Meet the CI Fellows: Jonathan DUNNETT

Jonathan Dunnit is a Canadian intelligence professional who was inducted into the Council of Competitive Intelligence Fellows in 2023. He has 15 years experience in the area of intelligence collection and analysis and developed a sophisticated skill set around client management. He has an optimistic view about the future of our profession and I hope you enjoy our conversation. Hey there, this is Eric Garland with yet another episode in our speakers from the Council on Competitive Intelligence Fellows. I’ve got a fellow fellow here, Jonathan Dunnit from the great nation of Canada. How are you doing, sir? I’m doing well, Eric. How are you today? I’m great. I’m great. I get to talk with all my colleagues about my favorite subject, intelligence.

So, you’re catching on me on my best day. [laughter] That’s fantastic. Yeah. So, what year were you made a fellow? In 2023. 2023. So, is it like Miss America? Like, how’s your life changed? Have they Do they treat you differently at the grocery store? Uh, no, not at all. Uh, so [snorts] here here we have uh Soies and Superstore and uh Yeah. Now, where are you where are you recording from today? I’m in uh Monton, New Brunswick, Canada. And uh unfortunately, there’s no pump and parade every time I do go into the grocery store. So, uh New Brunswick, one of the least known provinces of Canada out and Americans have trouble naming a few. I I have I have spent time doing intelligence in New Brunswick back in the day.

Um I also grew I’m I’m I’m recording from Vermont today. my native state and uh of course we’re just across the border from Quebec so we have a lot of visibility into your your country. So Sure. Yeah. I think there’s a an appreciation of folks that are in New England in Vermont, you know, a little more approximate to the country versus, hey, I have a friend in Canada. It’s like in Canada, right? Okay. Yeah. and and in in New England like you’ve got people in Maine and people in Vermont and Canada is is is not a hypothetical for us, right? Yeah. You know, for Maine, New New Brunswick is a real place full of just as as as much lumber and beavers and uh you know, rivers as Maine and uh Quebec and Vermont.

There’s kind of a nickels difference between the two state the two places in a lot of ways. But uh so it’s a quiet place where you can think deeply about stuff, right? Yes, absolutely. Now, I forget Monton, you you guys are at least partially bilingual, right? Yeah. So, New Brunswick is officially the only bilingual province in all of Canada. Uh French and English, [snorts] right? So, you have French and English, but there’s not a lot of um political scandal over over either situation. Oh, I I don’t know that I would say that. Sorry. It [snorts] was But by saying there’s no controversy, I I was making a controversy. That’s uh Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s uh New Brunswick is an interesting domain of uh just tensions uh between sometimes sometimes languages, sometimes uh city versus rural, north, south, you know, it but and and yet we all seem to get along and like each other.

So explain that to me. Yeah. And everybody seems to like people from New Brunswick today being no no exception. So excellent. So you you went 2023, you ended up in the Council of Competitive Intelligence Fellows. How did you get there? Well, uh started all by accident. So in um 2008 when I was doing my undergrad at Crandle University, also in Monton, New Brunswick, uh then called Atlantic Baptist University. Mhm. Um one of my profs came to me and said, “We have a a company that needs some research done.” And as any, you know, poor university student says, “Well, does it pay?” [laughter] And he said, “Yes.” And so I dove into that. And doing research. Yeah. Uh research as I understood it at the time.

Um, and so it later, uh, several years later, I stumbled on a post by our, uh, friend Eric Johnson, and, uh, on the competitive intelligence Ning, uh, network, which is still around, but he was explaining what competitive intelligence was and is, and I was like, that’s what I do. Aha. So, I did all this work had no idea and then you know stumbled on this thing on the internet and went oh now I I have a name that I can assign to them. I do competitive intelligence. Correct. Yeah. And so the first project I ever did actually was very interesting. It was in aerospace and defense. It was a fairly comprehensive profile for um a a corporate level and a product level profile to kind of pick the winner as such.

And um it to give you kind of a a timeline on that, I printed a massive binder. Oh, you I got it. You printed a massive binder. So yeah, versus here’s the USB or here’s the file. Um so we we were still not quite technologically mature enough to, you know, have it digital, but uh anyway, it was a fascinating project. Our the the first interview was with Luis Madua from Portugal and I was regailing him with tales about how when I started in the late 90s, we got paid to pick up the phone and order a printed copy of the 10K report from the competitor from their in investor relations office. And you know, it would take two weeks for that to arrive. And we got paid to read what was in the mail. Yeah.

And the and the competitors or sorry the clients were super happy because like we had gotten a hold of this stuff that they couldn’t just order to their office building. They had somebody at arms length that could get something in the mail, read it and and type it up for them and you know whether we sent put it in the sometimes we put stuff in the fax machine, sometimes we we put it in in the mail. um you know so yes I remember all those days these are all these are vital parts of our history yeah absolutely and I know sometimes you hear stories from even those who were there before us and you know uh ka tablets papyrus whatever yeah yeah all all of the things right so uh it’s it’s interesting the evolution of the field from you know kind of the Jan Herring era and on [clears throat] of I I I do wonder today in terms of the analysts that are graduating um you know much as I had an experience I I taught in Beijing in 2011 uh taught technology and my students marveled when I said I did not grow up with the cell phone they they couldn’t even compute that and so I wonder today for the modern intelligence analysts if they could understand you had to manually read a 10k word by to find those insights.

Oh yeah. I mean, we we got paid for things that take 0.13 seconds now. That that and yet, as I was discussing with Luis, just because um it can be done quickly, cheaply, or automatically doesn’t mean it’s being done well. Because what you need competitive intelligence for is for somebody to read the document and go, I think that’s crap. I don’t think that’s true. Let’s call let’s call the guy who who wrote this thing and that um you know SAS skepticism as a service. Mhm. That remains our our value proposition and I yeah so you so you started with a university background you you got into defense and you were doing um competitor assessment. It sounds like you were doing like win loss prediction and other kinds of if you’re trying to figure out who was going to get the bid.

That’s Yeah. Yeah. Well, I had the stated criteria from the government. So that I was doing a little bit of AB. Um how that was I didn’t obtain that that that was already in hand. So that was very helpful. But um yeah, it was a really interesting project especially for my first one. Cool. And so what was it? What was it about you personally do you think that that bit into that curiosity, skepticism, imagination? What from your perspective? What was it about this profession that you liked? I think it was really the it it was interesting the the point on curiosity. Absolutely. Um the the systems aspect so how things fit together from sort of a large scale perspective. um doing the learning and the synthesis is also very interesting.

I mean I used to joke when I later worked for a company that became well was shift central at the time got bought out by lac research and then u now the what’s left of the original shift central is uh in harbor which is a legal focused intelligence firm. Um but I used to joke when I worked there that I was a professional learner and uh you know getting thrown in the deep end and we often would have client calls and they would say we need to know need to know about the following and you go okay I know nothing about that. um and you just get thrown in on the on the deep end. But as you know and and I know you can appreciate sometimes it’s it’s about the approach more than the topic um to a certain degree.

Now as long as you can ask the right questions kind of at the front end through discovery and then if you need to kind of cultivate that as you’re going through the project that that can work out fine as well. But um yeah, so having that that ability to uh just jump in and not be overwhelmed and you know your brain naturally goes through these cycles of I have no idea what this is. So you start off with the Wikipedia page and you kind of splinter out from there. Uh depending on the project, you might be talking to experts to glean those the Wikipedia page. Now, now we’re getting a new generational thing. Like when we used to start back in the Creataceious period, um maybe it was the Jurassic, we would order um for a fixed fee find SVP.

So, you’d get a thick packet in the mail, people and it would be all the various news items from major newspapers and industrial journals. So, you would go through the written. So, Wik Wikipedia was a twinkle in the mailman’s eye back then. Yeah. We could we we had we had a single dialup line. Mhm. For all the computers. So, you had to schedule amongst the analyst who’s using the internet. Tell me when you’re off the internet. Mhm. So, and nobody pick up the phone and ruin the internet. We had a It was We had a couple Or did you have a dedicated line? We had some we had a dedicated voice line or two. Um well cuz most of we had to have a bunch because we were all we were picking up the phone, right?

So you know but we had other era we had other era specific realities which actually were very cool for human intelligence which is people picked up their phone at the office. Mhm. That that was how they communicated. They didn’t these guys 1997 1998 nobody had a cell phone. I mean, yeah, the CEO did, but people didn’t have a cell phone. They had at their on their desk, they had a phone. And if they were senior enough, they had a personal assistant, right? And you would call Jeanie or Margaret, sorry, it was very typically a female, not trying to stereotype anything, but you, you know, you you call Margaret and go, “Margaret, is Jim going to be in? Or is is Sally going to be in?” So the executives were not um you know uh it’s gender specific but you you’d call the gatekeeper sweet talk and go Tuesday I saw he wrote he wrote this thing in this article I’m looking at paragraph the Margie I’m going crazy here guys is he around Tuesday that’s awesome you’re the best you who’s the best you are.

Hey if you’re ever going to go skiing in Vermont you let me know. Okay. Boom. And then we would we would arrange to talk to the guy, get get the pen and paper and be be prepared to call the guy uh at the appointed time and elicit like crazy based on everything that we could get about that guy and you know what we could use about him to trigger some information. And people were not as um they were not as skeptical as they are now about these things. So you you didn’t have as was like oh yes I am senior vice president of blah blah blah. Yes. Sure. Sure. I’ll talk about it. Mhm. I mean it’s not that people weren’t busy. People were always busy. Yeah. But um yeah, so we started with you. You said just a moment ago that this is about process, not about content.

Because I would do the same thing whether it was construction glass, applesauce. These are all real examples. Construction glass, applesauce, um nuclear power, casino gaming. Those last those last two are really serious topics, by the way. Poking around those industries is a real trick. Um but it didn’t matter. You start with kits and kicks. You go you got to figure out what the client wants and then you start looking up who who knows about this who has written this down secondary information and who could be a good primary source. So it sounds like you discovered that um but it wasn’t nobody was saying you’re in competitive intelligence. You you started doing it and then you’re like my god this is competitive intelligence.

with with thanks to Eric Johnson. Um yeah, because had I had I not stumbled on that, I mean eventually I would have probably put two and two together, but um you know try and try and figure out and and this is what I always say is competitive intelligence has a marketing problem. Um if you keep talking, keep talking. If you Google, you know, what what is the query preLLM? uh what is the query that gets you to oh I’m a competitive intelligence analyst if if you don’t even know that the rudimentary ingredients to get that as a query or if you don’t know somebody in the field you’re not going to know that you’re in the field okay so how did you know you were in the field if you could break it down since we obviously need to make sure there’s I I think it may be up to the fellows to do this we will not name which other organizations maybe should have been doing it but anyhow You’re a fellow.

Eric Johnson’s a fellow. I’m a fellow. What what were the skills that you were deploying that made you go this is competitive intelligence? Yeah. So from a skills perspective again when I saw that definition it kind of gave me an anchor and and I will fudge this entirely but you know the the definition that Eric would have put forward is probably something like understanding the external environment to help make internal based decisions given constraints and and whatever. uh Luis that you had on your last podcast has done the study and has uh we have a definition actually on our website from his study um which is kind of meant to be a unifying force. Uh of course there are probably uh 50 plus other opinions out there saying well I like my definition better but anyway that as an aside he he did the work.

He did the work. The work. Yeah. And I was I was interviewed as part of his work up to that and I know that he engaged with right and I know he engaged with a bunch of uh folks in the field. So um in terms of the skill sets just to speak to that. So for me at the time at least it was really about taking uh asking great questions, understanding how to interrogate information, how to do great synthesis, uh putting that together in the context of what are we trying to understand? What are the big questions? What are we trying to solve for? and how can we make that make sense in a way to the client and to ourselves ultimately um such that it helps move the needle and helps move things forward. And so, you know, as just with some of the experiences that I had over the years, um, it was really interesting how just this the size of some of these projects and like you mentioned nuclear power as an example, that is not a small undertaking.

No matter what you’re doing, unless you’re talking about uh we want certain size screws for the doors that go on, you know, the Oh, no. Even that’s a problem. Um [laughter] [gasps] I I’m sure uh that was a special one. Um that was Yeah. So yeah, I I think really again from a skill set perspective, it’s that ability and whether this is back years ago or even now, I think that ability to number one understand what it is that you’re trying to solve for genuinely and within that helping the client understand if that’s even the right question or direction number one. U because again as as you know sometimes the client says I want to know this and you go no you don’t. No, you don’t. Ah, you want to this this is a better direction for you and here’s why.

Um, now depending on the client, you can have that conversation, sometimes you can’t. So, so one of the skills you’re talking about is client management 100%. That’s establishing credibility with that client and gently. Um, I forget if it’s Mark Twain. I think it’s be Mark Twain or Oscar Wild. That the the definition of diplomacy is the art of telling a man to go to hell such that he looks forward to the trip. [laughter] Um, you know, how do how telling a client that they are a thin skinned, emotionally manipulable fool is a real thing. Um, now we it’s we usually don’t mean that and we certainly don’t say that, but you know, if you’re saying no, you don’t want to know that. You actually want to know, how do you get around to well, don’t you think this is maybe the the critical issue?

Like that that’s a real thing, right? Yeah. And I think that comes down to, you know, how well do you know the client? How much trust and rapport do you have established? And often just from the human behavior perspective, if you’re dealing with a client that let’s let’s park the folks that don’t want to listen and you know you will not persuade or influence. If you have a reasonable client, often times what I would do in those situations if if faced with that is I would come back to them with their own words. they they would give context of you know this is what we’re trying to solve here’s why etc etc well Frank building on what you know what you just said five minutes ago you know Frank when you said blank blah blank you know made me think wow right right and sometimes then pairing that with if if we imagine that this is a painting there’s you know we’re we’re trying to paint a canvas and if we’re seeing part of it okay this is what you want Frank, there are these other pieces of the edge that we already know are happening and therefore within context for us to have the best outcome and that I think that’s key.

So intelligence for you when you’re talking about client facing is about vision. You have vision beyond [clears throat] what your clients do and you invite them into that vision. you you’ve got to create buyin and ultimately again because that that’s a judgment thing for us. If you understand where the client wants to go and you know their business adequately to help them do that, that’s where that’s they hire us for our judgment. And so if we fail to say, you know, we need this part, you know, this is happening and therefore the reality that you want to get to, um, needs this other piece or needs a different approach, then ultimately they’re going to say yes or they’re going to say no. Um, now if they say no and you’ve done your duty as as an analyst, then you can either say, “All right, we’ll do the project.” And then you you put the the caveat emptor on that or you say I think this is a mistake.

So for based on my professional judgment, my reputation, I’m going to walk away from this project. If you would like to revisit what I’ve discussed here, then we can have that conversation. You know, ultimately it’s it’s about decisions at that point. And so in my career, I’ve been very fortunate to have for the most part very reasonable clients who [laughter] Yes. Um we we Can you write it up so I know what it’s like? Sorry. [laughter] No, that’s fine. Um we we certainly did have um that’ll be my lullabi to get me to sleep [laughter] at night. Reasonable clients. Reasonable clients. Yeah. Um yeah, we did have one client once upon a time that and really only one in my career ever came back and said, you know, basically what is this crap?

like I could have done this and was like well why didn’t you you know like um now I did not say that I was not actually the client lead but effectively you know my my boss was liazing and and my boss to your point on the the you know we’re going to go to hell line and and have have them feel good about that he was very very good at um at at that positioning he jiu-jitsued it he’s like well he was very very You know what this has done is it’s confirmed what you were thinking and that’s going to give you a level of confidence that you didn’t have about the decision before. Right. Right. Yeah. So I I I like to tell people I’ve been thrown out of more boardrooms than you’ve ever been in. [laughter] I have been fired more than you’ve been hired.

Um and I no longer uh I I no longer say that with any self-pity or even deprecation. It’s just a fact of being uh an intelligence consultant who sometimes delivers bad news. I’ve been in a lot of places with some stuff that is really controversial and people don’t like hearing [clears throat] the reality and so the reaction to a an intelligence consultant who is there to provide insights and is on a rubber band. you let the you let it go, the consultant goes far, far away, right? Um, you know, I think one of the things we have to deal with as fellows is about the ethics of this. Do we lie to our our clients? Do we tell them the truth no matter what? Now, how do we do it? That’s the real trick, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I think on on that end it again comes back to human behavior, comes back to even understanding the profile of the client that you’re dealing with. Um you know, how are they going to react? Um, if you know you’re walking into a boardroom and you know that they’re going to react terribly, my suggestion in that context is you’re going to plant those seeds way before you have that meeting. just to allow some of that mental decompression for the client. Because if you just know I’m going to deliver bad news and they’re going to blow up like a volcano, that’s not fun for anybody because and it’s not it’s not productive either because then the the client is stuck in their amigdula.

They’re just chewing through their There we go. There’s no logic happening at that point. There’s no processing of what you’re delivering. fight or flight, right? And therefore, it’s it’s a waste of time for everybody, for you, for the client. And so, trying to get the client into their prefrontal cortex as opposed to the back of the brain. Right. Right. And so, you know, again, from a client, I think that client handling aspect is really important. And so if you know the profile of the client and you know they’re not going to react well to this, they’re not going to like what I have to say, I would a week before say, “Looking forward to our meeting.” Um, controlling expectations, pro stuff. Here, here’s the box, right?

Here are the edges. Um, John, I know you’re not going to like what I have to say. I want you to understand I’m delivering this because we need to inform the big question or questions that you’re trying to answer. You’re not going to like what I have to say. However, as a result of understanding this information, you are going to be able to do X. You are going to be giving them the out emotionally. This is senior level stuff, kids. Yeah. For those of you interested in back to the vision, it’s back to the vision piece, right? So it’s it’s pointing forward to solutions and that’s always the interesting issue in when you have those moments of conflict. It’s how can you be solution focused rather than problem focused and again reorienting the client to at the start you said you wanted to understand this and I understand this is upsetting.

This may not be what you want to hear. This may be you know whatever. However, now [clears throat] you are prepared to take the next steps. Right? So [clears throat] again, this is the senior level stuff. We are not talking about being right about the subject. We’re not talking about source validation. We’re not talking about analytical methods or even to a degree cognitive bias. That’s all kind of baked in. We’re now talking about grief counseling. Yeah. [snorts] which is the, you know, that’s the, as near as I can tell, that’s that is the real work of senior intelligence professionals is walking in understanding the situation maybe better than the client does. Mhm. And prepping it in advance.

[clears throat] So, how would you pitch this profession to somebody who is in their fourth year of university right now? Well, would you would you recommend anyone get involved in this? You know, it it’s interesting. I think again competitive intelligence has a marketing problem and I’ve said that for years. Okay. As a field that’s an issue. So, we’ll we’ll park that from a skill set perspective. However, when you look at large organizations that are out there, there are some some big organizations in our field that maybe tend to pull in the business intelligence, the data and analytics folks, the prompt engineers now, you know, whatever sort of these other discip it is a thing. Um, I don’t know if it’s the thing, but when you look at I I kind of would equate them to the cousins, right?

When you look at all the cousins of business intelligence, strategic foresight, futures, competitive intelligence, data and analytics, like there’s a whole continuum of related fields and people jump back and forth all the time depending on what their skills and expertise and acumen uh are. And so I I would say to a graduate if you are back to use your your word from earlier if you are curious if you want to work in fields where you’re solving puzzles where you are being to use your your word as well skeptical um and just if you are genuinely interested in helping people to go from A to B that’s that’s a really great field for you. if you want to take that into maybe um related domains. So you want to be in tech, guess what?

Product managers uh and product owners, they need great competitive intelligence skills. And so I look at it from the perspective of um if I’m a university student and you want to be future focused, there’s probably no better field or field within sort of that that cousin realm that you can go into. Um, and so especially as the future kind of continues to shrink and as everybody continues to adopt AI and cut headcount and which is a bizarre sort of exercise in and of itself, but I think to have some future resiliency as a field, intelligence and its cousins is going to be a really good place to go into. So you you you see the future is pretty bright there. [sighs and gasps] On the intelligence side, the core underpinning skills are going to be inherently valuable.

Um whether or not the future is bright, you know, there are other actors in play. Uh of course with that, but I think from a personal and professional development perspective, those are great skill sets to have. Um, how can you, the question that I would be asking if I were in the shoes of a fourth year university student is how can I most effectively future proof myself and bolt on different skills and acumen? So, you know, artificial intelligence being what it is, I need to be AI native. I need to be in incredibly comfortable within those ecosystems. I need to understand you know you look at data and analytics as an example the the rapid progress even now from you know take a simple example of like Google Analytics Google Analytics is you know a medium sort of uh difficulty tool for the basics of the basics you can understand it but if you want to use it as as an excuse me at an expert level there’s there’s a lot of work to be done to use that effectively the interesting thing that AI is doing is democratizing some of this using natural language questions and natural language processing to make that data more usable and more accessible.

Um so and and I think you’re seeing that really across a lot of platforms. Um, not to mention, you know, I’ll park agents on the side for a second, but in sort of more traditional SAS platforms that we think of now, that incorporation of artificial intelligence is democratizing things. Um, I would argue that you still need to have good skills and acumen to effectively use it. Um, so that’s that’s my kind of thinking for students at this point is again Intel and its cousins great direction because it helps you to understand information, interrogate it and to use it effectively. And I think especially in a world that is already inundated with information, being able to validate, corroborate and use effectively information is going to be really powerful.

I agree and I love it. So that’s fantastic. So we’re going to wrap up for today, but uh if we want more Jonathan Dunit, where do we go? Sure. So um Jonathan.com is a great place to start and um so you can check me out there and I also have another site as well, uh enableleers.com, which provides matching uh for executive coach services. So, uh, really appreciate the conversation today, Eric, and, uh, thank you for your time. I’m pleased to be one of the fellows, and I’m pleased to get to talk to the fellows, my favorite people, talking about my favorite subject. And for everybody else out there, thank you for joining us, and we’ll talk to you soon.