DON'T OUTSOURCE THINKING?

What Is Red Team Thinking?

Red teams are established by an enterprise to challenge aspects of that very enterprise’s plans, programs, assumptions, etc. It is this aspect of deliberate challenge that distinguishes red teaming from other management tools.

"Most people would rather die than think; many do" - Bertrand Russell

Red Team Thinking is a more agile and adaptable version of red teaming, a formal process developed primarily by the U.S. military and intelligence agencies in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the disastrous wars that followed them. It is a systematic way of making critical and contrarian thinking part of the strategic planning process of any organization. It provides a robust set of tools designed to challenge your assumptions, expose hidden threats, identify missed opportunities, and stress-test your plans and strategies. These techniques help you think differently about your business and consider the unintended consequences of your actions.?

Learn how to stress-test your strategies and pressure-test your plans

Assumptions Challenge?is a?foundational Red Team Thinking Tool that will help you identify the stated and unstated assumptions behind your plans and strategies while also providing a rigorous?framework for deliberately challenging your thinking in order to overcome cognitive biases, groupthink and other threats to sound decision making

Understand who the players are and how to win them over to your side

Influencer Engineering??is a useful tool for identifying the different internal and external stakeholders who can contribute to the success or failure of a plan. By plotting their level of support or opposition against their level of influence, you can identify which ones to target in order to increase their level of support or blunt their opposition in order to ensure your strategy has the greatest chance of success.?

See how key stakeholders see you – and how to turn adversaries into allies

Four Ways of Seeing?is a simple but remarkably revealing technique that can yield valuable insights into the way competitors, customers, and other key influencers view your company, your industry, and one another. It can be used in conjunction with?Influencer Engineering??to figure out how to turn strong opposition into weak opposition, weak opposition into weak support and weak support into strong support for your strategies and plans. It can also be used by planners formulate strategies that address the challenges and opportunities presented by these key influencers. Finally,?Four Ways of Seeing?can be used after a plan has been formulated to ensure it takes into account the sensitivities and expectations of all of the stakeholders

Learn?how to uncover the pathways that lead to failure so that you can avoid them

PreMortem Analysis?is a powerful tool that is designed to help you understand the ways your plans can fail in order to ensure that they don't. Originally developed by Dr. Gary Klein, it helps to identify the individual steps that can lead a strategy to fail in order to develop specific mitigating actions to prevent those failures from occurring.

We can’t predict the future, but we can uncover the different ways in which it could unfold

Alternative Futures Analysis?is a valuable technique designed to reveal the different ways a strategy could unfold, allowing your organization to plan for the worst even as it prepares for the best. It is also designed to help planners identify and understand the levers their organization can pull to increase the odds that their strategy will succeed.

Understand the threats and opportunities that lie ahead

Swan Dive??is a powerful tool designed to explore the consequences of events that might not occur, but that would have a major impact on your strategy or plan if they did. It is a structured brainstorming technique that is designed to expose both the threats and opportunities that could be created by such disruptions, as well as opportunities your organization might have to steer events the desired direction.

Ever wondered how to play the devil’s advocate...how to make contrarian thinking part of your planning process..?

Red Team Thinking? is a battle-tested set of tools and techniques designed to help you stress-test your strategies, strengthen your plans, identify unseen threats, uncover missed opportunities and make better decisions in a complex and rapidly changing world. First developed by the military and intelligence agencies, these techniques will help you challenge your own thinking and enlist your team in finding the best way forward through these turbulent times

Prepared for change ; Armed for disruption ; Ready for tomorrow

"This is thinking that is core to surviving and thriving in this world"