Gathering Intelligence Through Human Interaction
The most valuable market information lives in conversations. SOURCE is about learning to access it.
Business development professionals, sales directors, strategy and market intelligence teams, senior managers, and anyone whose work requires them to gather accurate, relevant information through direct interaction with people — clients, prospects, partners, suppliers, competitors, or industry figures. SOURCE is also relevant for CI practitioners who want to develop the human collection dimension of their organization's intelligence capability, and for anyone who has completed SHIELD or SENTINEL and wants to understand the offensive dimension of the same skill set.
The program opens with why people disclose what they disclose, what drives voluntary versus involuntary disclosure, and how the conditions of a conversation determine how much information moves through it. People share information for reasons that are predictable, consistent, and largely unconscious — understanding these dynamics is the foundation of human intelligence collection.
Participants learn how to prepare for a conversation with a specific intelligence objective, how to build rapport quickly and credibly, how to use conversation structure to guide disclosure, and how to recognize and work with the psychological triggers that make people want to share. These are practical skills applicable to any professional conversation.
The program covers the principal elicitation techniques used in professional intelligence collection. Participants learn not only how to apply these techniques but how to recognize when they are being applied to them — creating a dual capability that makes SOURCE directly complementary to SHIELD and SENTINEL.
A dedicated section addresses the ethics and boundaries of human intelligence collection in business. The line between gathering intelligence and manipulating people is real and matters. SOURCE is explicit about where that line is and how to operate effectively on the right side of it.
The organizations that consistently access valuable information understand something about human interaction that most professionals have never been formally taught.
The program is substantially practical — the majority of the afternoon is devoted to exercises and scenario work. The techniques taught in SOURCE only become usable through practice, and the program is designed accordingly.