ANALYSIS OF THE PROCESS OF DECOMPOSITION AND VISUALIZATION IN THE ANALYTICAL WORK OF THE INTELLIGENT

Abstract

One of the most obvious limitations that analysts will face in their work is the limit to how much information most people can hold in their minds and think about at once. Imagine that you have to make a difficult decision. You make a list of pros and cons. But when it comes time to make a decision, the lists can be so long that you won't be able to consider all the pros and cons in a simultaneous comparison. The paper notes that when thinking about a decision, you will vacillate, focusing first on the pros and then on the cons, first choosing one solution and then another. Now imagine how difficult it would be to progress through understanding a problem with intellectual complexity that has many interacting variables. The limitations of human thinking make it difficult, if not impossible, to perform analysis without the aid of an external representation of parts of the problem being worked on. Special attention is paid to two commonly accepted approaches to overcoming this working memory limitation. These are decomposition ‒ that is, breaking a problem or question into its component parts so that each part can be considered separately, and visualization ‒ arranging all the parts on paper or on a computer screen in some organized way designed to make it easier to understand how the different parts interact. In fact, all structured analytic techniques use these approaches, as external reflection of one's thinking is part of the definition of structured analysis. For some basic techniques, however, breaking down the problem to present the data in an orderly fashion is the main contribution they make to more efficient analysis. These basic techniques will be described in this article. Any technique that takes a complex thought process out of the analyst's head and onto paper or a computer screen can be helpful. Using even a simple technique like a checklist can be extremely productive.