On Planning the Destruction of the Rebel Alliance

Last week, as part of the Connections Online conference, I look part in a "Red Teaming Workshop".

For this exercise we used some common red teaming methods, namely "Think - Write - Share", and "6 Empathetic Questions", to look at Rebel Alliance from the perspective of the Empire.

Think-Write-Share is literally how it reads, in response to a prompt everyone thinks for a while, then writes down their ideas, then shares - in turn, in an order determined by the facillitator, giving everyone a chance to contribute.

The 6 Empathetic Questions are shown below, within the US Army's Red Team Handbook they're introduced with "Visualize the world from the point of view of the other. Empathetically examine the world by answering from the other’s perspective:"

This session was the ideal combination of fun and thought-provoking, and a few points struck me:

• Just the value in something like Think-Write-Share, in giving everyone a voice - such a dramatic change in outcomes from a discussion.
• While I shouldn't really be surprised, with all the good experiences I've had with current or former military personnel, it was still notable to me to be among people with such impressive experience who didn't talk down to me in any way because I was a civilian, nor to any less experienced member of the group.
• To experience these techniques in practice is always useful, and especially to see online facillitation run so well.
• The session was another example of the value of taking a ficticious scenario seriously. This is a great way to use shared knowledge to learn or generate new ideas, without any of the baggage that comes with real world examples. So putting all of the narrative concerns to one side, and treating the films - and my hasty reading of Wikipedia - as historical, generated useful insights.
• It was thought-provoking to look at such a well established narrative in a new way and come to new conclusions. Most prominently for me: at how awful the Empire must be to not have destroyed, or at least rendered ineffective, such a puny adversary. From others in the group: realising that the Rebels were essentially a wandering bullseye, directing the weaponry of the Empire against whichever poor planet or civilisation they chose to burden themselves with; and that the Empire clearly doesn't have any kind of internal red team, their demise being an example of how enforced agreement within an organisation can lead to its downfall is ever there was one.
• And lastly - as Gaby pointed out - we were kind of doing this exercise twice... as conference attendees in the real world we put ourselves into the mindset of a red team for the Empire, and from there putting ourselves into the mindset of the Rebel Alliance. These mental gymnastics were surprisingly easy, and very rewarding.

Thank you to Steve Sallot for running this, and to Robert Domaingue, Ph.D. , Christopher Weuve , Tracy from Ottocon, and Gaby, for being such great co-workers in our efforts to bring order to the universe.

And thank you to Indy Neogy for suggesting this is the content that LinkedIn deserves.

( and as a final note, it's something the military members in the session steered away from, but I'd genuinely like to walk through a Centre of Gravity analysis of the Rebel Alliance one day... )