The Astronauts & The Spies - Part II
Exploring consilience through chameleonic shapeshifters and nodal players
Part of our continuing ‘flâneuring’ series - where we explore and ruminate. This essay explores what it means to navigate effortlessly through our twisted, sinewy world — and the personality archetypes that are most poised to win.
“Modern societies cannot be described without recognizing them as having a fibrous, thread-like, wiry, stringy, ropy, capillary character that is never captured by the notions of levels, layers, territories, spheres, categories, structure, systems.”
— Bruno Latour
IN OUR PREVIOUS essay, we spoke about the Astronaut archetype — relentless thrill seekers hooked onto ambitious goals. Consider the following exploration to be a follow up, a mirror archetype to the Astronaut. Where Astronauts look up to the skies, Spies focus on the ground-level, successfully weaving through the many structures of our society.
The Watchtower
HAVE YOU EVER considered word etymologies?
Unless you’re a linguist or a word-nerd (or both - like Susie Dent), I doubt many of us have. The cool thing is that etymology can describe the evolution of common words, and all the myriad meanings that those words have taken on throughout their use.
Consider the word Spy. It shares a common derivation with the word specula which is Latin for ‘watchtower’. Other words that share the same derivation include ‘speculate’, ‘introspect’, ‘telescope’ and also ‘speculum’ which is Latin for ‘looking-glass’. A mirror.
A fascinating theme emerges — the Spy has sight. Even in Sanskrit, the word spasati (for ‘sees’) is considered a cousin to the root word.
But what is a Spy’s sight about?
If we are to treat it as an archetype, we think a Spy’s sight is about two things: 1) information, and 2) people.
Spies are top-notch intelligence gatherers, and even though they may engage in deception for their work, what we’ll focus on today is their ability to see through people and situations, and to ask the right questions in a shifting environment.
Spies and Spymasters throughout history are renowned for being exceptional information gatherers. This intelligence helps them make decisions and navigate a fibrous landscape with clear-sightedness.
CONSIDER A PANOPTICON. The physical structure of this invention (first popularized by Jeremy Bentham in 1791), involves a central watchtower enclosed in a circular dome-like structure. Guards in this radial jail can at any time peer into the cells of the inmates from their central watchtower. It’s an apt metaphor for complete surveillance.
But there’s another metaphor hiding here.
People who embody the Spy archetype are information-voyeurs. They are like the guards in the central watchtower, but instead of surveying the inmates in a jail, they take in information from many sources. They can’t help it — they want to know more.
Say you’re an economic analyst. How does embodying a Spy mindset help you? A snippet from Stansfield Turner (ex-Director of CIA, 1977-81) sheds some light:
Economic intelligence can range from the broad trends that foreign businesses are pursuing, all the way to what individual foreign competitors are bidding against U.S. corporations on specific contracts overseas. 1
This is how a Spy thinks about analysis. Not just broad strokes, but minute details.
The job of a Spy is intelligence gathering, and like many things it’s a muscle that can be trained. The Oxford Handbook of Expertise has a relevant section on the steps that intelligence analysts take:
To conduct an intelligence analysis (IA), analysts perform multiple perceptual and cognitive tasks to understand the past, present, and/or future states of some real-world environment or situation. They attempt to illuminate the future (Taylor, 2005) and provide actionable intelligence (Scholtz et al., 2006) by compiling, reviewing, and processing as much information as they can. 2
A strongly honed sense of sight is needed to understand the past, present and future state of any given situation, and expert Spies have perfected that ability — allowing them to ascertain situations by asking the right questions that probe at second and third-order thinking.
Take for example the thought process of Aharon Farkash (the head of the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate from 2002 to 2006), which captures this logic:
How you asked and what you asked mattered a lot. And the problem with the CIA or almost any bureaucracy, Farkash felt, whether it was IBM or the Department of the Treasury, is that people have the habit of asking the wrong questions, of looking in the wrong places and in the wrong way.
So, shortly after coming into office, Farkash started directing his spies to look at details that his predecessors had thought irrelevant or regarded as second-order concerns: Were people out shopping in Beirut (a sign of the Lebanese economy’s health)? What was intellectual life like on the streets of Damascus? How were Iraqi refugees inside Syria settling in?
— Joshua Cooper Ramo, “The Age of the Unthinkable”
You can’t access the right information (at the right level of detail) without asking the right questions.
The Network
THE IDEAL SPY is always scanning, acutely aware of the smallest details: a situation, a gesture, a face, a passing comment.
When researchers studied intelligence analysts, they determined that the best ones have situational awareness (SA). Those that embody the Spy archetype possess this too.
Academic literature3 defines SA as “the perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning and the projection of their status in the near future” — which is to say that the Spy sees everything, analyzes it deeply and uses that information to make predictions. Remember: spy / speculate share the same root word.
In many ways, the Spy is a writer — making dynamic inquiries about the world. But soon the Spy will realize that each inquiry will beget further inquiries, which in turn will lead to even more searching. The scope of their work will expand.
That’s because the Spy is embedded into a networked world.
In this web of people and information, the Spy is just one node, and its their job to become a nodal player. Nodal players are central to the network and they have a certain degree of the power and influence over that network.
These players maintain substantive ties with hundreds of relevant global players in multiple domains. This means not only knowing the domains of these people, but also bringing the full force of psychological analysis to bear on these relationships. A true spy is mimetic — adapting himself to the object of his study — a chameleonic shapeshifter perhaps.
This dynamic is embodied most strongly in the world of international diplomacy.
Take the example of Sweden. Even though it’s a smaller state, the Swedes have cemented their ties on the international stage by building up their state’s node centrality. Sweden varies its contacts, and builds linkages between other nodes (states) in the global network4.
That’s why when it came to the matter of North Korean disarmament, Sweden had more influence than others, because it effectively maintained a string of contacts in Pyongyang. It’s strong ties with the U.S5 allowed it to broker deals or carry information — and this gave Sweden a high degree of influence on others.
When you become a nodal player, information flows through to you.
Plus, nodal players have an ‘agenda-setting’ influence on their networks. They get to decide how information flows, and who gets to hear that information.
These highly networked people have better intuition, because their network can help them update their priors. But for that to happen, the information sharing between the network needs to happen more frequently.
Hence the informal maxim: “Always be scanning”.
Finally, it’s worth noting that Spies are trespassers. They trespass in disciplines that are not their own, in search of connections. They must weave an Ariadne’s thread6 as they traverse the network of people and information. Like the ambitious astronauts, Spies exhibit their ambition by going wide, chaining beads of knowledge together.
If you mix the two archetypes together, you get a potent combination that can weather storms, push boundaries and form connections in an evolving world.
The Rocketman, and the Networker — working in tandem to achieve the holy grail:
Consilience.
Foreign Affairs, “Intelligence for the New World Order”.
These and other related snippets are from Chapter 32: “Expertise in Intelligence Analysis” by Michael P. Jenkins and Jonathan D. Pfautz in The Oxford Handbook of Expertise.
“Endsley, M. R. (1988). Design and evaluation for situation awareness enhancement. Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting Proceedings 32, 97–101.”
This example (and others from the world of network diplomacy) were taken from Michael W. Manulak’s paper: “Why and How to Succeed at Network Diplomacy”.
Foreign Policy, “Why Trump needs the Swedes in Pyongyang”.
Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos of Crete, fell in love with Theseus, a Greek hero who came to Crete to slay the Minotaur (a half-man/half-beast monster who lived in a subterranean labyrinth). Ariadne gave Theseus a ball of yarn which he unwound as he entered the Labyrinth to slay the Minotaur. After slaying the beat, Theseus followed the thread back to entrance of the maze, rejoined Ariadne, and successfully escaped.
Consider Ariadne’s thread a metaphor for leaving breadcrumbs when doing research.