Our Instructors
Strong analytical practices are not confined to any one profession. Cascadia draws on methods developed across intelligence, academia, research, and other analytical disciplines to identify approaches that help people think more clearly about complex problems.
Our instruction emphasizes methods that have been tested in demanding professional and educational environments and can be adapted to the challenges organizations actually face. The goal is to give participants practical tools for evaluating evidence, challenging assumptions, working through uncertainty, and improving the quality of individual and team judgment.
Founder | Lead Instructor
Adam Wunische, PhD
Cascadia is led by Dr. Adam Wunische, who has spent more than 20 years practicing, studying, and teaching critical thinking and analysis across government, academia, research organizations, and the military. He has authored or co-authored two books on analytic methods and teaches graduate courses at George Washington University.
Throughout his career, Adam has worked with a wide range of approaches for structuring complex problems, evaluating evidence, challenging assumptions, and making judgments under uncertainty. His experience has also given him a practical view of where analytical methods help, where they fall short, and how they can be adapted to the real constraints people face at work. That perspective shapes Cascadia Intelligence Lab’s approach: drawing on the strongest ideas from multiple analytical disciplines and turning them into practical methods individuals and teams can use.
Adam began his career as a U.S. Army intelligence Sergeant and later earned his PhD from Boston College. He subsequently worked as an analyst and analytic methodologist at the CIA, where he received an award for analytic innovation, and later contributed to the Afghanistan War Commission’s examination of U.S. intelligence assessments. He is also the author of Unwinnable Wars.
