How military intelligence personnel collaborate on a sense-making exercise

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.