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William Chip Usher spent more than three decades at the CIA, including service as a senior intelligence executive. Today, as a Senior Advisor to the Special Competitive Studies Project, he focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence, intelligence, and national security. So when Usher opened a recent episode of Intel at the Edge by describing Narrative Intelligence as a new area of growing interest for the Intelligence Community, it framed a larger question: What does intelligence need to become when narratives themselves can shape strategic outcomes?
Usher explored that question with EdgeTheory founder Joe Stradinger, whose work in the information environment stretches back to the early days of online communities and who later helped establish the National Center for Narrative Intelligence. Their conversation ranged from cognitive warfare and artificial intelligence to foreign influence, data centers, measures of effectiveness and the changing role of open-source intelligence.
Running through those issues was a fundamental idea: Understanding what is being said is no longer enough. Organizations increasingly need to understand how narratives form, who is driving them, how they move through the information environment and, ultimately, how they affect perception, behavior and decisions.
Those who control information control perception; those who control perception control the narrative; and those who control the narrative control the outcome.
— Joe Stradinger, Founder, EdgeTheory
For years, organizations have invested in tools designed to monitor social media, news coverage, and other publicly available information. Those capabilities can answer important questions about what people are talking about, what is trending, and what is happening right now. Narrative Intelligence asks a different set of questions: Where did a narrative originate? How has it evolved? Which sources and communities are carrying it? Who is amplifying it? What emotions or perceptions is it activating? And is it beginning to influence behavior or decisions?
This distinction requires moving beyond the moment to take what Stradinger calls the long look. Most monitoring is necessarily focused on what is happening now, but by the time a narrative becomes sufficiently large or controversial to command attention, many of the signals that explain how it developed have already occurred. Narrative Intelligence requires a steady stare across the information environment, observing narratives before, during and after events to identify patterns and understand how they change over time.
The objective isn't simply to identify the loudest narrative. It is to recognize what is beginning to emerge before it becomes obvious — what Stradinger describes as the kindling before the fire.
The need for that early visibility is becoming more urgent because artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed the speed and scale of influence. The underlying chain isn't new: information drives perception, perception drives narrative, and narrative drives outcomes. What has changed is the speed at which that chain can operate.
Human beings have always used communications technologies to influence one another. The written word expanded the reach of ideas. Radio and television created mass audiences. Social media dramatically accelerated distribution. Generative AI represents another step change because content can now be created, adapted and distributed at extraordinary speed and scale.
AI has literally collapsed the influence chain.
— Joe Stradinger, Founder, EdgeTheory
What once took generations, decades or years can now happen in seconds. That creates an intelligence challenge that cannot be solved simply by collecting more information. The information environment is already saturated. The challenge is determining what matters, where it came from, how it is moving and what effect it may be having.
The raw material for Narrative Intelligence can include social media, but it also encompasses news coverage, blogs, forums, official statements and other publicly available information. The individual post, article or video is not necessarily the object of analysis. The narrative is.
That means examining large volumes of individual pieces of information to understand the larger ideas connecting them and how those ideas evolve over time. A sudden increase in conversation may be organic. It may reflect a legitimate public concern. It may result from coordinated amplification. Or an outside actor may be exploiting an existing disagreement for strategic purposes. Those possibilities can coexist.
For intelligence organizations, the challenge is therefore not simply observing activity. It is understanding the patterns, sources and potential effects behind that activity. Narrative Intelligence provides a framework for making those dynamics visible while they are still developing.
For someone encountering a video, article or social post online, its origin may be almost invisible. Content can move through multiple platforms, communities and accounts before reaching an eventual audience. That makes a deceptively simple question fundamental to Narrative Intelligence: Who's behind this?
Attribution examines the sources participating in a narrative, how information moves among them, and whether patterns indicate coordinated or synthetic activity. This matters because foreign actors do not necessarily need to invent a controversy to exploit it. Existing grievances can be identified and amplified, competing positions can be intensified, and synthetic content can be introduced into an already contentious information environment.
The objective may not always be persuading an audience that one particular position is correct. Intensifying division, uncertainty, and confusion can have an effect, making it harder for organizations and individuals to understand what matters and make informed decisions.
The rapidly intensifying debate surrounding AI data centers demonstrates how narrative competition can move from the information environment into real-world decision environments. The issue sits at the intersection of technology, energy, economic development, environmental concerns, national competitiveness and local politics.
Communities are asking legitimate questions about electricity costs, environmental effects, infrastructure and other consequences of large-scale data center development. At the same time, those debates occur within a much larger strategic environment in which the United States and China are competing for AI leadership and foreign actors can have incentives to amplify domestic divisions.
That distinction is important. Narrative Intelligence is not designed to determine that criticism of a data center is legitimate or illegitimate simply because an adversary may also amplify it. The intelligence questions are different: Who is participating in the information environment surrounding the issue? How are the narratives changing? Who is amplifying them? And what effect are they having on decisions?
For a data center developer, the decision environment might be a city council considering a proposed project. For an energy provider, it could be a regulatory proceeding. For an investor, it could be a capital allocation decision. For a foreign adversary, the objective could be to exploit an existing debate to increase division or impede strategic development. Narratives become strategically important when they begin affecting those decisions.
Views, likes, shares, and mentions can measure activity, but they do not necessarily measure influence. The Intelligence Community's traditional concept of Measures of Effectiveness (MOE) provides a useful way to think about the distinction: The important question is not simply whether a narrative traveled, but whether it produced an effect.
Measuring cognitive effects is difficult, but persistent observation provides something essential to understanding them: a baseline. If analysts understand the narrative environment before an event or influence effort, they can examine what changes afterward. Different narratives may gain or lose prominence. New sources or communities may enter the conversation. Emotional characteristics may shift. Behaviors may change. Decision-makers may respond differently.
This is another reason the long look matters. Without understanding the environment before something happens, it becomes much harder to determine what actually changed afterward. Ultimately, the most consequential measure isn't how much content appeared or how many people engaged with it. It is whether the narrative contributed to a change in perception, behavior or a decision.
Organizations already have access to extraordinary amounts of information. The problem is making sense of that information early enough to act. Narrative Intelligence adds another layer of visibility by revealing the narrative structures within the information environment: what is emerging, how it is changing, who is driving it and where it may be having an effect.
For national security organizations, that can mean earlier visibility into foreign influence and cognitive warfare. For companies, it can mean understanding emerging reputation risks, competitive narratives, stakeholder concerns and issues capable of changing regulatory, investment or customer decisions.
The missions may be different, but the underlying problem is remarkably similar. Decision-makers need to understand the information environment surrounding the decisions they are trying to make. Narrative Intelligence makes that environment visible while it is still moving — and provides the decision advantage to act before the narrative plays out.
One of the central questions surrounding Narrative Intelligence is where it fits within the Intelligence Community. The answer is still developing because narratives cross traditional organizational boundaries. They can affect diplomacy, military operations, economic competition, critical infrastructure, technology policy, and commercial organizations.
That makes Narrative Intelligence difficult to place neatly inside one existing intelligence function. But it also helps explain why the discipline is attracting increasing attention. The information environment has become consequential to operations and decisions, AI is dramatically accelerating the creation and movement of information within it, and foreign adversaries recognize the strategic value of shaping perception.
Responding to that environment requires more than another monitoring tool. It requires tradecraft, persistent data and analysis, attribution, measures of effect and analysts trained to understand narratives and the environments in which they operate. It also requires collaboration among government, academia and industry — one of the reasons the National Center for Narrative Intelligence was established.
Narrative Intelligence is moving from an emerging capability toward a discipline built around understanding one of the most consequential elements of modern strategic competition: the narratives shaping what people perceive, believe and ultimately decide to do.
Watch William Usher's complete conversation with Joe Stradinger on Intel at the Edge from the Special Competitive Studies Project.
Narrative Intelligence becomes most valuable when it moves from understanding the information environment to helping decision-makers act on it. See how EdgeTheory turns emerging narratives, source attribution, patterns and measures of effectiveness into Decision-Ready Narrative Intelligence.
Image Credit: Special Competitive Studies Project. Special Competitive Studies Project https://www.scsp.ai
