It was deeply ironic that the wisest thing Donald Rumsfeld ever said was roundly mocked for being stupid while the rest of his career of evil and stupidity was seen as respectable.
29 Likes
Just don’t be confused by the wildly new ideas that were sparked by his creativity technique.
2016
2017
Don’t forget that he was also saying it as a way to obfuscate the fact that they wanted to invade a sovereign nation with no intel supporting their claims. But yeah, he was right for that 12 seconds or so.
9 Likes
1 Like
I think that one is the ‘Condor Checklist’. The one named after the not-mythical organism…
2 Likes
I guess there is some value in working through this list methodically if you are stuck on something, but it’s really just a long-winded description of how you will solve a problem, if you are a smart person who’s good at thinking.
It’s the universal self-help formula: just describe in detail how the reader would overcome their problems, if they were a different person who didn’t need help in the first place.
This can actually help, in maybe 5% of cases, but the real secret of this formula’s success is that the other 95% of the time, you’ve persuaded the reader to blame themselves for their failure, without saying a single thing that is less than breathlessly positive.
2 Likes
thanks for the recommendation
Here’s the CIA’s “Phoenix Checklist” for thinking about problems
That gave me a f’ing headache.
2 Likes
i was just thinking to myself as i read through the checklist, “for such a sophisticated rubric why have so many of the resulting plans been so stupid?”
11 Likes
Is it safe to suppose that you’re not thinking right now then? 
3 Likes
Is the length of the Phoenix Checklist part of the problem?
Or is it a completely separate problem?
7 Likes
It’s important to recognize that there are two parts of the CIA, the active part which was created by Ivy League bros and has always been incompetent, racist, and flat out wrong as to what is best for the US; and the analytic part which is well respected. And there is actual evidence of that, because for a brief time in the 1970’s the CIA was required to make unclassified versions of all their reports, such as the 1977 one saying the Soviet Union would have severe economic and social problems at pretty much the time they predicted.
This sounds like something from the second part.
5 Likes
—
And let’s have some Truman as well:
For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.
I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.
With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about “Yankee imperialism,” “exploitive capitalism,” “war-mongering,” “monopolists,” in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.
I well knew the first temporary director of the CIA, Adm. Souers, and the later permanent directors of the CIA, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg and Allen Dulles. These were men of the highest character, patriotism and integrity—and I assume this is true of all those who continue in charge.
But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.
We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.
Excerpt from http://www.maebrussell.com/Prouty/Harry%20Truman’s%20CIA%20article.html
7 Likes
Can you use this problem to solve some other problem?
There was an old woman who swallowed a fly…
ETA: That song is actually a rather apt metaphor for the history of the CIA’s operations.
3 Likes
You deserve your username, I laughed so hard I woke up my neighbors
1 Like
What are examples of unknowns…
A) How much money do we need?
B) How many people do we need?
C) what sort of skill sets do they need?
D) do we rent or buy?
No man. I disagree with your ‘smart guys do not need checklists’ statement.
As someone who is both prone to chaotic skull meltdowns, and working (slowly) towards PMP and Six Sigma certifications, checklists like this are awesome. Companies that manage lots of projects keep tons of templates for them.
Do you need the whole checklist? No. Are you guaranteed to need this checklist? No.
But checklists do serve as an out of the box form of pre-rolled discipline and structure when tackling projects and problems. And writing this stuff down helps you clarify your message to others and assure that you can get feedback on your plans.
As an example of how useful checklists are…
Surgeons are often touted as the smartest guys in the room, but when checklists were introduced into operating rooms in the same way they were entered into the aviation industry, the rate of medical mistakes including ‘left in objects’ (as in doctors forgetting that they sewed in gauze or a scalpel into a patient) dropped dramatically.
Just because you are smart, doesn’t mean that in a chaotic situation you covered most of your bases. In fact the stronger your belief in your infallibility, the more cognitive dissonance might flow in and prevent you from double checking your work.
6 Likes
I tried to find a source for this that actually pinpointed this as something from CIA, and had some great troubles. @markfrauenfelder, from where did you get this? Anyone else with insight into the actual source (and veracity!) of this?
cheers.
1 Like
You can say that again. Also, he was using that bit of wisdom to talk about an utterly foolish and evil undertaking. Sort of a cargo cult approach: “My actions are nonsense, but I will cloak them in the trappings of rational behavior, and then hopefully they will magically become rational behavior.”
4 Likes
