CRITICAL THINKING IN THE MILITARY — RED TEAMING

It took a lot, but it finally happened. It took the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City to be attacked by terrorists and to fall. Immediately those in the intelligence community identified a key problem—there was a breakdown in communications. The information about the attack was there, but the critical thinking about it was missing. People were not collaborating or communicating effectively. It also took a disappointing failure in Iraq after freeing Iraq from a dictatorship. In both cases (and many others), it was as if someone had not thought things through before engaging in a war.

With all of that the U.S. military finally decided to install critical thinking as an intricate part of its planning processes. To do that it set up what they called “red teams” who were commissioned with the task of playing devil’s advocate and looking for how the plan could go wrong or be defeated. They called the process red teaming. At least some in the government were beginning to intelligently use failure.

“Failure is only the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” (Henry Ford)

I didn’t know about this until I read it in Bryce Hoffman’s book that he wrote last year— Red Teaming: How Your Business Can Conquer the Competition by Challenging Everything. Here is how he defined the process of “red teaming.”

Red teaming challenges your plans and the assumptions upon which they are based. Red teaming makes critical and contrarian thinking part of your company’s planning process. Red teams are established to challenge aspects of an enterprise’s plans, programs, and assumptions.

Red teaming is critical thinking. It is getting an organization, or even more challenging, a bureaucracy, to question itself— to question its plans, strategies, and processes. It is establishing within an organization the ability to honestly look at itself, encourage bad news, reward “speaking unpleasant truths to power,” etc. All this is especially hard given that any and every bureaucracy by its very nature encourages compliance, rewards conformity, punishes whistle blowers, keeps status levels separate, and suffers from several biases (e.g., not-invented-here bias, status quo bias, etc.).

As a form of critical thinking, that is the design of red teaming? It is to overcome the limitations of human decision making. And that’s because we are all “unduly influenced by a dizzying array of cognitive biases and logical fallacies that skew our decision making and lead us in unintended directions without us even being away of it.” (p. 51). Hoffman sorts it out and puts it in three

phrases:

1) Use analytical tools to question arguments and assumptions.

2) Use imaginative techniques to figure out what could go wrong or right.

3) Use contrarian thinking to challenge the plan and force considering other alternatives.

Now Hoffman was the first and only civilian to ever be allowed to attend the Red Teaming Training on the military grounds of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He knew some people and got some strings pulled which enabled him to be invited to the training. This was in part due to his previous book, American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company. He noted that many had adopted the book as a manual for a new model of leadership— “a forward- looking, data-drive approach to management that Mulally had used to save not only Ford but also Boeing.” (p. 4).

Critical thinking is tough enough for a single person. We have so many psychological mechanisms to protect us from it (e.g., rationalization, cognitive distortions, cognitive biases, etc.)! It is even more challenging when a group or team takes it on. But it is next to impossible for a large organization and especially a bureaucracy. There are so many group dynamics and political dynamics that go against questioning the organization and “speaking truth to power.” So to solve that problem, Hoffman says, “Red teaming is most effective when the red team has permission to question the unquestionable, think the unthinkable, and challenge everything.”

That’s because you are bringing in critical thinking to challenge the status quo, to raise self- awareness of one’s own biases and limitations and to become intellectually honest (p. 107). You are also bringing in critical thinking to identify, flush-out, and challenge your assumptions. That’s sure to stir up controversy and induce people with vested interests into states of insecurity. Doing this further means looking at the way you state problems, solutions, resolutions, decisions, etc. Why? Because how you frame these things determines the alternatives you consider and the way you evaluation them (p. 125).

Critical thinking in this “red teaming” format means making sure that you frame problems and solutions correctly. The US Army teaches red teamers start by examining the issue under review from a variety of different angles. Turning a problem on its head can also yield valuable insights and new perspectives. This is what we do in NLP via using multiple perspectives and that’s due to the flexibility premise that we operate from— the person with the most flexibility in a system will have the most influence.

For more, order Executive Thinking: Activating Your Highest Executive Thinking Potentials (2018). http://www.neurosemantics.com/products/executive-thinking/