Intelligence After Next: Improving Intelligence Analysis—Adopting the Wisdom of the Crowd

One of the core functions of the Intelligence Community is to assess the likelihood of occurrence—and, by extension, the strategic implications—of uncertain future events. A growing body of evidence suggests large crowd analytic forecasting platforms offer an efficient and practical mechanism for bringing transparency and rigor to geopolitical forecasting. The theory behind crowd wisdom forecasting is that aggregating and summarizing the analytic forecasts of multiple, distributed individuals often leads to consensus estimates that are more accurate than those ventured by individuals in the group. The IC should increasingly adopt crowd-based analytic forecasting as part of its decision-making toolkit to determine whether its analytic judgments are consistently more accurate over time.