Preventing the Terrorist Attack: Massive Failure in Collaboration

We have witnessed yet another terrorist attacking a plane. On Christmas Day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, tried to blow up Northwest Flight 253 as it was about to land in Detroit on its way from Amsterdam. And yet again, we’re now learning that officials around the world had information that, if shared, could have prevented this from occurring. According to President Obama, “A systemic failure has occurred…Had this critical information been shared…the warning signs would have triggered red flags, and the suspect would have never been allowed to board that plane for America.” This is a massive failure of collaboration among intelligence and governmental officials. Their job is to piece together fragmented and incomplete information from various parts of the world to make sound judgments about upcoming threats. In this instance, various bits of information were there, but they weren’t pieced together. Information about available intelligence prior to the attack is trickling out. According to the New York Times, the government had intelligence from Yemen noting that something was afoot. The father of Mr. Abdulmutallab had gone to the American Embassy in Nigeria to warn about his son. This resulted in his name being added to a database of some 550,000 people with possible ties to terrorism, but it did not result in his name being entered into the no-fly list. Eerily, the British had banned him from entering the UK, but this piece of information was not made available. No one connected the dots. The worst part of this, though, is how scarily similar this is to the intelligence failure just before the 9/11 attack in 2001. As you may remember, the 9/11 commission report chastised the intelligence community for failing to “connect the dots” back then. In my book Collaboration, I analyzed the collaboration failure among the CIA, the FBI, and other agencies prior to 9/11. Two barriers to collaboration stood out: The Hoarding Barrier: Officials hoarded information. They were unwilling to share what they knew with others, in part because incentive systems penalized such sharing. The report states, “Each agency’s incentives structure opposes sharing.” The Search Barrier: Agents could not easily search for relevant information. As the report put it, “The FBI lacked the ability to know what it knew.” Today, we have to ask how much progress the U.S. intelligence has made over the last eight years. I suspect much less than we thought. The U.S. Government has spent a small fortune on information technology systems, but the problems we face aren’t just about IT. It’s about changing the culture, from one where officials don’t share much to one where they share widely, so that the dots can be connected. How can they do this? Here’s a start: Change the incentives system. Reward people for sharing, and penalize them for not sharing. Recruit new people. Infuse the old culture with new employees who think differently. Rotate jobs. Move employees among agencies (a proven technique to build cross-unit professional networks). I’m sure there are many more things that can be done. I welcome you to share your own suggestions in the comments. Maybe it’s time (finally) for the leaders of the intelligence community to launch a complete overhaul of its entire culture in order to foster effective collaboration — for their benefit and our safety. Morten T. Hansen is the author of Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results (Harvard Business Press, 2009) and is a professor at University of California, Berkeley, School of Information, and at INSEAD, France.

Preventing the Terrorist Attack: Massive Failure in Collaboration

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