The article discusses professional best practice implications stemming from differing varieties of thinking about black swans. The possibilities of rare event recognition in general, and the conforming limits on the forecasting art that arise from different views of possibilities is addressed. In particular, assessing how different philosophical groundings partner with methodological and practice implications to shape and limit practice possibilities is highlighted. Opportunities for securing comparative advantages—individual, organizational, and societal—are revealed by introducing holistic methods for better recognizing, assessing, and managing emerging large scale, large impact, rare events thought by most people to be unpredictable black swans. To achieve this, the article uses mainstream model and analyst failure dynamics to develop a way to better recognize and time large scale, large impact rare event emergence. As part of this discussion, the article assesses the philosophical and factual bases of Nassim Taleb's famous book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, and argues that strong‐version black swan perspectives (views that meaningful forecasting is not possible in an essentially chaotic world where rare black swans shape reality) are significantly responsible for placing unreal limits on the very possibilities of improving professional best practices, they being grounded in philosophical traditions that needlessly constrain better training, and competent risk assessment and futures forecasting.

Why is the effectiveness of CI programs so low? Poor training of CI analysts, asserts the author. Academics often do an inadequate job of training people to think critically, rigorously, and in creative and alternative ways precisely because many of them lack these skills themselves. For CI to prosper long term within the corporate environment, it needs to be difficult to gain entry into an intelligence training program, and even harder to graduate from it. Similarly, the corporate CI function needs to attract and hire only the top talent from within the company or from outside. To support this, perhaps the foremost characteristic of a CI practitioner needs to be analytical excellence built upon flexibility of mind and a first‐rate intellect, which is only then followed by some of the other characteristics generally assumed to be necessary for a CI analyst. Since CI organizations are not interested in buying a degree but in producing a result, the transformation of ex‐student to future analyst is better served by recruitment and retention standards that focus on active thinking abilities by establishing apprentice‐like arrangements. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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One can probably misjudge or misunderstand more critical history‐making international events, patterns, and trends than contemporary intelligence analysts have, but it is hard to imagine how. The crisis of intelligence, including business intelligence, is part of the larger crisis of incompetence within the social sciences generally. It is a systemic problem involving, as an internal CIA review says, an inability to think “how the other guy thought,” a chronic failure of imagination and personnel, and flaws in information gathering, training, and analysis. Senator Helms says, “Our foreign policy institutions are a complete mess,” and many congressmen, scholars, and practitioners agree.

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