International Conference on Naturalistic Decision Making 2015, McLean, VA How Military Intelligence Personnel Collaborate on a Sense-Making Exercise Chris BABER a1 , Gareth CONWAY b , Simon ATTFIELD c , Chris ROONEY c , Neesha KODAGODA c and Rick WALKER c a School of Electronic, Electrical and Systems Engineering, University of Birmingham b Human Systems Group, DSTL c School of Science and Technology, Middlesex University ABSTRACT Sense-making plays an important role in Intelligence Analysis, but can be difficult to study in situ. Thus, it is common to use training exercises to study this phenomenon. In this paper, an exercise was undertaken by Military Intelligence personnel. The behaviour of groups of analysts is considered in terms the Data / Frame Model of Sense-making. The paper illustrates how Intelligence Analysis need not follow a linear process but often involves parallel and overlapping explorations of data, with multiple frames that might be minimal and sketchy. The use of representations, such as link diagrams, provides a means of externalizing frames and it is suggested that this shifts reasoning from deductive reasoning to abductive reasoning as the exercise progresses. KEYWORDS Sense-making; Intelligence Analysis; Representations. INTRODUCTION While it is unlikely that there is a single, definitive way of ‘doing’ Intelligence Analysis, there are generic descriptions of how Intelligence Analysis could be performed. For instance, NATO (2008) describes the Intelligence (or Analysis) Cycle in terms of four phases:  Direction: define objectives for Intelligence Requirements and Requests for Information;  Collection: gather information by agents or assets;  Processing: compile and interpret information to produce intelligence product;  Dissemination: distribute appropriate parts of the intelligence to relevant parties. Although this implies a flow from collection to dissemination, alternative descriptions emphasize the recursive nature of the analysis process. For example, Elm et al. (2005) define this process in terms of ‘down-collect’ (sample from the available data for material deemed to be ‘on analysis’), ‘conflict and corroboration’ (ensure accurate and robust interpretation of findings, and modify the ‘down-collect’ accordingly), and ‘hypothesis exploration’ (construct coherent narrative to explain the findings, and reflect this narrative back to the ‘conflict and corroboration’ activity). This recursion means that Intelligence Analysis is not linear (Heuer, 1999; Heuer and Pherson, 2010; Roth et al., 2010; Kang and Stasko, 2011). Such recursion is neatly captured by the Data / Frame model of sense-making model (Klein, Moon and Hoffman., 2006a, b). Data / Frame Model of Sense-making Central to sense-making in the Data / Frame model is the relationship between the data to which the analyst has access and the different ‘frames’ that can be used to interpret, make sense of, or explain, these data. Klein et al (2006a) point out that, “When people try to make sense of events, they begin with some perspective, viewpoint, or framework – however minimal. For now, let’s use a metaphor and call this a frame.” (p. 88, emphasis added). 1 Corresponding Author: c.baber@bham.ac.uk; 0044 121 414 3965 ; School of Electronic, Electrical and Systems Engineering, University of Birmingham, Birmingham. UK B15 2TT