Perhaps there is one.
And I owe it to my former boss, JackStraw, who was Home Secretary and I was
his senior official, I was his permanentsecretary.
And Jack always approached thedifficulties by saying, when in doubt, do
what you genuinely believe is the rightthing.
(31:34):
It will still go wrong.
Most things go wrong.
And you have a defense.
Well, knowing what I knew at the time, Itook the decision to do what I believe was
the right thing.
That's a defense and a solid one.
But the moment you start to say, I'm notgoing to take the straightforward course,
(31:55):
I'll try some devious maneuver, I'll blamesomeone else, or I won't tell all the
truth, and you try and shimmy your waythrough, spin your way through, as the
spin doctors say.
when it all goes wrong, you have nodefense.
(32:15):
Yeah.
So I think it's not a bad principle inlife.
And then what about, is there a book thatyou would recommend to our listeners?
We're going to have links to your books aswell.
Is there a book just now that you've beenreading that's really made you kind of
rethink?
We've been talking about AI, we've beentalking about biotechnologies as well.
Is there something that you think peopleshould check out?
(32:37):
Well, a lot of people have checked it out,but the three body problem, and there's
more than that's the first volume of thetrilogy by Fikin Liu, if my Chinese
pronunciation is right, is mind -bending.
(33:01):
And I thoroughly recommend it.
It's you can watch it on Netflix, which israther a shortened version and rather a
sort of dumbed down version, but theoriginal.
And there's also a Chinese series in 30parts, which doesn't spare the mathematics
(33:22):
and the but it's about the future and it'sabout, in a sense, a plausible future.
And it's well, it raises some very deepquestions.
as well as being great fun because it's anentertaining story.
Well, it's been a pleasure being with youtoday.
(33:43):
If people want to learn more about you,learn more about the books that you have
coming out as well, where's the best placeto go and do that?
The King's College website, I'm a visitingprofessor at King's College in the War
Studies Department and they can find allabout it or just Google me and you'll find
(34:03):
a lot of details about the, as I say,latest paperback out on the 6th of June,
how to survive a crisis.
Professor Sir David Omand, thank you forbeing a guest on the SuperCreativity
Podcast.
It's been a pleasure.
Sir David Omand was the first UK securityand intelligence coordinator responsible
to the Prime Minister for the professionalhealth of the intelligence community,
national counter -terrorism strategy andhomeland security.
He served for seven years on the JointIntelligence Committee and was permanent
secretary of the Home Office from 1997 to2000, and before that, director of GCHQ,
(00:28):
the UK Signals Intelligence Agency.
Previously in the Ministry of Defence asDeputy Under -Secretary of State for
Policy,
He was particularly concerned with long-term strategy, with the British military
contribution in restoring peace in theformer Yugoslavia and the recasting of
British nuclear deterrence policy at theend of the Cold War.
He was principal private secretary to thedefence secretary during the Falklands
(00:49):
conflict and served for three years inNATO Brussels as the UK defence
councillor.
He's been a visiting professor in theDepartment of War Studies at King's
College since 2005 to 2006 and his latestbook is called
How Spies Think, 10 Lessons inIntelligence, where he shares the
methodology used by British intelligenceagencies to reach judgements, establish
the right level of confidence, and actdecisively.
(01:11):
The British former Home Secretary andForeign Secretary, the Right Honourable
Jack Straw, calls How Spies Think abrilliant book by one of the UK's true
polymaths, author, academic,administrator, mathematician, and former
spy.
But this isn't just a book for thoseinterested in the secret world of MI5,
MI6, and GCHQ, it's for
anyone wanting to know how to make betterdecisions and avoid traps into which
(01:35):
businesses and governments can and do falltime after time.
Professor Sir David Orman, welcome to theSuperCreativity Podcast.
Thanks, James.
Delighted to be on the show.
So this book was first published 2020,then you added a preface on the paperback
edition in 2021.
Since then we've seen the invasion ofUkraine, artificial intelligence enter
(01:56):
very much the mainstream and increasingtensions with the West and China.
If you were publishing this book today, aswe're filming today in 2024, any big
changes that you'd be making to it do youthink?
Not to the guts of the book, which as yousay is about critical thinking, I might
emphasize even more than I did in the bookthat we have a polluted information
(02:22):
environment, which AI, I'm afraid, adds towith the ability to make deep fakes and to
provide misleading information.
So my message, which is how do you thinkclearly and straight, even when?
some of the messages reaching you are nottrue or are designed to be deceptive.
(02:44):
That still holds, I think.
Now you give these 10 lessons towards theend of the book, but then you talk about
the main framework, the way to thinkcritically about situations, whether it's
in business or in other situations aswell.
And you call it the SEAS model, which isreally how intelligence analysts think.
First of all, maybe give us just a bit ofa kind of top line, and then maybe we'll
(03:06):
get into some of those four parts of thisparticular model.
Yeah, I put C's S -E -E -S just to make itmemorable.
But the first S is situational awareness,which is answering questions about what is
going on, where and when.
Facture, questions which ought to beanswerable if you've got a good grasp of
(03:29):
the situation.
But then the first E in C's is aboutexplanation.
And that's the bit we often get wrong.
because that usually involves gettinginside somebody else's mind, an adversary,
a terrorist group, a dictator, and tryingto work out why are we seeing what we are
(03:49):
seeing, what's behind it, what are themotivations?
So those questions that have why in it orwhat for.
And then if you've got enough situationalawareness and you've got some decent
explanations,
You can move on to what the BritishIntelligence Community, the Joint
Intelligence Committee, I spent sevenyears on the committee, what they tried to
(04:13):
do, which is to assess and provide anestimate based on assumptions, but trying
to peer over the hill to give an estimateof how things might work out.
Normally in the sort of short to mediumterm.
So that's why the final S.
I add into my acronym Cs is strategicnotice.
(04:39):
Can you actually spot some way awaydevelopments which could either provide
big opportunities or perhaps more oftencould provide serious challenges?
It's not a prediction.
I'm clear in the book that there are nocrystal balls.
(04:59):
Nobody can produce accurate.
predictions over any length of time.
But you can spot trends in technology,international affairs, domestic affairs
and social attitudes, and then have theimagination to say, well, if that were to
(05:23):
happen, what would it look like?
And are the things we perhaps should donow in order to try and make it
that future more bearable if it were tocome about.
One of the critical thinking tools youtalk about in the book is the Bayesian
approach.
Hopefully I've got that right.
What is this Bayesian approach and how canthis be applied in the work that, maybe
(05:48):
you'll listen to this show in businesswhen you're thinking about probabilities,
the chances of something happening or not?
The Reverend Bayes was an 18th centurycleric in Tunbridge Wells, and he amateur
mathematician.
And he came across this rule, which wecall Bayes rule named after him, which
essentially relates the likelihood ofsomething happening to which you've worked
(06:17):
out to how you should then recalculatethat likelihood when new evidence arrives.
So you have the prior position, which youbelieve, you've read intelligence reports,
you think you've got a grasp of it all.
And then some new intelligence arrives andshould alter your view of how likely your
(06:40):
proposition is to be true.
And of course, all these magical AI neuralnetworks that we've got used to in the
last year or so, they are all based.
on Bayesian thinking you train the modeland every time you provide some new
information to the model, it works out.
(07:01):
Does that help me?
How do I get closer to the accurateanswer?
It adjusts the weights in its neuralnetwork, depending on whether it got it
right or wrong.
And if you iterate that millions of times,you end up with a sort of trained.
AI program, which is rather better atrecognising faces than a human being,
(07:24):
which is what indeed has happened, allplaying chess.
And so this is often expressed in a kindof formula that we might see.
I know you were involved in the creationof contests where we, in the UK, we had
this thing, the Prevent Strategy, forexample, where you expressed, I guess,
risk using this type of formula.
Yes, I mean, the basic approach when weput together the UK counter -terrorism
(07:49):
strategy was to reduce the risk thatterrorism posed to everyday life.
So it was based on this idea of normalityand can you take steps which helps
maintain normality?
And when you think about it, the risk isthe product of the likelihood of bad
(08:09):
things happening.
Your vulnerability.
to those bad things, which is somethingyou might be able to do something about.
And then if they were to get through yourdefenses and something bad happens, what's
the reaction?
What's the impact of that?
Both immediately, how well did theemergency services cope, but also in the
(08:32):
longer term, how resilient are thesystems?
So after, say, a terrorist attack, nextday, is the London Underground working?
Well, on 7 -7 it was.
Now, one of the things you said as acommon mistake you see organizations,
governments make, policy makers make, isthey immediately try to jump from
(08:54):
situational awareness into the third partwith the estimates, making estimates of
what's gonna happen.
But there's this kind of stage before thatthat you need to spend time on.
Can you go into that?
Yes, that's the E that stands forexplanation.
Why are we seeing what we are seeing?
(09:14):
It's a truism in all statistics thatcorrelation is not causality.
Just because you've spotted two thingshappening together, does that mean they
are necessarily related or that one iscausing the other?
You need an explanation.
You need some sort of explanatory model.
(09:36):
And particularly when you're dealing withhuman beings who may mean us harm.
So take the period just before PresidentPutin ordered the invasion of Ukraine a
couple of years back.
All those tanks had been on an exercise,tens of thousands of soldiers.
(10:01):
Was he going to invade or wasn't he?
And that's the point at which you don'tjust jump from those tanks to assuming
he's going to it.
You actually have to work out what's theexplanation.
And in that particular case, UK andBritish and American intelligence, they
had the intelligence to be able to saywith near certainty, yes, we know what he
(10:27):
is up to.
We know he's going to try and mount afalse flag operation to provide a pretext
for the invasion.
We know that the medical supplies andother logistics have been, which you
wouldn't see in an exercise, have actuallybeen activated.
(10:47):
This looks like the real thing.
So that's the explanatory bit.
And it is difficult to do.
It's the bit we most often get wrong.
Now, something I noticed in the book, Ilove the book, and it was just great how
it took through in a very kind ofsystematic, very kind of logical way of
thinking through things to think moreclearly, as you say.
(11:08):
But one thing you didn't speak about somuch in the book was the role of
creativity in this.
And I guess what you were talking aboutthere in terms of the explanation is, is
this is us as humans also using ourimagination to understand, well, what is
the role of this being?
So I wonder, like, what is the role ofcreative thinking?
(11:28):
as opposed to critical thinking in thework of, let's say, the analysts?
And is that different perhaps from thepeople who are, let's say, the agents in
the field, that people are actually havingto be a bit more improvisational in the
work that they do?
Yes, I mean, you don't want yourintelligence analysts to be too creative.
It has to be grounded.
And this is, of course, the great lessonof 2003 to 2003 intelligence leading up to
(11:55):
the war in Iraq.
So you want it to be grounded.
You want critical thinking to be appliedevery step to be tested.
But when you look further ahead,
you certainly do want imagination becauseyou want to be able to see some of these
trends, which may not be obvious, whichcould lead to significant problems in the
(12:22):
future.
If the Chinese were the first to develop aquantum computer that works at scale,
which nobody has yet really done, thenthey would be able to read, get through
the encryption.
that protects all our financialtransactions, our military communications
and so on.
(12:43):
There's no guarantee they'll get therefirst and maybe we will or the United
States.
But if they did, and this is the pointabout strategic notice, if they did, it
would create quite a difficult situation.
Implication, very obvious.
Let's spend a bit more resource onbuilding quantum resistant encryption.
(13:05):
which can be developed and persuade peopleto use it so that we're not stuck with
that position if one of our adversarynations were to get there first.
And that's simple example.
Where creativity comes in is particularlyin the work of the intelligence agencies
(13:27):
to think about how are we going to getaround the determined will of the
adversary not to let us.
see his secrets.
So this is what secret intelligence isabout.
It's about getting better decisions madebecause you have uncovered the secrets of
people who mean us harm.
(13:48):
Dictators, autocrats, people smugglinggangs, terrorists, criminals, and so on.
They have secrets.
They desperately don't want us and ourallies.
to find out those secrets.
So that's where you have to be reallycreative in trying to think of ways they
haven't thought of, which will enable youto penetrate the secrets of the terrorist
(14:13):
group or the narcotics smuggling gang orwhatever it might be.
That requires a diversity of mind.
And that's something I would certainlywant to emphasize.
It's something that my old department,GCHQ, has...
has really developed is to employ peoplewho think differently.
(14:35):
And that diversity of minds makes it morelikely that somebody will make the
creative breakthrough, which is new andhelps.
So with diversity of minds, when I oftentalk with organizations, we talk about,
there's different ways of doing this.
I know we sometimes have things like,going back in history, like Edward de
(14:58):
Bono, six thinking hats, a way of justlooking at things from different
perspectives.
In the book, you talk about one of thebiggest challenges for us as humans,
humans and machine side, that the humanpart is biases that we all have and
recognize that you talk about Dick, Ithink it's Dick Huer of CIA.
Hmm.
and these six key biases that we have.
(15:20):
What are the ones that you often in yourcareer, you've often seen most coming up
in these biases?
And then second to that, how do you createa space, a safe space where these biases
can be discussed, sometimes withcolleagues, sometimes with other
governments, for example?
Yes, I once went on a training course withEdward de Bono himself.
(15:42):
It was fascinating and we wore the hats,his thinking hats.
It's a little artificial.
What I was trying to get people torecognize is we're all subject to
cognitive biases, as they're called.
And it's a natural human instinct,confirmation bias.
(16:04):
We interpret information in the way we...
kind of unconsciously feel that's what webelieve.
That's what we would like to see.
The group think is very well established.
So if you've got an analytic group andit's coming up for closing time at the end
of the day, and there's a lot of pressureto reach an answer, that's where you want
(16:30):
the, perhaps the one analyst who doesn'tagree not to just quietly accept,
the group consensus, but to say, no, Ithink you're missing something.
It's a great skill to be able to work agroup.
There are different techniques that aretaught.
One is empowering individuals to, well,for the next five minutes, tell me what
(16:57):
we're getting wrong here.
What are we missing?
So that an individual doesn't feel thatthey're, particularly junior, that they're
somehow challenging.
the authority, but actually they've beentold to, it's your job to take this
information and then tell us what are wegetting wrong?
Or what would it, an interesting question,what would it take for us to reach a
(17:20):
different conclusion?
And when you apply that logic, you maywell find that your thinking is all based
on one report, which when you examine itclosely, say, well, we don't, we can't be
so certain.
Creating the safe space is one in whichpeople work as a team and they're not
(17:45):
dominated by the most forceful personalityin the room.
Something that I touch on in the book andI've come to talk about even more is that
when you think about any serious decisionthat any of us have to take, whether it's
in the family or whether it's the primeminister or something,
(18:08):
major matter of state.
There are two different kinds of thinkinghave to be integrated within the single
mind of the person taking the decision.
On the one hand, you've got theemotionally based thinking of this is what
I want to achieve.
This is what I must achieve.
(18:28):
This is what the world I want to live inlooks like.
And on the other hand, you've got theanalytical thinking that says,
These are the limits of the possible.
This is what the spreadsheets show.
And so both are necessary.
So if you haven't got the emotionallybased thinking, then you won't have the
(18:49):
right kind of narrative to incentivizepeople.
You know, Churchill in 1940 gave theBritish people the narrative.
Zelensky has given his people thenarrative to enable them to keep going
despite the odds.
but neither of them neglected the analyticpart, which is it's not enough just to
(19:12):
have bombast.
You've got to have grounded analyticalthinking about what armaments are we going
to need?
What steps do we need to take?
Churchill brought in Beaverbrook torevolutionize Spitfire production.
So you need to integrate both.
If you just have the former, then...
(19:34):
Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, it's emotional.
It may sound very powerful, but it's notbacked up with solid analysis.
If you just have somebody talking off aspreadsheet, who's going to put themselves
out to do extraordinary efforts on thebasis of what a spreadsheet says?
(19:56):
So you need both.
And that, I think, is one of the secretsof getting this safe space where...
you have the analysis, but you also canbring out the narrative of why all this
has to be taken seriously and developedinto a public message.
(20:21):
I'm wondering, as I was reading the book,and I was thinking, especially the story
you start with in the book, which is aboutthe beginning of the Falklands War, when
there was a period of obviously highstress, you're in a very intense period,
time is contracted.
I wonder what that does in terms ofpeople's biases, how that safe space is
(20:43):
created.
The other day I was doing an event and Iwas sitting in a dinner next to Willie
Walsh, who'd been formerly the CEO ofBritish Airways.
IAG.
And we were having this discussion aboutstress, because I thought, you know, your
job as CEO must be very stressful, thingshappening all the time.
And he said, one of the things that youoften find is that in high stress
(21:04):
environments, people kind of revert to aversion of themselves that is sometimes
not the best.
And he said, as a leader, your job is overtime to try and nudge that and move that
to a slightly better place as well.
In your own working, I mean, is the
with these skills that you're talkingabout, is this something you can be
(21:25):
trained to become better at under morehigh stress environments where you're
maybe not sitting in the comfort of a niceideation brainstorming room with cups of
tea, for example?
Yes, I mean, I've written another book.
It's the paperback comes out on the 6th ofJune from Penguin called How to Survive a
Crisis.
And this is very much at the heart of howwe survive a crisis, because the point
(21:49):
about a crisis is not we have emergenciesall the time.
So I distinguish between emergencies andcrises.
And when a real crisis arrives, the personin charge won't know what to do.
If they did know what to do, it's just oneof those emergencies that companies have
to deal with all the time.
(22:10):
And British Airways, you know, sometimesthe computers go down, people know how to
sort it, you get on with it.
But a crisis is when events are hittingyou faster than your responses can cope
with.
I have what I call the rubber levers test.
You pull the normal levers and nothingseems to happen on the ground.
(22:33):
If anything, it gets worse.
And some of the steps that you may havetaken early on actually seem to make
things worse and you risk sliding intodisaster.
And that's where it's so important thatthe person at the top, and that's the
person who doesn't know what to do bydefinition, gathers the team.
(22:54):
And this takes you back to the safe spaceand says to the team, we're in serious
trouble.
We're mobilizing.
all the best people we can get our handson.
This is number one priority for survivalof a company or the business, or indeed
the nation.
This is now the priority.
(23:15):
And together we will work out what thesolution is.
And that takes you into teamwork.
Surviving crisis is a team sport and it'snot something that the leader will.
instinctively know exactly what measuresto take.
That's why you need the expertise, youneed the team together.
(23:39):
And it's high stress.
And it's very well documented that inconditions of high stress, tempers fray,
people, there are what I think are calledthe Ds.
So the first is denial.
This can't really be happening to us.
Let's just wait a bit.
(24:00):
Prime Minister Johnson doesn't turn up tothe first five COBRA meetings on the COVID
emergency.
That's a very well -known phenomenon.
You have the disparagement of peoplebringing bad news, so you send them away
to do more work.
You have displacement activity, wherepeople, you get the staff to focus on
(24:24):
anything other than what they really haveto focus on, which is the...
crisis which is looming.
So you can trade, you know, just talkingabout this, having little exercises, being
coached, there's a lot of things can bedone to improve the performance of those
(24:46):
at the top when something unexpectedhappens.
And as the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hasbeen saying this morning, we're entering
an era.
of more and deeper crises over the nextfive or 10 years.
So we better prepare ourselves.
And we had a guest on the show a littlewhile ago, Professor Roger Nibran from
(25:10):
UCL, I think, and also from CambridgeUniversity, who wrote a wonderful book
called Experts.
He's like the world's leading expert onexperts.
So do you think we're in a time now wheremaybe post -COVID experts are coming back
into fashion?
Because it certainly seemed in the UK fora little while, they were deeply
unfashionable for a while.
and we would have been well and trulystuffed if we hadn't had the expertise,
(25:31):
for example, on the vaccines task force.
And if those vaccines had not beendeveloped and innovative ways found of
getting them into people's arms quickly,then we would still be in the depths of a
very major pandemic.
It's still hanging over us and people arestill suffering, but we've got over the
(25:54):
worst of it.
But there are...
more pandemics to come, undoubtedly, andnew diseases will jump the species
barrier.
So we've got to be ready for that.
Technology will turn much of our lifeupside down.
We've already mentioned artificialintelligence, but quantum developments,
(26:16):
bioengineering, we're going to see someremarkable things happening with
bioengineering.
We've already got
DNA being used for genetic diseasetreatments, which are entirely novel.
It's very exciting.
There are lots of opportunities, but, andit's a big but, are those who mean us
(26:44):
harm, our adversaries, will take advantageof some of these.
And we'd better be ready for that.
So you were talking about this idea ofdiversity of mind, having that diversity
of mind, being able to hold emotional andanalytical thinking at the same time.
You're obviously absorbing, taking in lotsof inputs all the time.
You're obviously reading widely, you're apolymath in the work you do.
(27:06):
But where do you go for inspiration?
How do you go to sort and sift this stuffin your head to take, you know, then to be
able to take a step back and think about,well, what is it, AI or climate change or
whatever the thing is, how do you...
set that self and yourself so you've gotthat time to yourself to be that kind of
creative part of you to think in that way.
(27:28):
Well, the best thoughts come to me whenI'm out running early in the morning.
And I think that's quite a well-recognized phenomenon.
You do have to give yourself time, butthis is one of the difficulties that as
technology advances so quickly, youactually got to put in the hard yards to
(27:53):
understand what is actually happening.
So to have the first inkling of what isgoing on with generative AI and what the
magical treatment is that has turnedsimply machine learning into something so
much more.
You've actually got to do the work andyou've got to study it.
(28:13):
But we have a wonderful way.
If you think about going to any hospitalor medical clinic and you'll find lots of
talk about, well, we'd better get an MRIscan.
done and people talk about MRI scans, butthat stands for magnetic resonance
imaging.
And magnetic resonance is one of thoseextraordinary, to understand that is one
(28:38):
of those extraordinary parts of thequantum world that we're talking about the
resonance of molecules and atoms in a waythat the general public has no idea of
what is driving the MRI scanner.
So all advanced technology, you know, itlooks like magic when it first appears.
(29:01):
And then we all get used to it.
I have no idea what is under the bonnet orthe hood of my car.
I used to, 20 years ago, I've been able tosay, well, that's the carburetor.
And there's probably a fuel pump.
You know, there's a bit of dirt cloggingthe fuel pump.
I've no idea whether my car even has afuel pump.
(29:23):
So...
A certain amount of work is needed as wellas relaxation.
And it's interesting, you know, withobviously artificial intelligence, first
coin, 1956 has been around for a long,long time, but obviously we more recently
it's, we've seen this drive primarilythrough big data, which the fuel for it as
well.
(29:44):
what's for me is interesting is now seeingalmost I can imagine a few hundred years
ago, you know, invention of electricitybeing used where suddenly anyone has the
ability, you don't have to know howelectricity works to be able to flip that
switch or to.
add electricity to your business in someway.
Now you see people using it for good andfor bad.
(30:04):
Bad actors using generative AI to createdeep fakes and all this stuff as well.
So we're certainly going into a prettyfascinating time in human history.
Yeah, the parallel is probably with theinvention of the printing press, which has
produced world literature and made itavailable to everyone.
(30:25):
And simultaneously, a lot of other stuff,which we ideally would not have had to
suffer.
So the printing press turned the worldupside down.
It led to decades and decades of religiouswar, AI and
the other technologies, particularlybiotechnologies, are going to do the same
(30:47):
to our world in the next five to 10 years.
So, you know, buckle up.
It could be a bumpy ride.
So just to finish up, a couple of quickfire questions for you.
There's some wonderful quotes in the book,wonderful lines by different folks,
Churchill and all kinds of differentareas.
Is there a quote that you live by you canhave as a bit of a guiding star for
(31:10):
yourself?
that's a difficult question.
Perhaps there is one.
And I owe it to my former boss, JackStraw, who was Home Secretary and I was
his senior official, I was his permanentsecretary.
And Jack always approached thedifficulties by saying, when in doubt, do
what you genuinely believe is the rightthing.
(31:34):
It will still go wrong.
Most things go wrong.
And you have a defense.
Well, knowing what I knew at the time, Itook the decision to do what I believe was
the right thing.
That's a defense and a solid one.
But the moment you start to say, I'm notgoing to take the straightforward course,
(31:55):
I'll try some devious maneuver, I'll blamesomeone else, or I won't tell all the
truth, and you try and shimmy your waythrough, spin your way through, as the
spin doctors say.
when it all goes wrong, you have nodefense.
(32:15):
Yeah.
So I think it's not a bad principle inlife.
And then what about, is there a book thatyou would recommend to our listeners?
We're going to have links to your books aswell.
Is there a book just now that you've beenreading that's really made you kind of
rethink?
We've been talking about AI, we've beentalking about biotechnologies as well.
Is there something that you think peopleshould check out?
(32:37):
Well, a lot of people have checked it out,but the three body problem, and there's
more than that's the first volume of thetrilogy by Fikin Liu, if my Chinese
pronunciation is right, is mind -bending.
(33:01):
And I thoroughly recommend it.
It's you can watch it on Netflix, which israther a shortened version and rather a
sort of dumbed down version, but theoriginal.
And there's also a Chinese series in 30parts, which doesn't spare the mathematics
(33:22):
and the but it's about the future and it'sabout, in a sense, a plausible future.
And it's well, it raises some very deepquestions.
as well as being great fun because it's anentertaining story.
Well, it's been a pleasure being with youtoday.
(33:43):
If people want to learn more about you,learn more about the books that you have
coming out as well, where's the best placeto go and do that?
The King's College website, I'm a visitingprofessor at King's College in the War
Studies Department and they can find allabout it or just Google me and you'll find
(34:03):
a lot of details about the, as I say,latest paperback out on the 6th of June,
how to survive a crisis.
Professor Sir David Omand, thank you forbeing a guest on the SuperCreativity
Podcast.
It's been a pleasure.
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