Intelligence Failures are Failures of Imagination

Thomas Friedman in the New York Times made this point on Sunday. Even if we had had perfect intelligence, we lacked the imagination to put the pieces together. This was true about 9/11, Pearl Harbor, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and many other intelligence failures. Sidney Finkelstein has explored the disastrous impact of mindset in the business world. It applies to intelligence and the church as well. The real heroes are the people who challenge the institutional mindset, telling the institution that if it is not true to its mission, bad things will happen. In biblical times we called these people prophets. In modern times they are whistle blowers, publicity hounds, malcontents, or just a general “pain in the …” The problem is that it is hard to tell a prophet from a Cassandra until after the disaster has occurred.