The Decision-Grade Intelligence Standard: Brief It, Caveat It, or Hold

You have a finding about a company and its people, and someone is about to act on it. This standard tells you whether that single finding is solid enough to put in front of a decision-maker, and it is written for market-intelligence analysts, talent-intelligence teams, and operators sizing a market. It grades one finding at the moment before it enters a brief, using a rubric explicit enough that two analysts score the same finding the same way.

Most readiness standards grade a whole deliverable: a competitor profile, a named-candidate list, a market map. But analysts do not get burned by whole deliverables. They get burned by one finding inside an otherwise sound brief - a stale job posting read as live demand, a headcount gap that was definitional all along, three citations that turned out to be one press release. This standard borrows the intelligence community's source-reliability and analytic-confidence discipline and adapts it to findings built from public company and people signals, so you get a concrete rubric instead of "verify your sources" or an abstract military code.

What "decision-grade" means, and the two axes it rests on

A finding is decision-grade when a decision-maker can act on it without you standing next to them to caveat it. That threshold rests on two independent judgements the intelligence community keeps deliberately separate: how reliable the source is, and how credible this specific claim is.

The Admiralty code, codified in NATO AJP-2.1, rates these on two axes and notates them as a pair such as B2. Reliability runs A to F and asks about the source's history. Credibility runs 1 to 6 and asks about the piece of information in front of you right now. Each descriptor is considered in isolation so that the reliability of the source does not influence the assessed accuracy of the report.

Reliability A means completely reliable, running down through B usually reliable, C fairly reliable, D not usually reliable, E unreliable, to F cannot be judged. Credibility 1 means confirmed, then 2 probably true, 3 possibly true, 4 doubtfully true, 5 improbable, and 6 cannot be judged. A regulator filing feed or an issuer's own 10-K is a high-reliability source; a paywalled trade publication is mid; anonymous social is low. But reliability is about the channel, not the claim - which is why the two passes stay separate.

The commercial version of this discipline is thin. Practitioner CI guides tend to say "cross-verify" and stop. This standard makes the pair explicit because the pair is where two analysts either converge or diverge.

How many independent sources it takes to reach "confirmed"

Exactly one. Under the Admiralty scale, a single additional independent source lifts a finding to the top credibility grade of 1, provided that grade rests on independent corroboration from a separate reporting chain, internal consistency, and alignment with known information.

That is the single most useful fact in this guide, and it cuts against instinct. Adding a fourth citation that traces to the same origin buys nothing. Adding one citation from a genuinely separate collection path changes the grade. Credibility rewards independence, not volume.

The jump from single-source to confirmed is exactly one independent chain, not a pile of citations.

The journalistic standard is stricter in practice. The New York Times imposes a minimum that a fact not attributed to a single named speaker be verified by at least two independent sources. For a finding that will drive a real decision - a hire, a spend, a market entry - I hold to the stricter bar: at least two genuinely independent chains before I call something decision-grade, and I reserve the single-corroboration grade for directional.

A worked example of a credibility-1 finding: a report that a competitor is planning to exit a segment reaches a 1 when separate, unrelated sources point to the same conclusion through different channels - a trade publication citing insiders, a job-posting pattern showing hiring freezes, and a supplier reporting canceled orders. Three channels, three collection paths, one conclusion. That is corroboration. Three outlets reprinting one press release is not.

The circularity check, as its own gate

Circular reporting is information that looks multi-sourced but in reality traces to a single origin. It is the failure that produces a confident, wrong grade, and it deserves its own step because it is the exact way "cross-verify" fails.

Because circular reporting can happen inadvertently, extra care is needed to confirm that multiple sources actually are independent rather than interconnected in some obscure manner. The mechanism is quiet: a startup publishes a blog post, a newsletter summarizes it, an analyst cites the newsletter, and a second analyst cites the first analyst. Four "sources," one origin.

The check is mechanical. Trace each supposedly independent source to its root - the actual URL, dataset, filing, or person it came from. Collapse any that share a root. Then count what remains. If three citations collapse to one press release, you have one source and a credibility grade no higher than what a single origin earns.

Many practitioner CI workflows fold this into a generic cross-verify step and never separate it. Treat it as its own gate. A finding that passed cross-verification but never had its roots traced is not decision-grade; it is untested.

Shelf-life: when a true finding goes stale

A finding can be correctly graded and still be wrong by the time it is briefed, because the signal underneath it expired. Freshness is not a recency nicety - it is a credibility signal, because for signals like job postings, age proxies for whether the event is even real.

Job postings decay fastest. A posting under seven days old is a strong signal, but one older than 14 days should be treated as weak, and most genuinely urgent roles are filled or substantially progressed within three to four weeks. The quality split is stark: about 52% of postings from always-hiring companies are ghost jobs that never fill, while about 83% of fresh postings under seven days old from mid-market companies represent genuine hiring intent. The same "they are hiring" finding flips grade purely on the age of the posting.

Corporate events carry a longer but bounded window: acquisitions, product launches, and tech-stack changes drive hiring surges within the same 30 to 90 day window after the announcement. A hiring burst - three or more new postings for the same role within 14 days - is a signal in its own right, but only when it has breadth as well as freshness.

Record a last-verified date separately from the source date. The source date tells you when the signal was created; the last-verified date tells the reader when you last confirmed it was still live. Set a refresh cadence - monthly or quarterly for most markets - and the shelf-life stamp becomes an auditable field rather than a memory.

The disclosures a number must carry

Before you cite a headcount or a posting count, the finding must disclose how the number was built, because headcount disagreements are usually definitional, not factual. Two analysts can "disagree" on a company's size without either being wrong.

The recurring gap is workforce definition. Some sources exclude contractors and count only direct employees; other platforms include anyone who lists the company. A firm with 800 full-time staff and 200 contractors can read as 800 in one source and 1,000 in another. Compare the contractor-inclusive number against a filings FTE number and you manufacture a growth spike that never happened.

A citable number needs five disclosures:

• Period. The date range the count covers.
• Geography. Which countries or regions are included.
• Deduplication method. How records for the same real-world entity were merged across messy or slightly different sources through entity resolution.
• Occupation-mapping basis. What the occupational breakdown anchors on - commonly BLS data for the US, extrapolated to other countries using ILO statistics.
• Contractor and staffing-firm treatment. Whether contractors are counted, excluded, or unknown.

There is also a recency correction to know about: because people are slow to update their profiles after a job change, some sources run a nowcasting model that estimates recent inflows and outflows. A number that already includes a nowcast is not directly comparable to a raw count, so that too belongs in the disclosure line.

The analytic-confidence layer beyond the source grade

Source reliability and credibility grade the evidence. Analytic confidence grades your analysis of it, and it is a separate note. The Peterson Table of Analytic Confidence Assessment, a 2008 Mercyhurst thesis, weighs six factors: the information and analysis method used, source reliability, expertise, collaboration through peer review, task complexity, and time pressure to produce the analysis.

For a single public-source finding, four of these carry the weight. Task complexity is usually low for one claim, and source reliability is already captured in your A-to-F pass. The load-bearing four are the method you used, your expertise in the domain, whether the finding was peer-reviewed, and how much time pressure produced it.

Analytic-confidence thinness has a supply dimension that is easy to miss. In Refolk's index of professional profiles, the pool of people holding a competitive-intelligence family title is far thinner in some markets than others, which caps the defensible confidence a lone analyst can claim in a market with few peers to review the work.

The US pool is roughly 8.7 times the UK pool. The mechanism matters for grading: a UK market read rests on a much smaller expert base, so the same method yields lower defensible confidence there. Peer review is scarcer, corroboration is harder, and the "collaboration" factor in Peterson's table is structurally weaker. Do not paper over thin populations with a confident label.

When you need a second reviewer for the collaboration factor and your own bench is short, finding the right named analyst to route a finding to is exactly the friction Refolk removes: you ask for the people you want in plain English and get them back.

The components a decision-grade finding must carry

The intelligence-community baseline for what a finding must contain is ICD 203's tradecraft standards. Four of them are load-bearing for a single finding, and a finding missing any one is not decision-grade regardless of how clean its source grade looks.

• Sourcing. Identify the underlying sources and methodologies, describing factors affecting quality and credibility including accuracy, possible denial and deception, currency, and the source's access, motivation, and bias.
• Distinctions. Clearly distinguish the underlying information from your assumptions and judgments.
• Alternatives. Identify and assess at least one plausible alternative hypothesis.
• Linchpin assumptions. When an assumption serves as the linchpin of the argument or bridges a significant gap in the evidence, state it explicitly and explain what would change if that assumption turned out to be wrong.

The linchpin test is the one that saves careers. Force the "what would change this finding" line before you label anything. If you cannot name the single premise that, if false, collapses the finding, you have not surfaced your assumptions - you have smuggled one in as fact.

ICD 203 also enforces a wording discipline: do not combine a confidence level and a likelihood term in the same sentence, because mixing them confuses the reader about what exactly is uncertain. "Highly likely and high confidence" reads as emphasis but says nothing - the reader cannot tell whether you are unsure about the event or unsure about your own analysis. Separate them. Say the likelihood in one sentence and your confidence in it in another.

The commercial CI analogue rounds this out: a best-in-class finding answers what it means for stakeholders, what to do next, and what is likely to happen, not just what has happened. A finding with a clean grade but no "so what" is verified trivia.

The procedure

Run these eight steps in order. The first six a single analyst can do; the last two pull in a reviewer.

The output of the whole procedure is small: one label, one confidence sentence, and an audit trail behind it. That compactness is the point. A decision-maker reads the label; a challenger reads the trail.

How this goes wrong

The most valuable part of any standard is its list of failure modes, because these are the ways a finding passes a lazy review and fails in the field. Each one below has a false positive it produces and a specific check that catches it.

Two of these deserve extra weight. Fake corroboration is the deadliest because it earns a top grade rather than exposing a weak one - the finding looks its strongest at the exact moment it is most wrong. The headcount mismatch is the most common in day-to-day market sizing, because it does not feel like an error; it feels like two sources disagreeing, and the analyst "resolves" it by picking the number that fits the story.

The matrix makes the reliability-bleed trap visible. The bottom-right quadrant - reliable source, weak claim - is where analysts most often over-grade, because the source's reputation feels like it should count for the claim. It does not. Only the top-right quadrant is decision-grade.

The verification checklist

Run this before you attach a label. It is the definition of done, phrased so two analysts checking the same finding tick the same boxes.

Keeping the standard current

Adopt this as team policy and it will drift unless two things are maintained. First, the shelf-life table is the part that ages: re-check the posting-decay and ghost-job figures against your own funnel each quarter, because a signal's decay rate is specific to the markets you cover. If your urgent roles fill in two weeks rather than three to four, tighten the window.

Second, the analytic-confidence layer depends on having reviewers, and reviewer supply is uneven across markets. In Refolk's index, the pool of experienced-but-not-yet-director CI analysts is the scarce band: at Director seniority in the US, 8,754 people list competitive intelligence as a skill, against 4,109 at Senior - the Director band is 2.13 times larger, an inverted pyramid driven by skill inflation at senior titles. When you need a genuine second pass on a finding, the constraint is finding a qualified peer, not finding a title.

Treat the standard itself as a finding subject to re-verification. The rubric holds; the numbers inside it have shelf-lives too.