Sir David Omand, Author of How Spies Think 10 LESSONS IN CRITICAL THINKING #338

James Taylor (00:08)
Sir David Omand was the first UK security and intelligence coordinator responsible to the Prime Minister for the professional health of the intelligence community, national counter -terrorism strategy and homeland security. He served for seven years on the Joint Intelligence Committee and was permanent secretary of the Home Office from 1997 to 2000, and before that, director of GCHQ, the UK Signals Intelligence Agency. Previously in the Ministry of Defence as Deputy Under -Secretary of State for Policy,

He was particularly concerned with long -term strategy, with the British military contribution in restoring peace in the former Yugoslavia and the recasting of British nuclear deterrence policy at the end of the Cold War. He was principal private secretary to the defence secretary during the Falklands conflict and served for three years in NATO Brussels as the UK defence councillor. He’s been a visiting professor in the Department of War Studies at King’s College since 2005 to 2006 and his latest book is called

How Spies Think, 10 Lessons in Intelligence, where he shares the methodology used by British intelligence agencies to reach judgements, establish the right level of confidence, and act decisively. The British former Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary, the Right Honourable Jack Straw, calls How Spies Think a brilliant book by one of the UK’s true polymaths, author, academic, administrator, mathematician, and former spy. But this isn’t just a book for those interested in the secret world of MI5, MI6, and GCHQ, it’s for

anyone wanting to know how to make better decisions and avoid traps into which businesses and governments can and do fall time after time. Professor Sir David Orman, welcome to the SuperCreativity Podcast.

Sir David Omand (01:43)
Thanks, James. Delighted to be on the show.

James Taylor (01:46)
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 of Ukraine, artificial intelligence enter very much the mainstream and increasing tensions with the West and China. If you were publishing this book today, as we’re filming today in 2024, any big changes that you’d be making to it do you think?

Sir David Omand (02:09)
Not to the guts of the book, which as you say is about critical thinking, I might emphasize even more than I did in the book that 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. So my message, which is how do you think clearly and straight, even when?

some of the messages reaching you are not true or are designed to be deceptive. That still holds, I think.

James Taylor (02:46)
Now you give these 10 lessons towards the end of the book, but then you talk about the main framework, the way to think critically about situations, whether it’s in business or in other situations as well. And you call it the SEAS model, which is really how intelligence analysts think. First of all, maybe give us just a bit of a kind of top line, and then maybe we’ll get into some of those four parts of this particular model.

Sir David Omand (03:09)
Yeah, I put C’s S -E -E -S just to make it memorable. But the first S is situational awareness, which is answering questions about what is going on, where and when. Facture, questions which ought to be answerable if you’ve got a good grasp of the situation. But then the first E in C’s is about explanation. And that’s the bit we often get wrong.

because that usually involves getting inside somebody else’s mind, an adversary, a terrorist group, a dictator, and trying to work out why are we seeing what we are seeing, what’s behind it, what are the motivations? So those questions that have why in it or what for. And then if you’ve got enough situational awareness and you’ve got some decent explanations,

You can move on to what the British Intelligence Community, the Joint Intelligence Committee, I spent seven years on the committee, what they tried to do, which is to assess and provide an estimate based on assumptions, but trying to peer over the hill to give an estimate of how things might work out. Normally in the sort of short to medium term. So that’s why the final S.

I add into my acronym Cs is strategic notice. Can you actually spot some way away developments which could either provide big opportunities or perhaps more often could provide serious challenges? It’s not a prediction. I’m clear in the book that there are no crystal balls. 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 the imagination to say, well, if that were to happen, what would it look like? And are the things we perhaps should do now in order to try and make it

that future more bearable if it were to come about.

James Taylor (05:35)
One of the critical thinking tools you talk about in the book is the Bayesian approach. Hopefully I’ve got that right. What is this Bayesian approach and how can this be applied in the work that, maybe you’ll listen to this show in business when you’re thinking about probabilities, the chances of something happening or not?

Sir David Omand (05:55)
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.

So you have the prior position, which you believe, you’ve read intelligence reports, you think you’ve got a grasp of it all. And then some new intelligence arrives and should alter your view of how likely your proposition is to be true. And of course, all these magical AI neural networks that we’ve got used to in the last year or so, they are all based.

on Bayesian thinking you train the model and every time you provide some new information to the model, it works out. Does that help me? How do I get closer to the accurate answer? It adjusts the weights in its neural network, 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 at recognising faces than a human being, which is what indeed has happened, all playing chess.

James Taylor (07:27)
And so this is often expressed in a kind of formula that we might see. I know you were involved in the creation of contests where we, in the UK, we had this thing, the Prevent Strategy, for example, where you expressed, I guess, risk using this type of formula.

Sir David Omand (07:32)
Yeah.

Yes, I mean, the basic approach when we put together the UK counter -terrorism strategy was to reduce the risk that terrorism posed to everyday life. So it was based on this idea of normality and can you take steps which helps maintain normality? And when you think about it, the risk is the product of the likelihood of bad things happening. Your vulnerability.

to those bad things, which is something you might be able to do something about. And then if they were to get through your defenses and something bad happens, what’s the reaction? What’s the impact of that? Both immediately, how well did the emergency services cope, but also in the longer term, how resilient are the systems? So after, say, a terrorist attack, next day, is the London Underground working?

Well, on 7 -7 it was.

James Taylor (08:45)
Now, one of the things you said as a common mistake you see organizations, governments make, policy makers make, is they immediately try to jump from situational awareness into the third part with the estimates, making estimates of what’s gonna happen. But there’s this kind of stage before that that you need to spend time on. Can you go into that?

Sir David Omand (09:06)
Yes, that’s the E that stands for explanation. Why are we seeing what we are seeing? It’s a truism in all statistics that correlation is not causality. Just because you’ve spotted two things happening together, does that mean they are necessarily related or that one is causing the other? You need an explanation. You need some sort of explanatory model.

And particularly when you’re dealing with human beings who may mean us harm. So take the period just before President Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine a couple of years back. All those tanks had been on an exercise, tens of thousands of soldiers. Was he going to invade or wasn’t he?

And that’s the point at which you don’t just jump from those tanks to assuming he’s going to it. You actually have to work out what’s the explanation. And in that particular case, UK and British and American intelligence, they had the intelligence to be able to say with near certainty, yes, we know what he is up to. We know he’s going to try and mount a false flag operation to provide a pretext for the invasion.

We know that the medical supplies and other logistics have been, which you wouldn’t see in an exercise, have actually been activated. 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.

James Taylor (10:58)
Now, something I noticed in the book, I love the book, and it was just great how it took through in a very kind of systematic, very kind of logical way of thinking through things to think more clearly, as you say. But one thing you didn’t speak about so much in the book was the role of creativity in this. And I guess what you were talking about there in terms of the explanation is, is this is us as humans also using our imagination to understand, well, what is the role of this being? So I wonder, like, what is the role of creative thinking?

as opposed to critical thinking in the work of, let’s say, the analysts? And is that different perhaps from the people who are, let’s say, the agents in the field, that people are actually having to be a bit more improvisational in the work that they do?

Sir David Omand (11:40)
Yes, I mean, you don’t want your intelligence analysts to be too creative. It has to be grounded. And this is, of course, the great lesson of 2003 to 2003 intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq. So you want it to be grounded. You want critical thinking to be applied every step to be tested. But when you look further ahead,

you certainly do want imagination because you want to be able to see some of these trends, which may not be obvious, which could lead to significant problems in the future. If the Chinese were the first to develop a quantum computer that works at scale, which nobody has yet really done, then they would be able to read, get through the encryption.

that protects all our financial transactions, our military communications and so on. There’s no guarantee they’ll get there first and maybe we will or the United States. But if they did, and this is the point about strategic notice, if they did, it would create quite a difficult situation. Implication, very obvious. Let’s spend a bit more resource on building quantum resistant encryption.

which can be developed and persuade people to use it so that we’re not stuck with that position if one of our adversary nations were to get there first. And that’s simple example. Where creativity comes in is particularly in the work of the intelligence agencies to think about how are we going to get around the determined will of the adversary not to let us.

see his secrets. So this is what secret intelligence is about. It’s about getting better decisions made because you have uncovered the secrets of people who mean us harm. Dictators, autocrats, people smuggling gangs, terrorists, criminals, and so on. They have secrets. They desperately don’t want us and our allies.

to find out those secrets. So that’s where you have to be really creative in trying to think of ways they haven’t thought of, which will enable you to penetrate the secrets of the terrorist group or the narcotics smuggling gang or whatever it might be. That requires a diversity of mind. And that’s something I would certainly want to emphasize. It’s something that my old department, GCHQ, has…

James Taylor (14:18)
So,

Sir David Omand (14:29)
has really developed is to employ people who think differently. And that diversity of minds makes it more likely that somebody will make the creative breakthrough, which is new and helps.

James Taylor (14:47)
So with diversity of minds, when I often talk 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 Bono, six thinking hats, a way of just looking at things from different perspectives. In the book, you talk about one of the biggest challenges for us as humans, humans and machine side, that the human part is biases that we all have and recognize that you talk about Dick, I think it’s Dick Huer of CIA.

Sir David Omand (15:15)
Hmm.

James Taylor (15:16)
and these six key biases that we have. What are the ones that you often in your career, you’ve often seen most coming up in these biases? And then second to that, how do you create a space, a safe space where these biases can be discussed, sometimes with colleagues, sometimes with other governments, for example?

Sir David Omand (15:37)
Yes, I once went on a training course with Edward de Bono himself. It was fascinating and we wore the hats, his thinking hats. It’s a little artificial. What I was trying to get people to recognize is we’re all subject to cognitive biases, as they’re called. And it’s a natural human instinct, confirmation bias. We interpret information in the way we…

kind of unconsciously feel that’s what we believe. That’s what we would like to see. The group think is very well established. So if you’ve got an analytic group and it’s coming up for closing time at the end of the day, and there’s a lot of pressure to reach an answer, that’s where you want the, perhaps the one analyst who doesn’t agree not to just quietly accept,

the group consensus, but to say, no, I think you’re missing something. It’s a great skill to be able to work a group. There are different techniques that are taught. One is empowering individuals to, well, for the next five minutes, tell me what we’re getting wrong here. What are we missing? So that an individual doesn’t feel that they’re, particularly junior, that they’re somehow challenging.

the authority, but actually they’ve been told to, it’s your job to take this information and then tell us what are we getting wrong? Or what would it, an interesting question, what would it take for us to reach a different conclusion? And when you apply that logic, you may well find that your thinking is all based on one report, which when you examine it closely, say, well, we don’t, we can’t be so certain.

Creating the safe space is one in which people work as a team and they’re not dominated by the most forceful personality in the room. Something that I touch on in the book and I’ve come to talk about even more is that when you think about any serious decision that any of us have to take, whether it’s in the family or whether it’s the prime minister or something,

major matter of state. There are two different kinds of thinking have to be integrated within the single mind of the person taking the decision. On the one hand, you’ve got the emotionally based thinking of this is what I want to achieve. This is what I must achieve. This is what the world I want to live in looks like. And on the other hand, you’ve got the analytical 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 emotionally based thinking, then you won’t have the right kind of narrative to incentivize people. You know, Churchill in 1940 gave the British people the narrative. Zelensky has given his people the narrative to enable them to keep going despite the odds.

but neither of them neglected the analytic part, which is it’s not enough just to have bombast. You’ve got to have grounded analytical thinking about what armaments are we going to need? What steps do we need to take? Churchill brought in Beaverbrook to revolutionize Spitfire production. So you need to integrate both. If you just have the former, then…

Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, it’s emotional. It may sound very powerful, but it’s not backed up with solid analysis. If you just have somebody talking off a spreadsheet, who’s going to put themselves out to do extraordinary efforts on the basis of what a spreadsheet says? So you need both. And that, I think, is one of the secrets of getting this safe space where…

you have the analysis, but you also can bring out the narrative of why all this has to be taken seriously and developed into a public message.

James Taylor (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 about the beginning of the Falklands War, when there was a period of obviously high stress, you’re in a very intense period, time is contracted. I wonder what that does in terms of people’s biases, how that safe space is created. The other day I was doing an event and I was sitting in a dinner next to Willie Walsh, who’d been formerly the CEO of British Airways.

IAG. And we were having this discussion about stress, because I thought, you know, your job as CEO must be very stressful, things happening all the time. And he said, one of the things that you often find is that in high stress environments, people kind of revert to a version of themselves that is sometimes not the best. And he said, as a leader, your job is over time 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 talking about, is this something you can be trained to become better at under more high stress environments where you’re maybe not sitting in the comfort of a nice ideation brainstorming room with cups of tea, for example?

Sir David Omand (21:34)
Yes, I mean, I’ve written another book. It’s the paperback comes out on the 6th of June from Penguin called How to Survive a Crisis. And this is very much at the heart of how we survive a crisis, because the point about a crisis is not we have emergencies all the time. So I distinguish between emergencies and crises. And when a real crisis arrives, the person in charge won’t know what to do.

If they did know what to do, it’s just one of those emergencies that companies have to deal with all the time. And British Airways, you know, sometimes the computers go down, people know how to sort it, you get on with it. But a crisis is when events are hitting you faster than your responses can cope with. I have what I call the rubber levers test. You pull the normal levers and nothing seems to happen on the ground.

If anything, it gets worse. And some of the steps that you may have taken early on actually seem to make things worse and you risk sliding into disaster. And that’s where it’s so important that the person at the top, and that’s the person who doesn’t know what to do by definition, gathers the team. And this takes you back to the safe space and says to the team, we’re in serious trouble. We’re mobilizing.

all the best people we can get our hands on. This is number one priority for survival of a company or the business, or indeed the nation. This is now the priority. And together we will work out what the solution is. And that takes you into teamwork. Surviving crisis is a team sport and it’s not something that the leader will.

James Taylor (23:20)
It seems so… yeah.

Sir David Omand (23:30)
instinctively know exactly what measures to take. That’s why you need the expertise, you need the team together. And it’s high stress. And it’s very well documented that in conditions of high stress, tempers fray, people, there are what I think are called the Ds. So the first is denial. This can’t really be happening to us. Let’s just wait a bit.

Prime Minister Johnson doesn’t turn up to the first five COBRA meetings on the COVID emergency. That’s a very well -known phenomenon. You have the disparagement of people bringing bad news, so you send them away to do more work. You have displacement activity, where people, you get the staff to focus on anything other than what they really have to focus on, which is the…

crisis which is looming. So you can trade, you know, just talking about this, having little exercises, being coached, there’s a lot of things can be done to improve the performance of those at the top when something unexpected happens. And as the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has been saying this morning, we’re entering an era.

of more and deeper crises over the next five or 10 years. So we better prepare ourselves.

James Taylor (25:04)
And we had a guest on the show a little while ago, Professor Roger Nibran from UCL, I think, and also from Cambridge University, who wrote a wonderful book called Experts. He’s like the world’s leading expert on experts. So do you think we’re in a time now where maybe post -COVID experts are coming back into fashion? Because it certainly seemed in the UK for a little while, they were deeply unfashionable for a while.

Sir David Omand (25:26)
Indeed, and we would have been well and truly stuffed if we hadn’t had the expertise, for example, on the vaccines task force. And if those vaccines had not been developed 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 are still suffering, but we’ve got over the worst of it. But there are…

more pandemics to come, undoubtedly, and new diseases will jump the species barrier. So we’ve got to be ready for that. Technology will turn much of our life upside down. We’ve already mentioned artificial intelligence, but quantum developments, bioengineering, we’re going to see some remarkable things happening with bioengineering. We’ve already got

DNA being used for genetic disease treatments, which are entirely novel. It’s very exciting. There are lots of opportunities, but, and it’s a big but, are those who mean us harm, our adversaries, will take advantage of some of these. And we’d better be ready for that.

James Taylor (26:52)
So you were talking about this idea of diversity of mind, having that diversity of mind, being able to hold emotional and analytical thinking at the same time. You’re obviously absorbing, taking in lots of inputs all the time. You’re obviously reading widely, you’re a polymath in the work you do. But where do you go for inspiration? How do you go to sort and sift this stuff in 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…

Sir David Omand (27:05)
Hmm.

James Taylor (27:21)
set that self and yourself so you’ve got that time to yourself to be that kind of creative part of you to think in that way.

Sir David Omand (27:28)
Well, the best thoughts come to me when I’m out running early in the morning. And I think that’s quite a well -recognized phenomenon. You do have to give yourself time, but this is one of the difficulties that as technology advances so quickly, you actually got to put in the hard yards to understand what is actually happening.

So to have the first inkling of what is going on with generative AI and what the magical treatment is that has turned simply machine learning into something so much more. You’ve actually got to do the work and you’ve got to study it. But we have a wonderful way. If you think about going to any hospital or medical clinic and you’ll find lots of talk about, well, we’d better get an MRI scan.

done and people talk about MRI scans, but that stands for magnetic resonance imaging. And magnetic resonance is one of those extraordinary, to understand that is one of those extraordinary parts of the quantum world that we’re talking about the resonance of molecules and atoms in a way that the general public has no idea of what is driving the MRI scanner.

So all advanced technology, you know, it looks like magic when it first appears. And then we all get used to it. I have no idea what is under the bonnet or the hood of my car. I used to, 20 years ago, I’ve been able to say, well, that’s the carburetor. And there’s probably a fuel pump. You know, there’s a bit of dirt clogging the fuel pump. I’ve no idea whether my car even has a fuel pump. So…

A certain amount of work is needed as well as relaxation.

James Taylor (29:29)
And it’s interesting, you know, with obviously 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 primarily through big data, which the fuel for it as well. what’s for me is interesting is now seeing almost I can imagine a few hundred years ago, you know, invention of electricity being used where suddenly anyone has the ability, you don’t have to know how electricity works to be able to flip that switch or to.

Sir David Omand (29:35)
Hmm. Hmm.

Hmm.

James Taylor (29:58)
add electricity to your business in some way. Now you see people using it for good and for bad. Bad actors using generative AI to create deep fakes and all this stuff as well. So we’re certainly going into a pretty fascinating time in human history.

Sir David Omand (29:59)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, the parallel is probably with the invention of the printing press, which has produced world literature and made it available to everyone. And simultaneously, a lot of other stuff, which we ideally would not have had to suffer. So the printing press turned the world upside down. It led to decades and decades of religious war, AI and

the other technologies, particularly biotechnologies, are going to do the same to our world in the next five to 10 years. So, you know, buckle up. It could be a bumpy ride.

James Taylor (30:56)
So just to finish up, a couple of quick fire questions for you. There’s some wonderful quotes in the book, wonderful lines by different folks, Churchill and all kinds of different areas. Is there a quote that you live by you can have as a bit of a guiding star for yourself?

Sir David Omand (31:11)
that’s a difficult question. Perhaps there is one. And I owe it to my former boss, Jack Straw, who was Home Secretary and I was his senior official, I was his permanent secretary. And Jack always approached the difficulties by saying, when in doubt, do what you genuinely believe is the right thing. It will still go wrong. Most things go wrong. And you have a defense.

Well, knowing what I knew at the time, I took 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 not going to take the straightforward course, I’ll try some devious maneuver, I’ll blame someone else, or I won’t tell all the truth, and you try and shimmy your way through, spin your way through, as the spin doctors say.

when it all goes wrong, you have no defense. Yeah. So I think it’s not a bad principle in life.

James Taylor (32:14)
there’s no right way to do a wrong thing. It’s the ethical dimension.

And then what about, is there a book that you would recommend to our listeners? We’re going to have links to your books as well. Is there a book just now that you’ve been reading that’s really made you kind of rethink? We’ve been talking about AI, we’ve been talking about biotechnologies as well. Is there something that you think people should check out?

Sir David Omand (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 the trilogy by Fikin Liu, if my Chinese pronunciation is right, is mind -bending. And I thoroughly recommend it.

James Taylor (32:54)
Yeah.

Sir David Omand (33:04)
It’s you can watch it on Netflix, which is rather a shortened version and rather a sort of dumbed down version, but the original. And there’s also a Chinese series in 30 parts, which doesn’t spare the mathematics and the but it’s about the future and it’s about, in a sense, a plausible future. And it’s well, it raises some very deep questions.

as well as being great fun because it’s an entertaining story.

James Taylor (33:40)
Well, it’s been a pleasure being with you today. If people want to learn more about you, learn more about the books that you have coming out as well, where’s the best place to go and do that?

Sir David Omand (33:51)
The King’s College website, I’m a visiting professor at King’s College in the War Studies Department and they can find all about it or just Google me and you’ll find a lot of details about the, as I say, latest paperback out on the 6th of June, how to survive a crisis.

James Taylor (34:12)
Professor Sir David Omand, thank you for being a guest on the SuperCreativity Podcast.

Sir David Omand (34:17)
It’s been a pleasure.