"Barriers to Analysis" is a very important subject area that should be critically explored. Review Chapter 5 and provide a self-assessment of yourself, describing the challenges that may affect your analysis.

In high school, you were probably taught to outline and then write an introduction, body, and conclusion. There are similar concepts in law school and in analysis. No matter what structure you use, make sure you are consistent.

For more advice on writing, please visit Chapter 11 of your book titled "Writing and Briefing for the Intelligence Community."

Below, I have developed an example using the introduction, body, and conclusion structure. You may use what I have provided as a model or create your own.

Your product (a.k.a. writing) must be at least one and a half pages long.

Introduction:

In order to examine potential flaws and bias in the development of my analytical conclusions, I critically reviewed Chapter 5: Barriers to Intelligence, of the bookIntroduction to Intelligence Studiesby Carl Jensen, etal. According to the book, there are numerous common barriers to effective analytical thinking and writing, including (pick a few of these -- bounded rationality, decision making satisfying, heuristics, expected perceptions, biased mindsets, mirror imaging, fundamental attribution error.

recency effect, availability bias, vividness criterion, representative bias, cause and effect misinterpretation, fallacy of big results/big cause, fallacy of centralized direction, failure to recognize questionable assumptions, group-think, self-censorship, apparent unanimity, politicization, and stovepipes). During this review, I found X1, X2, and X3 are most likely to negatively impact my analytical development.

Paragraph 1:

X1 is DESCRIBE X1. The reason this could be a personal flaw when I write an intelligence product is because DESCRIBE HOW THIS MAY RELATE TO YOUR ANALYSIS. One (OR SOME) of the things I can do to prevent this is DESCRIBE HOW YOU CAN MITIGATE OR PREVENT THIS.

Paragraph 2:

X 2 is DESCRIBE X2. The reason this could be a personal flaw when I write an intelligence product is because DESCRIBE HOW THIS MAY RELATE TO YOUR ANALYSIS. One (OR SOME) of the things I can do to prevent this is DESCRIBE HOW YOU CAN MITIGATE OR PREVENT THIS.

Paragraph 3:

X3 is DESCRIBE X3. The reason this could be a personal flaw when I write an intelligence product is because DESCRIBE HOW THIS MAY RELATE TO YOUR ANALYSIS. One (OR SOME) of the things I can do to prevent this is DESCRIBE HOW YOU CAN MITIGATE OR PREVENT THIS.

Conclusion Paragraph:

Identifying barriers is an important responsibility of every intelligence professional to ensure effective, unbiased, and error-free analytical conclusions. Behavior changes often and a review of potential flaws and barriers by intelligence professionals should be conducted regularly for self-awareness. Upon self reflection of the common barriers listed in the book, I determined that I must be most cognizant of X1, X2, and X3. Realizing these barriers could have the most impact on my analytical conclusions, I created effective techniques for overcoming them.

Text Book Required:

Jensen III, Carl J., McElreath, David H., and Graves, Melissa, Introduction to Intelligence Studies, 1st Edition, CRC Press.