CI Lessons from Winston Churchill

In May 1940, Winston Churchill was elected prime minister of Great Britain as the Nazis planned their summer invasion of the British Isles. The Nazis had a vastly superior war machine and were confident about another easy victory. They did not take into account Churchill’s ability to visualize and quickly implement an early warning system to gather, consolidate, and analyze competitive information.

Military analysts projected that Britain needed a minimum of 1,200 fighter planes to defend against the Nazi bombing. However, the Royal Air Force (RAF) had been reduced to 620 planes after losing 500 in a vain attempt to hold the Nazis back from France.

British analysts at Bletchley Park had broken the Nazi code used to encrypt messages providing up to date information about planned sorties into British air space. In addition, Churchill set up a system of on-the-coast watchers who provided human source information in addition to radar for electronic monitoring. The human and electronic source data were combined and analyzed in a map room, where Women of the Auxiliary Air Force (WAAFs) moved the buttons representing friendly, unidentified, and enemy aircraft every 5 minutes on the map table. The resulting visual was easily understood and up to date.

Churchill set up communications links with the RAF squadrons with notations on which planes were 30 minutes, 5 minutes, or 2 minutes from deployment. The quickly grasped map intelligence allowed Churchill and other British leaders to leverage the limited RAF resources effectively against the competition. The Nazis decided to defer the invasion until 1941 and the rest is history as we say.

What are the lessons for managers today:

• Use all appropriate sources, both human and automated
• Combine the various sources of data into an analyzable whole
• Check the various sources of data against each other to insure data quality
• Analyze the data quickly
• Create a format for intelligence delivery that is easily understood by decision makers

In the 1940’s, nobody called Churchill’s map and its inputs CI, but it did contain the major elements of an effective CI system. Like Churchill, managers today can leverage limited resources to win against larger competitors by establishing a superior process to gather, analyze, and leverage superior competitive intelligence.

For more information on Churchill’s intelligence system, please see “Churchill’s Decision-Making Environment” by Mark Kozak-Holland, parts I and II, published in DM Direct Nov 2005 and May 2006.

Comments

[John Cass]

I found this post particularly interesting because my Aunt Ethel served in the war room during the war.