In this piece, Colin Reed reviews We Never Expected That: A Comparative Study of Failures in National and Business Intelligence by Dr. Avner Barnea, which establishes a common taxonomy between corporate competitive intelligence and national security intelligence failures.
Further book recommendations can be found in our 2026 Geopolitical Reading List.
The international system today is characterised by pervasive, low-level shock. Pandemics, supply chain collapses, wars redrawing flight paths, weaponized tariff regimes — all of these disruptions are large, visible, and tend to telegraph their approach long before they arrive. Threats like these are in fact so large, so common, and so pervasive that the commonplace term for them is “gray rhinos;” that is to say, threats which are so large they cannot be missed. Yet the consistent tone of today’s governments, corporations, and leaders in the face of these crises seems to be continual surprise. Why?
The question of why organisations fail to act on warnings they demonstrably received is one of the oldest in intelligence studies, but Avner Barnea’s We Never Expected That: A Comparative Study of Failures in National and Business Intelligence (Lexington Books, 2021) is a welcome recent addition that approaches the question from a unique lens, reaching across the boundary between state intelligence and corporate intelligence to look for patterns that neither field has fully grasped on its own. Barnea, a former senior official of the Israel Security Agency and now a research fellow at the University of Haifa, brings a practitioner’s instincts to an academic question, and right away, the book’s core contribution recognizes the irony of the gray rhino and develops around it a typology of surprise. To Barnea, “diffused surprise” describes situations where the intelligence target itself is hard to identify; situations in which the threat is ambient, emergent, and lacks a clear return address, as with the First Intifada that erupted across the Palestinian territories in 1987. “Concentrated surprise,” on the other hand, describes situations where the adversary is known and watched, but analysts misjudge its capabilities or intentions, as in the September 11 attacks. Barnea covers his bases establishing this framework within the national security field, but then applies this same frame to the corporate world, examining IBM’s near-collapse in 1993, when the company’s leadership failed to internalize a transformation in the computing market that competitors like Dell and Toshiba had already absorbed. The method is comparative and case-driven. By setting national security failures alongside business failures and asking what structural features they share, Barnea is looking for diagnostic patterns that hold across domains.
The intelligence failure literature is deep and, at this point, fairly well-established. Richard Betts argued decades ago that intelligence failures are essentially inevitable, and indeed, baked into the ambiguity of evidence and the institutional politics of decision-making. Robert Jervis, examining the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq WMD debacle, traced failures to cognitive pathologies and organizational cultures that struggled to probe their own assumptions. Erik Dahl pushed back on the idea that warnings simply get lost in the noise, arguing that what matters most is whether tactical-level intelligence reaches decision-makers who are willing to act on it. Barnea is working in this tradition, but he brings something genuinely useful to it in the insistence on cross-domain comparison. Most of the intelligence failure canon stays firmly within the national security world, and competitive intelligence literature rarely engages with it in any serious way. Barnea’s framework, particularly the diffused and concentrated surprise typology, gains real traction precisely because it is tested against cases from both sides.
The book’s strongest suit is the seriousness with which it treats this comparison. Too often, writers who straddle the national security and business worlds do so with a light touch, tossing Sun Tzu quotes into airport paperbacks claiming “ten strategies to improve your offer now!” Barnea is not in this camp. His IBM analysis is particularly rewarding, depicting how a dominant firm’s leadership fell prey to the same cognitive pathologies — confirmation bias, anchoring, groupthink — that intelligence agencies exhibit when they convince themselves that an adversary simply must behave rationally. Barnea’s practitioner background lends this credibility. He has watched organisations fail from the inside, and the book reflects that experience in its patience with institutional detail and its refusal to reduce failure to a single explanatory variable.
The book has limitations, though, and the most consequential is a narrowness of scope on the business side. Barnea’s corporate case studies are drawn from the world of competitive intelligence, an aspect of sensemaking about the world that is very well understood as an outgrowth of marketing science and much less well considered as an actual intelligence discipline. This is valuable, but it skips a significant and much older tradition of private sector engagement with geopolitical intelligence. As (Encyclopedia Geopolitica’s own) Dr. Lewis Sage-Passant documents in Beyond States and Spies: The Secret Intelligence Services of the Private Sector (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), corporations have been building their own intelligence functions to sense and navigate geopolitical risk for at least as long as states have. Multinationals operating across unstable regions, extractive industries managing sovereign risk, and financial institutions tracking sanctions regimes have all through the ages developed sophisticated practices for anticipating the kinds of systemic shocks that Barnea is concerned with. By focusing on competitive intelligence, Barnea misses a closer and more instructive point of comparison with the national security world. A firm trying to anticipate a coup or a sanctions escalation is behaving in a manner structurally much nearer to that of a national intelligence agency than a firm tracking a competitor’s product launches. More lessons could be drawn, and the diffused/concentrated framework could be tested more rigorously, if Barnea had widened his aperture to include this dimension.
Despite this quibble, Barnea has opened a productive line of inquiry. The world he is writing about, in which “diffuse” surprise is every bit as pervasive and challenging as “concentrated” surprise, is a world where the old boundaries between national security intelligence and business intelligence are dissolving fast. Governments increasingly need to understand commercial dynamics to make sense of strategic competition, and firms increasingly need geopolitical awareness to protect their operations and investments. The analysts and strategists who sit at this intersection need frameworks that travel across domains, and Barnea’s diffused/concentrated typology is a genuine contribution to that toolkit. The book deserves a readership beyond the academic intelligence studies community where it has so far mainly circulated. It also deserves successors willing to push the comparative project further, with fresh cases and a broader interpretation of what non-government intelligence can fully encompass.
We Never Expected That: A Comparative Study of Failures in National and Business Intelligence is available now from Bloomsbury, who generously provided Encyclopedia Geopolitica with a review copy.
Further book recommendations can be found in our 2026 Geopolitical Reading List.
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Colin Reed is the Chief Intelligence Officer of Clock&Cloud, a software company building geopolitical risk management and intelligence tools for business. He previously led geopolitical risk management at Salesforce, and specializes in strategic intelligence and global planning for businesses and executives. He is a dual graduate of both Russian History and International Relations from North Carolina State University as well as postgraduate in International Security from Georgetown University. Colin previously worked a senior intelligence analyst for the US government and leads several industry groups professional associations on the intersectionality of multinational business and international affairs.
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