About CKS

In its broadest sense, intelligence can be viewed as a kind of “peculiar genius” - a “quickness in seeing things as they are,” as George Santayana famously put it.

In professional practice, intelligence is the art and discipline of accessing information, elucidating meaning from it, and communicating the results to the right audience.

We use it to determine the art of the possible.

As trained political scientists, anthropologists, historians, lawyers, and engineers, we have the knowledge and skills to think through, answer and resolve complex questions.

We apply structured thinking to matters in which facts are disputed, sources are partial, and context is essential.

We use it to understand and assess how things work in the real world.

Research and experimental development - R&D - organises speculative research in a structured and iterative process, generates new evidence, and learns from it.

Basic research builds knowledge without seeking outcomes. Applied research uncovers new data to advance a product or process. Experimental research builds, tests, and studies them.

Our R&D is about advancing the state of the art.

We maintain professional and personal commitments to the rule of law, and we have a record of completed assignments to prove it.

Our work has always been connected directly or indirectly to rule of law initiatives, including service with international organisations and fact-finding missions mandated to uphold and promote legal process, principles, and outcomes.

We support legal process and operations, including legal research and pre-discovery, needs assessment, evidence collection, large-scale digitization, and technology assisted review. We do not provide legal advice or services regulated under English and Welsh law.

We began working on emerging technologies in response to client requests for regulatory, behavioural, and applications research.

The result was a wrap-around service that provides two things: elements of context that connect product to market, and strategic and market intelligence for decisions about investing in, procuring, or countering new capabilities.

That matured into a dedicated practice area focused on humans-in-systems, artificial intelligence, user experience and adoption, product benchmarking, use case and scenario development, and the broader spectrum of emerging tech work that shaped us.

We implemented an in-house research program on the behavioural, cultural, and social characteristics of financial networks.

Our desk and field assignments on fragile and conflict affected states frequently overlapped with economic challenges and the financial activities of globally sanctioned entities.

Programme coverage included multiple desk and field assignments. Field missions included: a rapid field assessment of revenue leakage (in the nine figure USD range) surrounding a major mining concession in Indonesia; and evidence gathering and analysis of illicit networks and economies in denied areas of Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, and Syria.

Our most robust area of expertise and track record of completed assignments is in geopolitics, defence, and security.

Private sector and civil society assignments focused on due diligence, open-source intelligence, competitor research, and political, strategic, and operational risk intelligence.

Public sector assignments, for UK, US, Canadian and Norwegian government clients, covered policy, strategy, doctrinal, and historical analysis, typically delivered as detailed studies, maps, datasets, briefing and workshops. In the UK these were delivered through prime-led consortia (primes were BAE, Thales, PWC, and others).