Making Unknown-Unknowns, Known: Thoughts on Red Teaming, Psychological Safety, Situational Awareness, and Debriefs.

Background: This past week I was involved in a whirlwind of conversations ranging form Cynefin in Safety, Effect-Based Operations, Value-Focused Thinking, Red Teaming, Teamwork, Sensemaking in Options Trading, Leadership, Structured Debriefs, "Soft Firings," Operational Excellence, Behavioral Markers, Surveys, the OODA loop, and Flow Systems.

I want to focus on a few things here beginning with the idea that Red Teaming exists to make Unknown-Unknowns, Known. Unknown-Unknowns can only be revealed retrospectively, after the fact. I'll come back to this later.

I was once asked to give an example of an unknown-unknown by someone who thought everyone can be made above average. -Unknown

Red Teaming Groupthink Mitigation Tools (GMT) exist to help make what is known to a few, and not known to many, known. Red Teaming also helps us identify the gaps in our collective knowledge, those things we know we don't know: known-unknowns.

Anonymity, used in most Red Teaming Groupthink Mitigation Tools including 5 Gets You 25, may signal to the group that it is unsafe to speak up here in the same way anonymous surveys signal it is unsafe to speak up here. This is why we should not confuse Red Teaming techniques with psychological safety.

Psychological safety is fostered through leadership actions including articulating intent, displaying fallibility, and by simply saying, "I don't know." Much has been written about psychological safety and I would caution you to learn from those who lived it, not those who read a book about it. Same goes for Red Teaming.

The purpose of Red Teaming Groupthink Mitigation Tools and why leaders need to foster a psychologically safe environment is the same: to make what is known by a few, known to the many (what can bucketed under weak signal detection). What leaders do with these weak signals --whether they were captured with a Red Teaming technique or as a result of a culture of psychological safety--can amplify or dampen future weak signal detection efforts.

The way I act when I meet my daughter's first boyfriend will determine if I meet the second. -Known Unknown

Twist time...

Debriefs: Revealing Unknown-Unknowns, wait for it, Retrospectively

Recent research suggest debriefs should be structured and led by a trained team member or leader with a focus on objective data, not subjective beliefs. This is counter to the cottage retrospective industry that thrives on creating a dependency on games, anonymous surveys, and external facilitation. More on this at a later time.

Debriefs help us improve our future by looking back on what happened and understanding the how and why. Leaders can use the debrief to help foster psychological safety as this most important team event provides and opportunity for a leader to display fallibility, clarify intent, and say, "I don't know."

When used in a structured debrief, Red Teaming Groupthink Mitigation Tools such as combining Think-Write-Share with the Crawford Slip Method provide a way for team members to share their perspectives on what happened, essentially making the previously unknown-unknowns, known. This is painful as most people don't know what happened (objective data) and tend to focus on beliefs and attitudes (subjective data).

By looking back at what happened from multiple perspectives, we start to build more situational awareness not only in the debrief but in situ, where events take place in the future. I argue that an overlooked outcome of effective debriefing is in the development of individual capacity to notice more, building that situational awareness necessary to help make what is known by the few, known to the many.

Final thoughts. Thanks for all of the conversations and posts this past week. I am a little fired up that the military (U.S. Army) has decided to defund the UFMCS Red Teaming school at the end of 2021. I'm thinking about creating a Red Teaming school/workshop around The Flow System. Thoughts?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera is the founder of AGLX Consulting and co-creator of The Flow System