The Applicability of Army Design Methodology to the Federal Bureau of Investigation

The FBI has a long history and established culture as the pre-eminent law enforcement agency in the world. Beginning in the late 1930s, the FBI assumed responsibility for espionage and domestic intelligence investigations. Abuses of domestic intelligence investigations in the 1950s and 1960s led to the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s. Those hearings showed the FBI had abused its investigative powers, and several senior FBI officials were indicted. Subsequently, intelligence investigations and programs were avoided by most FBI personnel, and the intelligence program was unable to detect and prevent the 9/11 attacks. Following 9/11, the FBI sought to transform itself into an effective domestic intelligence agency by implementing a series of bureaucratic programs and policies. Eight years later, the Fort Hood attack, and the subsequent Congressional report, indicated the FBI's transformation needed to be accelerated. Had the concept of design been available to FBI Intelligence Program leaders and applied to the problem, the need to deal with the FBI's law enforcement culture concurrently with establishment of bureaucratic policies and procedures would have been apparent. By applying design to the Intelligence Program, a need for post-9/11 cultural transformation becomes clear. As the world becomes both more complex and interconnected, the FBI needs to adapt and evolve to meet new challenges. By developing and applying its own design concept, the FBI can avoid the transformational problems of the past ten years in the future. The FBI will continue to be faced with complex, ill-structured problems, and can benefit by establishing a design process to apply to those problems. Can design be applied to complex, ill-structured problems within the bureaucracy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)? Should the FBI develop a design methodology to enable the organization to more quickly adapt to emerging problems? The FBI has traditionally used a bureaucratic approach to solving problems, but an increasingly complex and interconnected society requires agility and flexibility. Developed since the mid-1990s by the Israelis, and now modified into Army doctrine, "Design is a methodology of applying critical and creative thinking to understand, visualize and describe complex, ill structured problems and develop approaches to solve them." Design is an approach which considers the environment, problem and solution as a connected web in which a change to one area affects the others. The commander leads and encourages discourse toward the development of a narrative which explains the logic of the environment and becomes the basis of the operation. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has added several new divisions and directorates since September 11, 2001, each to address a complex, ill-structured problem. For example, prior to September 11, the FBI had no Security Division, Intelligence Directorate, or Records Management Division. Each was established in response to a problem exposed in a significant negative event, the arrest of FBI agent/Soviet spy Robert Hanssen, the intelligence failures of 9/11, and the failure to provide investigative records to Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh during his judicial process. The issues exposed by these events were deeply rooted in FBI culture and history, factors which a design process can identify and engage. Could the FBI benefit from the application of the Army's doctrinal design process? Using FBI history and a variety of government reports to provide a basis for FBI culture and the need for transformation, this paper will apply design to the FBI's Intelligence Program as it existed on September 12, 2001 to demonstrate the potential for design and the need for FBI development and application of a design methodology.