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Contact: Debbie Morton at Mercyhurst College, 814.824.2552
‘Talk is cheap’ to new generation of analysts
“The world is in danger of creating a new generation of intelligence analysts who would rather write than stand up in front of an audience and brief them,” says career intelligence specialist Don McDowell.
Most analysts struggle with the challenge of selling their findings to decision-makers. It’s not enough to compile research in a written document, deliver it and expect it to be read. The verbal briefing lets an analyst pitch his information, distinguish the highlights, and instill the curiosity to learn more.
“The verbal briefing is the most powerful selling medium and, because of today’s social culture, it’s just not being done the way it should be,” said McDowell, who will share his experiences with effective verbal briefings at the upcoming Dungarvan Conference, sponsored by the Mercyhurst College Institute for Intelligence Studies (Erie, Pa., USA), July 11-13 in Dungarvan, Ireland.
McDowell is the founder of The Intelligence Study Centre with offices in Australia, Europe, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Canada and the United States. He has delivered training courses in intelligence analysis to the international intelligence community for more than 40 years.
Briefings are routinely given in the context of national security, he noted, but it is the wider world of business, or corporate intelligence, law enforcement and regulatory intelligence where this is not the norm.
“When people don’t have much time, you have to give them a reason to read,” he said. “You have to give them the message, the conclusions, and ways you reached them so they’ll want to read more.”
He said the Dungarvan Conference is the ideal setting in which to convey his “analytic best practices” to a broad cross-section of intelligence practitioners spanning business, national security, medicine, law and more.
“This conference is absolutely unique because you are bringing leading practitioners together to share their knowledge, experience and insights with each other,” he said. “These are real people who will say, ‘I did this and it worked’ or ‘I did this and it didn’t.’ That just never happens at other conferences, where the emphasis is more on what has been achieved rather than acknowledging that we also learn from our partial achievements and even from our failures.”
The first U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, will deliver the summit’s keynote address.
