Anyone know of good refs about both reading and writing good briefs, within institutions like the CIA or other places where people must produce and consume a lot of rich, detailed situation awareness information very quickly? High-value, high-transience intelligence basically
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Recently learned that top intelligence community leaders spend like 90 minutes every morning mastering briefs prepared for them overnight by their orgs (make sense... if your job is pure intelligence, it all has to go somewhere and be understood holistically by somebody)
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I used to be much better at this, but have gotten rusty. Badly presented rich detail quickly turns into FUD and I find myself falling back upon my pre-intelligence derp positions (after all the purpose of real intel is to get you to update your priors and update the narrative)
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When a document in a good "private institutional genre" is done skillfully, it is an active pleasure to read and master. When it is bad, it is painful bureaucratic paperwork that increases FUD and reinforces derp.
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Theory: a knowledge-based institution is only as good as its primary internal "genre" of briefing material (style, composition principles etc). It doesn't matter whether it's the famous Amazon 6-pager or a slide-deck pro-forma. It has to be a learnable skilled genre.
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Bookmarking tweet hoping your reach gets some better responses than I got. I asked the same question a few months ago to crickets...twitter.com/taps/status/11 Pinged around to a few friends who've worked in those institutions, got a bunch of wishy washy answers #whatissosecret
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Does anyone know someone who has previously worked in a Senate office or the White House building briefing books? Looking for an introduction!
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The Quartermaster newsletter (written by two special forces vets) often has resources devoted to answering questions like this
quartermaster.substack.com
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