What your intelligence interviewers can do right now!

What three things can your intelligence interviewers do right now that could markedly improve their intellligence product and their critical evaluation of that product?

Well, I dedicated my PhD research to understanding interviewer-informant interactions and the psychology we, as interviewers, can use to our advantage.

And what three key recommendations would I make?

1. Record everything. As interviewers we tend to focus on what is said, but sometimes, how it is said can be just as important!

2. Analyse the narrative. The role informants assign to themselves when telling a story can be a good indicator of whether or not they're lying.

3. Adopt the R-WITS-US model. This bespoke interview model doesn't just focus on building rapport or improving recall, instead it encourages a holistic approach to informant intelligence gathering, with a unique emphasis on things such as welfare and tasking.