Cultivating high quality decisioning by red-teaming
Red Teaming - Why and What
While we want to believe we make the best decisions possible with the information available, studies have repeatedly shown that there are formidable limitations of human decision making. Despite our best intention, intelligence and experience, we are clouded by arrays of cognitive biases, logical fallacies, human emotions and behaviors, situational motivations and incentives that skew our decision making which subsequently impacts performance.
At the highest level, these limitations can be classified into a few categories (root causes):
Complacency with current state and established practices
Assumptions which no longer hold true
Hierarchy of decision making
Groupthink especially when led by strong leader
Failure to examine external factors adequately
Personality traits and organizational boundaries which prevent open discussion, debate, and commitment
Red Teaming is a practice which dates back to the Vatican’s Office of the Devil’s Advocate whose job was to thoroughly investigate candidates for sainthood and debunk false claims. It was formalized and codified by the US Army in 2004 after the stinging results in Iraq. It is a system with a set of tools to enable the mindset and practice to “question the unquestionable, think the unthinkable, challenge everything”. It empowers the “minority viewpoints” to be heard and considered.
When done well, Red Teaming makes our plans and decision processes better. It fosters diverse viewpoints and creative solutions. It raises the team’s confidence and commitment level for the decision and plan we made, so we can focus more on execution. Ultimately, it enhances our chance of success, and the accelerates our path towards building a high performing team.
The How’s
Red teaming is a systemic approach that intentionally inserts contrarian thinking into our decision making and planning process. This approach starts by deliberately examining the underlying assumptions, and challenging the decision and status quo. It is important to provide independence to the Red Team, and charge it with the obligation to dissent. The red team is to literally be the devil’s advocate when everybody else is in agreement, to articulate what we need to believe to have the nightmare scenario realized.
The Four Principles laid out in the Red Team Handbook by US Army introduce systemic and structural elements to achieve effective red teaming:
Self-awareness and Reflection - understanding how one’s experience, beliefs and motivations manifests in our decision making process, and learning ways to improve such.
Groupthink Mitigation and Decision Support - examining unseen group dynamics that can pressure us to agree with the group or to avoid contradicting the senior leader, thereby freeing us from groupthink.
Fostering Cultural Empathy - providing insights and clarity on why different people and groups see things in fundamentally different lights, and thereby embracing diverse viewpoints and possibilities.
Applied Critical Thinking - increasing our ability and skill to scrutinize assumptions, identify biases, and evaluate alternatives.
It is equally important to recognize what Red Teaming is not:
It is not a challenge to the leadership. It helps the leadership make better, more informed decisions
It is not about getting it right or predicting the future.
It is not a competing team with zero sum game. It makes the same, collective team better
It is not cynical, albeit critical
It is not an excuse for inaction. We need to know when to stop and commit to a decision
Getting Started
While the entire portfolio and depth of red teaming are vast, we can utilize its essence to boost our own decision making and planning on a pragmatic basis. To get started, there are two types of situations for us to consider deploying the practice of a red team. The first would be on important, long lasting decisions we need to make, e.g. whether to move from on-prem to public cloud for our infrastructure, or how to increase our chance of success in a highly competitive consumer finance space. A red team can be formed by appointing members from non-related functions who collectively possess domain expertise and have demonstrated competence in critical thinking. Their mandate is to stress test the established plan and come up with fault lines in the proposal, or alternative views. It is important to have a proposed plan in place first by designated members, before the red team is formed.
The other situation is less resource intensive - to introduce the concept of red teaming and appoint / rotate red team members in Key Business Reviews and Staff Meetings. The members’ mandate would be to put on their critical lens and provide contravian views when making tactical decisions, or solutioning for P0 issues. This will shape the team dynamics to one where the leads become comfortable in challenging the leader and each other, without the fear of getting it wrong, or upsetting others.
Guiding Principles for Red Teaming
The boss must buy in
Outside and Objective, while Inside and Aware
Fearless Skeptics with Finesse
Have a big bag of tricks
Be willing to hear bad news and act on it
Red team just enough, but no more