In this episode of Technology & Security, Dr. Miah Hammond-Errey speaks with Carmen Medina, former CIA executive, influential voice in the U.S. intelligence community and renowned change-maker. Carmen shares insights on leadership, cognitive diversity, and what it really takes to build organisations that can adapt to change. This episode goes beyond the intelligence community—it’s a must-listen for leaders across industries where thinking, analysis, and communication are core to success.
We explore how to harness cognitive diversity, compile high-performing teams, and make intelligence work for decision-makers in real time. There’s practical inspiration, including tools for understanding external change and evolving internal cultures to keep pace. Carmen shares why representation matters and her experience as a Puerto Rican woman in a system shaped by elite norms. She talks about how her background shaped her as a systems thinker and how she eventually embraced her identity to influence change. From YouTube algorithms and competitive pickleball to the power dynamics within national security institutions, this episode unpacks what it means to disrupt from within—and why diverse perspectives are essential to the future of intelligence–and society.
Resources mentioned in the recording
· Carmen Medina, 2015, Who Needs Rebels at Work? Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/oreillymedia/2015/01/13/who-needs-rebels-at-work/#7506efbd20a6
· Rebels at Work: A Handbook for Leading Change from Within https://www.rebelsatwork.com/resources
This podcast was recorded on the lands of the Gadigal people, and we pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging. We acknowledge their continuing connection to land, sea and community, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Music by Dr Paul Mac and production by Elliott Brennan.
Transcript - check against delivery
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Welcome to Technology and Security. TS is a podcast exploring the intersections of emerging technologies and national security. I'm your host, Dr Miah Hammond-Errey.
My guest today is Carmen Medina. Carmen is a globally recognized expert in intelligence analysis, strategic thinking, diversity of thought and innovation. She's spent over 30 years in the US intelligence community. She was part of the leadership team of the CIA's analysis directorate and the recipient of the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal. She's the co -author of Rebels at Work, a handbook for leading change from within. Her story as a change agent at CIA is the subject of her TED talk and was featured in Adam Grant's bestseller Originals, How Non -Conformists Move the World. Thank you for coming on this edition of Technology and Security Carmen. Well, thanks for having me. We're coming to you today from the lands of the Gadigal people. I pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging, and acknowledge their continuing connection to land, sea and community.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: President Trump has taken office again and it looks set to be a time of global change and uncertainty. I'd like to kick us off by asking you how intelligence and national security leaders can make big political and geopolitical transitions manageable for their teams and organizations.
Carmen Medina: It's a hard question. For anyone who's got more than ten years of experience. This is not their first rodeo. If you, uh, been with the intelligence community for ten years, you went from Obama to Trump, Trump to Biden, and now Biden back to Trump. In an ideal world, the transition to a different administration should not have a significant impact on the intelligence officer, because the intelligence officers work should be the same process regardless of who's in office. So we're trying to uncover and get as close to reality as we possibly can. And, uh, that is should not be affected by ideology. That's in an idealized world, in the world that we actually live in. A I would say almost everybody approaches reality by kind of using their ideological framework first to interpret reality. And then if they don't have a strong ideological or philosophical view, then they're open to facts. So this is kind of a fundamental problem in in intelligence that sits as its design. You often hear people talk about how intelligence officers should speak truth to power. I've never liked that phrase. One, I don't think we have some magical formula for getting to the truth. And two, it implies that when the when power hears truth, they stop, which is not true. They don't. I mean, they might, but there's no reason necessarily why they should. And this is totally nonpartisan. This this affects every administration. So I think you have to focus on fundamentals. You have to tell the ones who've had this experience before, have to be really work hard with their emotional and social intelligence in reassuring people because it it is hard.
Carmen Medina: I think this one's going to be, you know, harder than others because there are people in the Trump administration who are saying things that appear on face value to run counter to decades of Western and US tradition in terms of how we conduct ourselves from a from a national security perspective. But, you know, there's a lot of bombast in politics. So I think we have to observe very carefully and and kind of see what happens.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Yeah. this this does look from the outside, like quite a profound shift for institutions in the United States for, you know, democratic processes, for just norms, basic international affairs, norms and behaviours. And as you said, whether that is, you know, the intent behind it may or may not be relevant in this case, but, you know, an international relations perspective, many of the traditional norms around diplomacy and, you know, foreign relations are changing and that will impact intelligence indirectly or directly.
Carmen Medina: If I can just, uh, refer to something we we just finished an episode of my little YouTube channel where we interviewed Sue Gordon, the former deputy director of national intelligence, one of the things she says and I agree with it is the international system that we've built for many decades is breaking. I think she uses the phrase that the bedrock is cracking, and that doesn't have to be bad. It could be that we can build something better. It probably is the case that some things need to break. Uh, but it's an extremely difficult time to live through and particularly to work through.
Carmen Medina: you can't pretend that these tensions aren't there, You sort of have to acknowledge them and you have to do you have to do the work to get through them. that's why so many managers and leaders and individuals are lacking in emotional and social intelligence, because emotional and social intelligence is not like fairy dust that people sprinkle on you. Emotional and social intelligence is hard work, hard conversations, strong listening skills. Right. and the only way you're going to get through these situations is to do the work.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: We have a new segment in 2025. It's called the Contest Spectrum, and it asks, what's a new cooperation, competition or conflict you see coming in 2025.
Carmen Medina: So cooperation. I think that we, the United States, has to do more to sort of explore the edges of all the of all the traditional disciplines that we've been engaged in. So like scientific disciplines. And I think we've got to I mean, artificial intelligence is kind of forcing the issue. Uh, quantum is sort of forcing the issue. And I think that we need to collaborate more with academia, with each other, with people outside the academic spectrum that haven't normally been considered useful people to collaborate with, to really explore edge sciences. I think that the advent of the digital age has led to a tremendous decline in popular support and and the legitimacy of democratic governments. And So the collaboration that I think we need to have is a collaboration in experimenting with radical openness and in including in the conversation. Disciplines, individuals that we might actually have believed or perhaps even still believe are kind of too crazy to be part of this conversation. So I think that that is a very interesting collaboration and wouldn't surprise me to see some, some movement in that direction.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: So let's let's go to some of the intelligence questions. What are the biggest changes you've seen in your career in intelligence?
Carmen Medina: I'm really trying to think of something that has changed a lot. I mean, for sure from when I started in 1978 until today, the composition of the people in the intelligence who work on intelligence is quite different there. I mean, the intelligence community has become quite diverse. Cia, Dia, NSA, quite diverse, not diverse enough. And here I'm not talking about any kind of legacy diversity. I'm talking about diversity of thought. Uh, we frankly, we don't hire enough crazy thinkers. And you and you need crazy thinkers. Thinkers that are attracted to the edge and want to look over and see what's down there, even if there's a danger that they're going to fall. And the other thing that has changed about the intelligence community, and this is not a change in a good way, is that when I started out, we were the cutting edge of technology. In 2025, the intelligence community and government in general is no longer the cutting edge of technology. We are scrambling to even stay like within within the same decade of of the technology edge. And I think that's dangerous.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Do you see any alternatives to the current system, which is essentially try to buy that technology from outside.
Carmen Medina: Yeah I don't.government as we currently practice, it is just not organized for creativity.
Carmen Medina: It is organized for execution. And I think we're in the age of technology where creativity seems to matter more than execution. You know, people are willing to to kind of take chances. Uh, there was no roadmap on how. Not that I know of on how I was going to develop. Right. It's it's been like one creative turn after another, and government's just not organized to do that. So I always wonder when I say things like this, well, what about China? What does that mean? What does that mean? Because China, uh, there's a third word we need to have in there is control. So there's control, creativity, execution. And China is seems to be very much in I think you all in Australia, I'm sure, have a more nuanced view on this than than the average American. But China is conducting a really remarkable social experiment on how to kind of build a the modern society. You know, where the West has kind of gotten into. Decentralization and China remains attached to centralization.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: What's one thing about intelligence that the public don't know that you wish they did?
Carmen Medina: This is the one thing about intelligence that I wish the public knew. Well, I, I think the public assumes that intelligence is somehow clear cut, that it's a purely rational, analytic activity. Uh.
Carmen Medina: think a lot of people think that intelligence is something that is, uh, it's like solving a math problem that if you if you know the equations and you and you know most of the values that you can solve for the missing variable.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: And it's like finding the only truth.
Carmen Medina: Yeah. Finding the only truth. And this does not happen. I was where I was somewhere yesterday, and someone said, well, we have to eliminate all bias. And I went, this cannot be done. It is impossible to eliminate all bias in human beings.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: What do you think are the biggest challenges intelligence communities are facing?
Carmen Medina: The intelligence community has confused secrecy with the intelligence community has defined its mission around the concepts of secrecy. Secrecy is an ancillary part of the intelligence process. Intelligence, I believe, is about sense making and providing decision advantage. There are some situations where you need secrecy to achieve that. Absolutely. But is secrecy? Should secrecy be the default mode of the intelligence community? For most issues? Most of the time? No. And and what what what's happening is that their secrecy model Is weighing them down and slowing them down and making them less agile and making them less sensitive to change and making them making them walk away from the edge. Like on purpose. Intelligence agencies stay away from edgy technologies because they're not sure that they're safe yet. And then meanwhile, years of stuff goes on that they're only vaguely aware of. So I think that, um, I think the allegiance to secrecy, the confusion that occurs with thinking of secrecy as a primary function of the intelligence community rather than an ancillary function is, is hugely problematic.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Yeah, I've written about this as well, about the way that, you know, digital has changed the role of secrecy and intelligence. And I've never quite understood the devotion to secrecy. I mean, of course, I completely understand some capabilities, sources, methods, techniques will necessarily kept secret. But if you accept that in a digital world more information is knowable or inferable, then surely you're placing a premium on those things that you want to keep secret. And in doing so, you also have to accept that so much more is not secret.
Carmen Medina: I learned this from a very good consultant once, and he said, if you treat everything like it's an exception, then nothing is an exception. And that's that's kind of how we deal with information. All information is exceptional. All information is sensitive. All information should be kept secret. And so therefore it's very hard now to keep secrets.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: What are some of the biggest threats or opportunities for technology and security that you see at the moment.
Carmen Medina: obviously, you know, everyone's talking about AI.
Carmen Medina: I would like to see I used and I think it can be used to really explore how we think and enhance our thinking abilities. I don't know if you've ever done these scenario exercises where you get the two by two quadrant and to come up with the tremendous oversimplification of the two by two quadrant, you know, good good bad bad, less bad, less good. Uh, it usually the facilitation session involves you coming up with hundreds of post-it notes, with everything you could think of that could affect this future that you're you're trying to imagine. I was always so disappointed when those hundreds of post-it notes were reduced to the stupid two by two quadrant, which lowest common denominator contained almost no truth. And I always wanted to create a scenario generation machine that took all of those post-it notes and just crunched them, just, you know, every possible combination and then laid them out using some kind of logic, and probably best to use different types of logic, to sort of examine these scenarios. So, you know, if I like this variable. No matter where you put this variable, what other combination of variables you put it with? This variable is always popping up. And and, creating a mess that would be useful to know, right? AI could do that. In fact, I've played with AI uh, to give it variables and say, okay, give me 50 scenarios combining these ten variables. I've never done that kind of an industrial scale. I think it could be done in an industrial scale. I think technology could be used to better understand. the more sophisticated, nuanced aspects of our thinking ability.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: You can see there, too, the potential for so many different trajectories. Yes. There's so much happening in the world. And, you know, people often say, well, is is true strategic surprise really possible in such an observable kind of digital world?
Carmen Medina: Yeah. Good question.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: But when we actually when you, you know, when you start to look into events that have occurred generally there always have been indicators, right? It's just that we weren't looking that.
Carmen Medina: We weren't looking.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Pre-digital or digital. It doesn't really matter. Yeah. Yeah.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: And so the idea of being able to see what we could be looking at to identify things coming up. Yeah. It's a really it's a great idea and one that I think is really important. It's just it's both intellectually and technically difficult.
Carmen Medina: Yes it is, but.It's now more possible.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Absolutely.
Carmen Medina: Than it than it was 15 years ago. You can kind of begin to see the outlines of how you could tackle the problem.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Let’s go to the segment called Interdependencies and Vulnerabilities. What are some of the interdependencies and vulnerabilities in intelligence that you wish were better understood?
Carmen Medina: Well, I've mentioned one already. Vulnerability. That bias cannot be eliminated. I think an interdependence that I would cite is often not recognised is our ability to know anything. Our ability to know is a function of our tools for knowing. So whatever tools and processes we use to know, to figure things out determines how much we know. So I like to say, what was Galileo's profession? He was the best telescope maker in Italy. He happened to be born at the time that I think it was. The Dutch figured out how to do the whole lens thing, and then he became the best telescope maker. So because he was familiar with the tool that contributed to what he learned, the knowledge that he obtained. And so we in the intelligence community. Aren't as aware of how of the deficiencies in our tools for knowing. We don't it's we talk about gaps, but these are but when we think about gaps we go, okay, this is an area that we have to apply our tools to. But what we don't think about in terms of gaps is, oh, we can only see this part of the light spectrum, and there's this whole other part of the light spectrum that we don't even have a tool for looking at or the auditory spectrum. And there's probably a thinking spectrum that we haven't even, I think we're beginning to articulate it when people talk about the spectrum, but I think there's a lot more in there, about our human cognition and then human and machine combined cognition that we don't know. And the fact that we don't understand it is a vulnerability.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: So that's both the intellectual and philosophical gaps rather than, the kind of collection gaps or the collection gap.
Carmen Medina: Right? Yeah, Right.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Yeah, it's a very interesting. It is. It is a very interesting conundrum, I think, for the IC to think about how you might answer radically new questions.
Carmen Medina: Exactly.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Without thinking about how you refine those down into, like, collection requirements and, you.
Carmen Medina: Know, exactly kind.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Of straight away shoehorn them into the capabilities you already have.
Carmen Medina: Speaker3: Exactly. Yeah, that's very well put that when we confront a new problem, we just try to stick it into our existing capabilities without asking ourselves, are these capabilities really just are they even relevant to this new issue that we're concerned about?
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Goes to your point about what does it mean to know something? You know.
Carmen Medina: Exactly.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: What's your key advice for leaders and change makers?
Carmen Medina: There's so much, I would say the first thing that a change maker, whether they're a leader or not, but particularly important when you're not a leader. But it's important for both of them, is you have to make your idea somebody else's idea. You need to make your idea community property. This can be very hard because you get the type A personality who wants to have credit. I, get this ask to ask this question a lot. What should I do when somebody else gets the credit for my idea? And our answer is celebrate. Which, you know, that's extreme. That's not completely true. But what we're trying to do is get over it. Right. You're the objective. You know, the objective is the betterment of the organization. The secondary objective is that you get the credit. That's tough. But I think it's a necessary truth for change makers. So, you know, compromise your principles. To get more people on board your change bus. I just I think this is essential. Uh, I think everyone that's in an organization needs to ask themselves, how many of my brilliant ideas can my organszation tolerate in any given year? Once you ask yourself that question, and I often ask it live in a group, and I see the eyes open up and people go, oh, because the answer is not all of them.
Carmen Medina: And, you know, people will go, well, maybe 1 or 2. So once you have that realisation, then that will lead you inexorably to prioritise your ideas and pick the one that you feel most comfortable with. Probably because it has the best chance for success, but that can involve many factors. You know it'll make your boss look good. It doesn't require new funding. you have another office that's ready to pair up with you on it. Whatever. Right. But, uh, you know, as a change agent, you can't pursue every one of your ideas. And organisations don't like those people, and they never will. So you need to prioritise, Because the best thing that can happen to a change agent is a small success. That's the thing that will open up possibilities for the next one.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: I feel like so often change makers are not especially good at communicating the mission connectedness of their need for change. Often because something happens that they detect something, you know, some kind of pattern recognition or, you know, anomaly, and they go down some path of being, you know, quite focused on that. But then bringing it in and being able to communicate the mission and the why for other people is something I think really needs a lot of focus on. And so I was really interested when I read you wrote an article for Forbes like a decade ago now.
Carmen Medina: Oh my gosh. Yes.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: In it I'll put a link in the show notes. In it you distinguish between.
Carmen Medina: I'd like to reread it.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Good rebels and bad rebels. Right?
Carmen Medina: Oh, yes. Yeah.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: And so I'd like to ask you if you could take us through. Why? Good. Rebels are good for innovation. And how leaders can identify and embrace them.
Carmen Medina: Wow. Well, good rebels, are, uh, you know, mission focused, not me focused. I recall that, uh, good rebels don't want to break rules, but they want to change the rules. So when I was at CIA, CIA being a kind of rule heavy culture, I knew the worst thing I could do would be to sort of recklessly ignore rules or flaunt them. So I had to, you know, carefully play within the rules, maybe stretch them, but still, you know, always have that defense that I'm within the rules. earlier in, in my change making life, I was more accepting of this idea, this sort of Silicon Valley idea of break everything, I bet there are kind of an equal number of important ideas that have advanced through sort of slow, patient, iterative change, as have advanced through breaking things. I mean, I do think breaking things sometimes works.
Carmen Medina: But if you're in a large organization, particularly the government the chances for breaking things to work is are reduced and good rebels are not trying to break things.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: I would really add to that, A key part of government and the role of national security agencies is to protect and keep people safe. So breaking things has a whole different element in there.
Carmen Medina: a lot of people like from the business sector or whatever, government governing is hard, right? It requires your it requires you to put uppermost in your decision making process values that private sector companies don't normally have to worry about, like equity. Or, you know, or not providing one side undue advantage. I mean, all of those things are critical to legitimate government.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Do you think that affects how much we can embrace change making? Or do you think it just changes the kind of change making we need in public service institutions?
Carmen Medina: here's a question that I like to ask groups all the time and that I think government in particular fails. Any organisation I'm with, I asked them, okay, can you describe the rate of change in your external environment? What you know, how much is your external environment changing every year? And they'll come up with different numbers. They'll say, oh, it's changing 5% a year.
Carmen Medina: depending upon the kind of organization they're in, they'll go, oh, it's 20% a year or whatever. Then the second part of the question, okay, if you know, we agree it's 25% a year, it's changing. And then I go, okay, if your outside environment is changing 25% a year, what rate of change do you need to have in your organization to keep up with your external environment? Rate of change I get deer in the headlights. if the outside world is changing at 15% a year. Then what percentage of change do I need to do a year? Probably you were not capable of doing 15%, but like maybe you could aim for 7 or 8, right? And then then once you ask yourself that question, then you have to ask yourself what is your strategy or your process or even your tactics for making that 8% change a year? How do you do that? Because, you know, ideally, if the outside world is changing at 15% a year, that means that it will totally turn over in 7 or 8 years. And you as an organization have to do something equivalent to that at an admittedly slower rate. Because as a government organization, you cannot stop working. You know, you can't like, go, okay, we're going to be offline for the next two years. Good luck. We just can't do it because we're going to totally revamp. So I mean, that's very challenging,
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Be cool to add to that, a question of.
Carmen Medina: Okay, what.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Shouldn't you change?
Carmen Medina: Oh, I love that. Yes. What shouldn't you change?
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Yeah. What should you keep? Um, because I think I think sometimes with so much external change going on, people become kind of overwhelmed. And a real key here, at least for, you know, organizations that I advise. But also, I think, you know, the IC and government is where are we staying still? Like, what is it that we've got right, that we really. Need to keep.
Carmen Medina: We can't. Yeah, exactly.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Whether that's commitment to values, whether that's capabilities.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Whether that's workforce.
Carmen Medina: That's that's that's great. What we're just describing is not that hard to do it, but it just has to be done with intention on a regular basis. And it's really important for government to do this and it doesn't. And that makes me sad.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: so I always have a segment called Emerging Tech for Emerging Leaders. What do you see as the biggest shifts for intelligence leadership specifically from new technologies?
Carmen Medina: I think the intelligence community has to figure out how to support our customers exactly where they are. So if they want to receive stuff via text, they should be able to receive stuff via text. If the ways that we like to communicate are intelligence are too different from the way they normally get their information, we are going to lose. It's absolutely true. So I think that they have got we have got to I always when I was at CIA, I the phrase I had in my head is we have got to find a way to be remain authoritative, but become less formal in everything that we do. And I think technology has the opportunity, gives you the opportunity. And, you know, I would have these radical, heretical ideas that, you know, why couldn't the policymaker just have a conversation, you know, over instant messaging with an analyst. Oh my God, we would have no idea of what they said. I believe all of those fears and concerns are tremendously overblown and are based on flawed premises anyway. Of of how information works and how people make decisions.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: you've just raised something which is so important. So meeting people where they are at is critical because the so often in this discussion, the link between the whole intelligence cycle and intelligence process and communication with the decision maker, it's treated as a a process, right. Like it's treated as here's another step. We're just going to communicate this to a decision maker. And the assumption is job done. Like I've done the communication part, right? But the point is that people make decisions in really different ways, and people actually need to receive the information they need at the time. They need to make the decision in a way that influences their decision otherwise. That's right. It doesn't do the job it needs to do.
Carmen Medina: if you meant how can you use technology to become a better leader? I really think that the way we put together teams is suboptimal because there's diversity of thought. We talked earlier about there's a there's a cognitive spectrum that we do not understand currently. People are trying to understand it, but we do not understand. And so we need to figure out we need to become smarter about how to assemble cognitive talent To fulfill the mission. And I mean small units like the Navy Seals or whatever have figured out how to do this, but this is not done at scale. And so whenever I talk to people who work on talent or human capital or whatever they call it these days, I always say this is the area you should be looking at. You should be the advisor to leaders who can bring really important things to the table. Advice about how to assemble the team to for maximum results. But instead you just keep doing these transactional things that that don't work very well.
Carmen Medina: And I think technology is going to be a big part of that if we ever get there. Technology is going to be a big part of it.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: integrating complex technologies ethically asks a lot of us as leaders. Um, you've held some really significant roles during Technology and security developments in the intelligence community. How have you best led others through change in your career?
Carmen Medina: when people would ask me what my management philosophy was, I always had a one word answer, which is conversation. You cannot you just cannot have enough conversation. Practically speaking, you know, in the late 90s, I finally got permission. The job that allowed me to start to experiment with what we call then publish when ready. You know, 24 hour constant dissemination rather than this sort of newspaper cycle concept. We were living under and I was assembled a team to work on it. And, I thought it was a great idea. I was very enthusiastic about it. But in the first couple of sessions, I could tell the meetings weren't going well and people didn't know what to do. Just by chance. I went off to a class, in the Federal Training Center, on I think it was on program management. And we had we were presented with a two by two grid that nevertheless had a huge impact on me. When do you need to be highly directive as a leader, and when can you be very relaxed? The answer is obvious, but it had not been obvious to me. If we know exactly what we're doing, we've done it before.
Carmen Medina: We're clear and the people are competent. Just let it go, right? If you're trying to do something new that's never been done before, you got to be hands on and you have to be directive. It's kind of like you can't be afraid to take a decision because it might be the wrong decision. If you have faith in your staff, once you make the decision, they will correct it for you. But if you make no decision, nothing happens. And if people don't know what it is you want out of this new initiative, they're not they're not going to take any action on their own. So I came back and I said, okay, this is what we're going to do. We're going to do this. We're going to do this. And they were all went happily away. And we started making progress. But sometimes to lead people through change, you have to give them clear guidance in little bites that they can digest. And, and do and then gain confidence. And then you've established a track record and now you can go to the next bite. Right.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: I wonder, too, if that insight could be reversed. And that is that for leaders whose natural style.Is.Authoritative and kind of, like take quick decisions, perhaps they like if both or all leadership styles, if all leadership styles can learn to recognize what styles are needed in the moments.
Carmen Medina: Yes. Yes.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Then using the appropriate. Because you're exactly right. Like at times you need to be more, decisive and, action orientated and give people clear decisions that they can go away and work on. And at others, it's completely appropriate to let people kind of, you know, play a bit more and have that space. and both casual and formal approaches are relevant in there too. I just think there's it is natural.
Carmen Medina: Yeah. There's a certain thing that's right. For the moment, it's like in the military. Right. Uh, winning the military engagement is optimal, but retreating at the right moment to preserve your opportunity to re-engage is also optimal. Right? Either one of those decisions can be good. What's bad is not, you know, it's kind of floundering, right?
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Because, you know, leadership is understanding which one you need in each moment and being able to deliver.
Carmen Medina: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: I'll go to a segment called disconnect. How do you wind down and unplug?
Carmen Medina: I read broadly. I mean, when I say broadly, I mean broadly, uh, I don't watch a lot. I'm not a watcher. I think this is one of my kind of old fashioned fuddy duddy things I play pickleball and I'm pretty competitive. I don't mean to suggest I'm very good at it, but I. I enjoy competitive things. Yeah. I'm fascinated by how your mind works and the kind of extra thing that happens in your brain body connection when you're competing.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Technology brings you the most joy?
Carmen Medina: I've become very fond of YouTube as this incredible experiment in artisanal media production by everyone.
[01:13:45] Carmen Medina: I really enjoy how the algorithm works, because every once in a while it'll be like, surprise me with something like I've been binging on the Mitford sisters for some reason, only because the YouTube channel presented it to me,
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Eyes and Ears. And what have you been reading, listening to, or watching lately that might be of interest to the audience?
Carmen Medina: Well, I've been watching a lot about the Mitford sisters for some bizarre, strange reason. I'm currently reading strolls with Pushkin. Pushkin. The great Russian poet.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: And in my final segment, it's called Need to Know. Is there anything I didn't ask that would have been great to cover?
Carmen Medina: So you didn't ask me about being a Puerto Rican and a woman in the intelligence community, and, there's a correlation between the fact that I'm not a northern European, wealthy man who went to a prominent university on the East coast. There's a correlation between that and the fact that I'm an unusual thinker. I mean, I don't perceive myself to be as unusual a thinker as others perceive me to be an unusual thinker.
Carmen Medina: I don't want to I don't want to trade in stereotypes here, but I think I've always been more sensitive to sort of the arguments of the underdog or the feelings of the underdog or the concerns of the underdog, and less impressed by sort of power formulas, power elite formulas.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Yeah, that's a really interesting insight. how did you find being a Puerto Rican woman in the intelligence community?
Carmen Medina: Didn't think about it a lot at the time. so I'm Puerto Rican, but I went to high school in El Paso, Texas. That's a majority Latino community, Mexican American, but Latino. So there was people never spoke about it because it was like we were fish. It was the water. I didn't really become aware of that until I came to the East Coast. and then I realized that there was this, you know, that that we were othered. Not necessarily in horrible ways, but but still that people looked at us and thought we were, you know, kind of like, why are you here? Who are you? Why are you here? I was very sensitive always to the possible perception that I was getting ahead for some kind of, diversity, equity, quota reason. So I kind of underplayed it until I became a kind of a middle grade. And I had a friend who said to me, well, now that you are this grade, you're free to be who you really are and say what you really think. What a what an important piece of advice. And because of this grade, that also means that more people will hear you and you will kind of have this more natural platform. I hadn't thought of that. And from that point on I became very active in all sort of diversity. Equity. Joined the Hispanic associations and, started doing all the things that I had avoided doing earlier.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: it's an it's a common story. Unfortunately, I think many people minimize their own individuality until they reach a level they perceive as senior enough to share that. But it's also part of why representation really matters, right?
Carmen Medina: Yes of course. Yes, yes.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Thank you so much for joining me.
Carmen Medina: Great.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Thanks for listening to Technology and Security. I've been your host, Dr Miah Hammond-Errey. If there was a moment you enjoyed today or a question you have about the show, feel free to tweet me (@Miah_HE), or send an email to the address in the show notes (drmiah@stratfutures.com) You can find out more about the work we do on our website, also linked in the show notes. If you like this episode, please rate, review, and share it with your friends.
