Up & Out #8: People First, Product Second
Thought Leadership
October 6, 2025
If you’ve been following the Up & Out series, you’ll know we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the ‘product’ side of intelligence – how to sharpen outputs so they align with business strategy, building relationships outside of traditional security silos, and responsibly navigating the AI revolution.
This time, we’re flipping the lens to talk about the analysts who carry the weight of ambiguity and complexity for organisations every day. If they burn out, disengage or disappear, the product doesn’t just suffer – it stops mattering.
This is important because burnout is at record levels across the workforce. According to Forbes, 66% of workers in the US now report experiencing burnout – an all-time high – while in the UK, a mental health survey revealed that 63% of employees show signs of exhaustion and disengagement. Intelligence teams are especially vulnerable to these trends.
From reconceptualising team retention and culture to the role of psychological safety and purpose, this edition focuses on how sustainable intelligence all starts with people, and how this can multiply resilience across an organisation.
The “brain drain” nobody budgets for
Intelligence teams rarely lose people to burnout overnight. It’s a slow, quiet and invisible process. Most analysts are conditioned to endure, not complain. As the pressure builds, they internalise, isolate, and keep delivering – until suddenly, they don’t.
The cost of turnover isn’t just ‘less capacity’, reduced morale on the team, or the time and budget it takes to replace someone. It’s also the loss of institutional memory, contextual expertise and strategic intuition. When experienced analysts leave, they take with them years of nuanced understanding of stakeholders, threats, internal politics, and how the business works. This has a direct impact on the quality and sustainability of intelligence capabilities.
Customers may not perceive the impact of turnover on an intelligence team’s dynamics, but they do notice greater turnaround times, increasingly generic reporting, and weakened connections between analytical forecasts and business strategy. This tempts customers to rely less on intelligence assessments and more on gut instinct or external sources, which can jam the gears of decision-making. Eventually, the team starts to look like a cost center again and not a value driver.
If you’re a team leader pushing your analysts to grow “Up and Out”, here are three suggestions for building sustainability into your retention strategy:
1. Track who holds the long-term memory of key issues. Every team has someone who remembers the unique institutional lens through which the first COVID-19 outbreak was examined, why a stakeholder reacted the way they did that time a politically sensitive issue came up, or what it was about last year’s strategic forecast that prompted the CEO to send positive feedback. Consider pairing these veterans with newer analysts in informal mentoring setups to back up that memory before it walks out the door.
2. Create space for lateral growth. Not every analyst wants to become a manager. Many are specialists who need room to grow sideways: try embedded analysts in other business units on short- or long-term secondments, assign team members to become subject-matter experts on the use of AI, automation or data analytics, and rotate people through these roles. Develop internal training programmes, including those that prepare future leaders. Such initiatives sharpen skills and allow team leads to build cases for greater responsibility and compensation.
3. Normalise decompression and downtime. Intelligence work can be cognitively and emotionally draining. Combat this by allowing “low-intensity weeks” after major deliverables or crisis responses, where the team can shift their focus to reflection, personal development projects, or catching up on reading. Analysts need to be invigorated if stepping into new engagements with customers beyond their usual silo.
Retaining talent is critical, but it’s only part of the equation for sustainable intelligence. Intelligence teams require a culture that encourages relevance, adaptation, and connection to the wider organisation.
Why culture beats intelligence strategy
An intelligence strategy can include clear objectives, defined workflows and a slick tech stack, but if the team’s culture doesn’t support it, the product won’t land with the audience and progress on the Up and Out agenda will stall.
By culture, we mean a set of shared habits, assumptions, and behaviours that shape how an intelligence team operates, even when nobody is watching. This is hard to define and rarely written down, but it shows up fast when things get messy and analysts are forced to adapt without waiting for permission. If you’re a manager and wondering how to define the right culture for your team, start with:
• Reviewing each of your organisation’s core mission and values (usually available on the website) and assessing how your team performs against each one. There should be at least some correlation. For example, if you run the intelligence team at OpenAI, how much does the team still live by the Charter when things get hard?
• Thinking about a time when your team handled ambiguity and the qualities that stood out. Perhaps an analyst reframed a problem that uncovered a blind spot, or someone flagged a reputational risk not previously considered. Highlight those wins, especially if they helped to shape a decision.
• Looking at how your team interacts with the wider business. When that supply chain manager asked for an explanation of the modelling behind your country risk dashboard, did the intelligence team default to technical language or translate it into something useful? The latter is a sign of the team seeing itself as part of the business, not just adjacent to it.
The Up and Out agenda might be the intelligence strategy you need, but culture determines whether the team can actually move in that direction in a sustainable way.
Psychological safety and purpose
Within the cultural mindset, psychological safety and purpose are quiet drivers of performance. If analysts don’t feel safe, avoid questioning dominant narratives, or can’t see clearly how their work supports the business, the team loses its edge.
Intelligence leaders carry a distinct ethical responsibility to safeguard analyst wellbeing. Exposure to distressing content – conflict, exploitation, human rights abuses – under time pressure and ambiguity quietly erodes analytical rigour, judgement, long-term performance, and eventually resilience. But psychological safety isn’t just about preventing trauma:
“What if we’re wrong?”
“Are we looking at the right triggers, indicators and warnings?”
“Are we too close to this issue to see it clearly?”
If your organisation punishes dissent or overvalues consensus, those questions never get asked. Without them, your intelligence team might just be a passive observer than an active contributor to strategic decisions. In a 2017 article for Harvard Business Review, Laura Delizonna neatly outlined how high-performing teams need psychological safety to yield increased levels of engagement, motivation to tackle challenging problems, more learning and development opportunities, and overall better performance.
As US academic Christine Porath similarly puts it in Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace (2016): “Lacking a sense of psychological safety, people shut down … they are less likely to experiment, to discuss errors, and to speak up about potential or actual problems.” If assumptions are not challenged in an intelligence framework, it doesn’t mean everything is fine – it usually means something is missing, which is typically a leadership issue.
Leaders, particularly those that consume intelligence, have a responsibility to show analysts how their work connects to action. A simple email or five-minute call to demonstrate how an intelligence estimate shaped an investment decision or influenced risk appetite (even if that estimate was simply “we don’t know”) is all it takes to sustain energy. For analysts, it directs their focus and trains them to anticipate intelligence requirements in the future.
We recall one example of this in 2024 when a regional Head of Security at a multinational pharmaceutical firm emailed one of our embedded analysts to explain how their work directly supported the launch of vaccines for patients in Ukraine. It turned out the analyst already knew because regional stakeholders directly involved in the project had contacted them days earlier.
All this to say: ensuring psychological safety and helping an intelligence team to see its purpose are not “soft” concepts – they are important levers for extracting maximum value, which is essential for building long-term resilience.
The resilience multiplier effect
When intelligence teams anchor retention in institutional memory, cultivate the right culture, and embed psychological safety and purpose with the help of their customers, they become catalysts for wider organisational resilience.
This is especially the case when intelligence teams sit at the intersection of risk, strategy and operations. The behaviours they model – communicating uncertainty clearly and constructively, challenging assumptions respectfully, and collaborating across silos – can be contagious. They may not be enough to force cultural shifts across the entire organisation, but they can at least start a ripple effect.
Sustainable intelligence isn’t just about keeping analysts in seats. When analysts are supported with psychological safety, embedded purpose, and a culture that encourages relevance and connection, they have the best chance of shaping how an organisation thinks, decides, and responds. This aligns with the concept of Self Determination Theory, a motivational framework which shows that people thrive when three basic needs are met: autonomy – a feeling of ownership and choice in what they do, competence – feeling effective and capable in our activities, and relatedness – feeling connected to and valued by others. When these needs are supported, motivation, resilience and performance rise significantly.
Our CEO often repeats the mantra: “We’re only as good as our last product…”
But that product is only ever as durable as the people behind it and the environment that supports them.
What do you think is key to a sustainable intelligence function? We’d love to hear from you.
