Analytic Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community (PDF) - CIA

CHAPTER NINE
agents or agencies of change and manage their organization’s culture in the
same way they manage physical and financial resources. An organization’s
culture shapes individual behavior by establishing norms and taboos and, ultimately,
determines the quality and character of an organization’s products.
Culture and product are inseparable, and one cannot be changed without
affecting the other. The choice confronting any organization is to manage its
institutional culture or to be managed by it.
There is no single path to carrying out the research recommended in this
work. It could be performed at a single center or coordinated through several
specific centers; it could be purely internal to the Intelligence Community; a
cooperative effort among the community, academe, and national laboratories;
or some combination of these. What is most important to effective implementation
is that there be regular and open access among researchers and the Intelligence
Community. This may appear simple enough, but access equals trust,
and trust is difficult to establish in any domain. This is especially the case
within the Intelligence Community. The Intelligence Community needs to
increase its commitment to community outreach efforts. This study is one
such effort.
During the course of my research, the value of access and the premium the
community places on trust quickly became evident. At agency after agency,
physical access restrictions, security clearances, forms, interviews, phone
calls, questions, vetting, and more vetting were all signs of the value, not of
secrecy per se, but of trust and access. Without this sort of cooperation, this
research would have been impossible, and this is an important lesson that
ought to inform future research programs.
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