review: The Head Game

In The Head Game author Philip Mudd, a former deputy director of the CIA Counterterrorist Center, ex–National Security Council staff member and former senior executive at the FBI National Security Branch, distils his decades of analytical decision making experience for the U.S. intelligence community, into a neat and tidy “instruction manual” for the modern reader. Mudd offers an incredibly readable, uncomplex yet compelling style of instructive writing, interwoven with anecdotes from his many years of service in the upper echelons of the world’s foremost law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Despite acknowledged exhaustive vetting of the text by his former employers, the reader is imbued with a privileged sense of glimpsing “behind the curtain” into the inner-workings of these historically secretive institutions.

The Head Game, published in April 2015, was released amidst a flood of similarly themed books from retired military and intelligence community professionals seeking to make their contribution to the increasingly transparent complexion of the modern American intelligence landscape. Unlike former Director of National Intelligence, General James Clapper’s Facts and Fears, and former CIA and NSA director, General Michael Hayden’s Playing to the Edge, Mudd’s Head Game is less biographical and more instructional - more reminiscent of former FBI negotiator, Chris Voss’s Never Split the Difference.

In public comments, General Hayden has acknowledged the vital importance, particularly in the current political climate, of the intelligence community (IC) working to improve transparency by providing the general public with deeper insights about what it is they do, and how they go about it. Head Game successfully manages to do just that, without the IC’s vetting process and its strict controls over revelation of “sources and methods” compromising the continuity and effectiveness of the author’s “storytelling”.

While delivering genuine insights into the analytical decision making processes employed by professionals working within the FBI and CIA, Mudd doesn’t shy away from detailing instances in which agency and bureau analysis, interpretation, and decisions proved catastrophically wrong. Preferring to use those failures as lessons that strengthen his arguments, Mudd advocates a high efficiency analytical decision making methodology - the titular HEAD game. Mudd states his aim early in the text; to challenge and improve the reader’s decision making capabilities, and then methodically goes about achieving this ambition.

The HEAD game is divided into five primary lessons posed as questions:

1. What is the question that actually needs to be answered?

2. What are the drivers?

3. How is performance being measured

4. What about the data?

5. What are we missing?

Mudd seems determined to make The Head Game an active exercise for the reader, challenging us to participate, to play through scenarios, respond to questions, and to question our own assumptions, mindsets and decision-making habits, instincts and processes. The reader’s interest and efforts are sustained throughout the more demanding chapters by strategic deployment of anecdotes and metaphors, cleverly interwoven with exercises during which the author prompts the reader to attempt one of the many strategies or techniques offered up in the text. Whether describing the challenge of a trout swimming upstream, dissecting the decision to buy a “family-friendly” car, or coming to terms with IC failures in predicting the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the reader is provided a real world, relatable, reference point to frame the often complex analytical systems introduced by the author.

In some instances, Mudd approaches the “lesson” in a style reminiscent of the Harvard Business School case study method; a scenario is described to the reader, after which questions are posed about how the situational problems should be tackled. While analysing the grooming of America’s second ever suicide bomber, Shirwa Ahmed, and the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, the reader is simultaneously learning and applying the “head” game lessons. Mudd drip-feeds additional details and clues, sometimes posing hypothetical questions designed to help guide the reader to the eventual, or ideal, outcome. Like the Harvard case method, this approach proves effective for both demonstrating the method and retention of the information offered.

Taking the stylistic variability of the text further, Mudd employs dot points and checklists to breakdown problems and concepts, effectively delineating between traditional prose and instructional analytical techniques. On the page, these distinctions highlight, for the reader, the most critical information to be absorbed, and prove incredibly useful when quickly scanning the text for a “refresher” of the chapter’s main themes.

While each of the lessons in the book are viewed to a great extent through the lens of a career intelligence professional, the first, what is the question that actually needs to be answered?, is very much anchored in the perspective of an intelligence analyst and how they should tackle their fundamental duties. Answering the right question, not necessarily the question asked, Mudd suggests, is often the greatest challenge for analysts producing intelligence products for principals and policymakers. The author emphasises the critical importance for analysts in providing decision makers not just with “a crisp summation of the facts” but a “decision advantage”. This advantage can be achieved, Mudd suggests, if the analyst approaches the problem from “right to left”. The “right” side being what the decision maker’s problem is, and the “left” side being what we, as experts or analysts, already know.

Perhaps intentionally self-referential, or in the current zeitgeist what might be called “meta”, Mudd applies his right to left decision-making technique to the process of writing a book. He demonstrates the efficiency, for the author, of determining the “destination” of the characters and then reverse engineering their “journeys” to that point. Mudd even proposes an approach in which readers experiment with starting a novel at the final chapter, before returning to the beginning and reading the text, now enlightened by the knowledge of how it concludes, more attuned to the subtextual clues and signals littered throughout. Testing this strategy could have proved a “time saver” in the case of The Head Game as the final pages of the text contain a succinct summation of the book’s contents and a reference guide for putting the high efficiency analytical decision making into practice - but where’s the fun in that?

Delving into relatively recent psychological research, Mudd introduces to the reader the certainty bias, hindsight bias, and availability bias, detailing how each can influence and undermine our objectivity when attempting to make objective decisions. Recognising and overcoming biases, Mudd writes, is fundamental to successful analytical decision making. Though not directly referenced, the influence and research of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, most notably Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, is clearly evident in Mudd’s amalgamation of heuristics and biases within his “head game” methodology. The work of Richard’s J. Heuer, Jr in Psychology of Intelligence Analysis seems also to have informed Mudd’s dissection of the psychological challenges and impediments to objective and efficient decision making, particularly passages on the “death knell for analysis” of “incremental change”.

Mudd is critical of the notion that decision making by “subject-matter experts” can be “more art than science”, dedicating an entire chapter to explaining how metrics can be devised and applied to any decision making process to avoid “certainty traps”. Mudd argues, that no decision making process, individual or group, should preference either “science” (pure data/testing/red-teaming/precedents) or “art” (interpretation/expertise/experience/ intuition) one over the other, but rather, combine the two. Mudd advocates the inclusion of non-subject-matter experts in the process of group decision making, precisely to scrutinise and test the tendencies of experts to “approximate” and “assume” based on their extensive experience, and to increase the rigour of critical thinking applied to solving complex problems.

Mudd acknowledges that a single read of The Head Game is unlikely to affect any long-lasting material change on the reader’s decision making processes, reminding the reader often throughout the book that repetition is the key to success. He implores us to revisit the text, and to practice the techniques contained within if we genuinely hope to improve our “head game”. It could be argued that The Head Game itself, is an incredibly strong demonstration of Mudd’s argument for combining “art and science”. The text incorporates a broad range of data, divided into baskets, tested for accuracy and objectivity, and interpreted and analysed by an expert in the subject matter. The assessments are scrutinised from different perspectives, and flaws and gaps acknowledged. In The Head Game, Mudd provides the reader with a comprehensive intelligence “product”, confident he has delivered a “decision advantage”. Ultimately, determining what to do next is a decision left up to us, the readers.