Structured Analytic Techniques

Seventy-five years of patient work, and a door held open for you.

Premortems, red-teaming, alternative competing hypotheses, disciplined countermeasures to known failure modes of expert judgment.

Classification

Methodological lineage

1990s–

Brief / 01

Context record

Structured Analytic Techniques (SATs) were codified by Richards Heuer and Randolph Pherson, drawing on Heuer's work at the CIA, as a portfolio of small, repeatable methods that each target a known cognitive failure: anchoring, premature convergence, availability bias, mirror-imaging, and the corrosion of dissent inside high-trust groups.

Each technique is modest in scope. Their power is cumulative, a salon that runs a premortem, a key-assumptions check, and an alternative-competing-hypotheses pass before convening tends to surface failure modes the original framing would have hidden.

Every Strategic Salon and Question Network on Futurecraft is built around at least one SAT, chosen for the failure mode most likely to distort that particular conversation.

Origin

Heuer & Pherson · CIA / CQ Press

Applied To

· Premortems
· Red-teaming
· Alternative competing hypotheses

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