Operational psychology in leadership

Your psychology and your understanding of others shape everything downstream: your strategy, tactics, operations and decisions.

The problem is that the psychology you were taught is misleading.

It is not operational. It was not designed for the environments you actually operate in: uncertain, complex, grey, where information is incomplete, pressure is constant, and humans do not behave "as expected".

In human intelligence, there is a doctrine for this.

In this brief, I draw primarily on two KGB documents from the late 1980s (1987-1988) designed to reduce recruitment failure under hostile conditions, alongside my own notes and field experience.

To answer that question, we need to dismantle the psychological frameworks you inherited. We will break down:

• Why normative psychology collapses under pressure
• The HUMINT doctrine: psychology as a precondition for action
• What reveals a human structure (stress, behavior, biography)
• The 4 perceptual architectures
• What actually predicts behavior when conditions degrade

Before going further, one distinction.

In this brief, I use the word "psychology" in two fundamentally different senses: normative psychology and operational psychology.

We often use the word psychology in its normative sense, referring to introspection, the narratives we tell ourselves, our values, our emotional intelligence. It also refers to the most familiar way psychology is practiced: in an office with a therapist, within a safe space, where cooperation is assumed and where one has usually paid to be listened to transparently.

There is another way to practice psychology. It is the psychology you experience every day: when you make snap decisions, when you negotiate with difficult counterparts, when you have to act without clarity or comfort.

Operational psychology allows one to diagnose a situation, anticipate outcomes, and read human behavior under constraint. This is the one we practice in HUMINT.

Why normative psychology fails under pressure

It fails for one structural reason: it was built for conditions that disappear first when reality tightens. Agility, cooperation, transparency, emotional safety... all of these conditions are great. But they are rare, in real life situations.

The psychology you were given was never built for constraint, asymmetry, and error cost.

To answer our governing question - what predicts behavior under degradation - we must leave therapeutic psychology and enter operational doctrine.

HUMINT doctrine: psychology as a condition for action

Operational reality is defined by incomplete information, pressure, asymmetry, and irreversible decisions. And yet, decisions must still be made.

This is the CORE condition. And this is why HUMINT doctrine treats psychology as a precondition for action rather than a tool of understanding.

The Soviet document states: