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Your brain is very good at reaching conclusions. That's exactly the problem.
Course Description:
Intuition is fast, pattern-matching, and confident. It's also the source of most analytic errors — confirmation bias, anchoring, premature closure, mirror imaging. When you're under time pressure with incomplete information, your mind will give you an answer. It just won't always tell you whether it's right.
Structured analytic techniques exist to slow that process down at the moments that matter. Not to replace judgment — to discipline it.
What This Course Covers
This isn't a survey of techniques you'll read about once and forget. It's a working course. Over five days, you'll build a practical toolkit of structured methods — covering creativity and idea generation, organising complex problems, scenario thinking, diagnostic analysis, and deliberate challenge techniques — and you'll practise applying them to realistic analytic problems.
The goal isn't to memorise a list of SATs. It's to know which technique to reach for, when to reach for it, and how to apply it under real analytic conditions.
This course offers intelligence professionals insight into structuring analysis to generate better assessments. We explore structured techniques designed to generate creativity, increase problem-solving potential, and project forward into prediction and forecasting analysis.
What You'll Learn
By the end of this course, you'll be able to:
Explain what structured analytic techniques are, why they work, and where intuition tends to fail without them
Select the right technique for a given analytic problem — and know when structure helps versus when it slows you down unnecessarily
Apply creativity and idea generation techniques to break out of conventional thinking on hard problems
Use structuring and organisation techniques to manage complex, multi-strand analytic problems
Generate, evaluate, and explore scenarios to support forecasting and prediction
Apply diagnostic and problem-solving techniques to identify what you don't know and what you might be wrong about
Use challenge and contrarian techniques to stress-test your own analysis before someone else does
Course Outline:
Day 1:
Introduction to Structured Analysis
Creativity and Idea Generation Techniques
Day 2:
Structuring and Organisation Techniques
Day 3:
Scenario Generation, Evaluation, and Exploration Techniques
Day 4:
Diagnostic and Problem Solving Techniques
Day 5:
Challenge and Contrarian Techniques
Who this course is for:
Intelligence and security analysts at any experience level who want to move beyond intuitive, unstructured analysis — or who work in environments where the stakes of analytic error are high enough to justify the investment in rigour.
This course works as an introduction for analysts who haven't worked formally with structured techniques before. It also works as a deep reset for experienced analysts who've been taught the names of techniques but never had the space to really practise them.
Course Prerequisites:
No formal prerequisites. Participants should have a working understanding of cognition, cognitive bias, logical fallacy, and critical thinking before attending. This course builds directly on that foundation — it doesn't re-teach it.
We strongly recommend completing our Critical Thinking for Analysis course first if you're not confident that grounding is already in place. Participants who arrive unfamiliar with how bias operates in analytic reasoning will struggle to get full value from the structured techniques this course teaches.
Format and Duration:
In-Person: 5 days, 7 hours of instruction per day
Virtual: 5 days, 3.5 hours of instruction per day
Both formats cover the same techniques. The difference is how deeply you get to practise them.
Structured analytic techniques are learned by doing, not by reading. In-person participants work through practical exercises with real-time instructor guidance and peer discussion — which is where the real understanding happens. The virtual format covers the full curriculum, but with much less hands-on application time.
For a techniques course specifically, that distinction matters. If your team needs to actually use these methods under pressure, in-person gives you substantially more practice at that skill.
What You Take Away:
Every participant leaves with:
A certificate of completion
Slide handouts in PDF format
A set of worksheets, checklists, and job aids you can use in real analytic work
Six months of post-course support to answer questions and help you implement what you learned on the job
Ready to Schedule This for Your Team?
This course is available for individual enrollment and private organisational delivery. Contact us to discuss your team's needs and find a format that works.
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