176: How to Prevent Terrible Decisions using Red Team Thinking with Bryce Hoffman

Pete Mockaitis
Bryce, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Bryce Hoffman
Great to be on with you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so interesting background you have. So you are civilian and yet you chose to enter the Army’s Red Team Leaders Course which is made for military officers, right?

Bryce Hoffman
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
What’s that story?

Bryce Hoffman
Well, in 2015 I became the first civilian from outside government to graduate from this course which is for senior military officers. And the reason I entered that course, Pete, is because I am a former financial journalist turned management consultant and I was looking for a system to help companies stress-test their strategies to overcome what I think of as two of the biggest evils of business today: group think and complacency.

And I heard about this amazing program that had been developed by the US Army after it ran into some pretty serious problems in Iraq and Afghanistan that seem to me the solution to those problems, and this program was called Red Teaming and it was, as I understood it, a system that was designed to make organizations think critically and use contrarian analysis to look at their strategies and plans, to make better decisions and also, just as importantly, to kind of uncover the truths that are buried inside the organization and kind of held down by the hierarchy or by the prevailing wisdom.

It sounded like it’s something that could be really valuable to business, so I called the Pentagon and asked them if I could take the course and they, of course, said, “No, are you kidding?” But I’m a persistent guy, Pete, and I kept asking, and I kept asking different people in the military until finally that no turned into a yes. And I spent the first half of 2015 with an amazing group of US Army majors and one Air Force major who were in this program to become Red Team leaders, all of whom were combat veterans who had served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I was the guy who wasn’t wearing green on the first day of class.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, did they subject you to any physical fitness components as well?

Bryce Hoffman
You know, it’s not part of the program but peer pressure is an amazing thing. I found myself in a CrossFit box for the first time in my life several times a week and I’m a better man for it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s great, using the lingo. You had boxes, so cool. And so that’s so cool, and I really love that you’re just taken it to the next level there. It reminds me a little bit of Robert Cialdini who wrote Influence and the latest Presuasion in terms of, “Okay, you study something, you’re interested in something but you’re going to go wherever the cutting edge leads you in your study of the area.” So, kudos to you, my hat or beret off, if you will, for that.

Bryce Hoffman
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then can you lay it out for us a little bit? So Red Teaming is this set of mental tools or how would you define it precisely?

Bryce Hoffman
It’s really a set of planning tools and analytical tools that you can use as an organization to stress-test your strategies by breaking them down into the assumptions they’re based on and then challenging those assumptions to make sure they’re really true and likely to remain true under all circumstances. So that’s one thing that makes Red Teaming really different from most business tools is this element of deliberate challenge.

Then there’s a second component which is basically another set of tools and techniques that are designed to help you look at the different ways that your plan or strategy could unfold under different future conditions. Because, let’s face it, Pete, right now the future has become very hard to predict. We live in an age of incredible uncertainty and complexity in the business world in particular.

And so there’s a whole set of tools and techniques to say, “Here’s our plan, here’s how we hope it will turn out. And here’s how we think the business environment is going to be or, in this case, in its original form, the military environment is going to be but we don’t really know. So let’s run this trap out against a bunch of different scenarios and see how it looks.” So that’s another component.

And then the final component, which is this whole set of group-think mitigation tools and what the Army calls, very colorfully, liberating structures that are designed to basically cut through the hierarchy and get at the truth wherever it resides in the organization. Because look, Pete, we all know, anybody who works in a company knows that there are people who are not seen at the top of the house, who know what’s wrong, who know how to fix things, who know how to do what the company does better but they’re too often their voice are just aren’t heard.

Instead of the grease, too often the squeaky wheel simply gets invited to find a career opportunities elsewhere. And so Red Teaming has built into it a whole set of tools and techniques to kind of use things like anonymous feedback to get good ideas to surface in a way that doesn’t pay attention to rank or status, and that lets people look at the ideas rather than the personalities around the ideas which is very important in a hierarchical organization like the military but that’s also important in a hierarchical organization like a corporation.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Okay. Well, I’m excited to dig into some of these tools here. And I guess I’m wondering, first and foremost, I guess it just seems like companies, teams, individuals and work groups just should be doing this sort of stuff anyway and, more or less, systematically or kind of set it to a program but often they don’t. Maybe we could start there. So why aren’t folks doing this naturally anyway? How does group-think and complacency kind of crop up in the first place?

Bryce Hoffman
Well, Pete, you made a really good observation there which is the people should be doing this more or less. And the problem is that everybody knows that but they default to less.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Bryce Hoffman
So I’ll give you an example. Once I graduated from the Army’s program in June of 2015, I started working with my consulting clients to put these ideas into practice, and one of the first companies that I started working with was a global investment bank. It was actually a nation sovereign wealth fund, I can’t say which one.

And when I explained some of these tools to their senior managing partners and managing directors, a couple of them came up to me during one of our breaks and said, “You know, a lot of what you’re telling us we should be doing, we actually, on paper, are supposed to be doing. But the problem is is that we don’t actually do it because there’s no system. It’s just a box to check.”

For instance, there’s a Red Teaming technique called a key assumptions check. This is one of the simpler Red Teaming techniques that I talk about in the book, and I explained how to use all of these tools and techniques in the book. And a key assumptions check just kind of simply you take your strategy or you take your plan or, in this case, you take your investment proposal and you break it down into, as I said earlier, the assumptions it’s based on and then you examine those assumptions.

And he explained to me that, “We have as part of our written policy that we’re supposed to do a critical analysis of the assumptions that our investment strategies are based on.” But he said, “This is how it generally plays out. Three or four of us who are in charge of a program will be sitting around a table, we’ll get to that point on the list and we’ll say, ‘Have we looked and done a critical analysis on the assumptions here?’ ‘Yes.’ All nod at each other and we’ll check that box.”

You can’t do that with a formal Red Team process because a formal Red Team process has steps that require you to actually do that. And so some of the tools that are in the Red Teaming toolbox are things like you said that companies should be doing anyways but they’re not doing it. And Irving Janis identified group-think for the first time decades ago. I mean, this is old news but anyone who’s worked in a company of any size knows the group-think is alive and well today as it was when Janis first started writing about it decades ago.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so maybe before we dig deep into the tools, so we heard a little bit about the before in terms of US Army having some challenges. Could you also give us a glimpse of the after in terms of folks who have applied some of these principles to great effect?

Bryce Hoffman
Yes, so in the military, the best example of all, to me, of Red Teaming in action that people are familiar with is the 2007 troop surge in Iraq. So that was one of the first big visible products of Red Team thinking in the military. Unfortunately, a lot of the things that Red Team is used for in the military are very classified and so I can’t talk about them but this is one that I can.

If you look at what happened in 2007, the President of the United States, President Bush, gave the military the task of figuring out how to withdraw, how to pull out of Iraq. And General Petraeus, who was an early adopter of Red Teaming, an early fan of Red Teaming, used this approach to kind of come up with an analysis that was quite contrarian which was, in a sense, very kind of counterintuitive in a certain sense which is that, “If we want to pull our troops out of Iraq the thing we need to do is send more troops into Iraq.”

Pete Mockaitis
Indeed.

Bryce Hoffman
“Because we had been slowly drawing our presence down, and as we were slowly drawing our presence down, the insurgency was rising.” So General Petraeus, after having Red Teamed this, said, “No, here’s what we need to do. If we want to pull out we can just send 30,000 more troops right now and we need to just bring law and order to the country, give people a chance to catch their breath, separate the warring factions, allow the Iraqis to kind of get their foothold and police themselves, and then we can pull everybody out.”

And he developed a step-by-step strategy to do this. The problem, because this example, the thing I love about this example, Pete, is it shows the potential and the danger that you face when you’re Red Teaming, is the problem is it was so successful. If you cast your mind back, the amount of violence in Iraq just dropped off dramatically after this. That it was so successful that after a few months the politicians in Washington said, “Oh, that’s great. This worked wonderful. Let’s just pull everyone out now.”

And General Petraeus tried to say, “Wait. Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait. This is not the whole thing here. We’re not quite there yet.” But everyone was like, “Oh, no, let’s declare victory and pull out.” And then we pulled out and everything fell apart again, and that’s how we got ISIS and where we are today. So my point is that shows you how it can work and how it can fail if the organization doesn’t listen to the Red Team’s results.

Now let me give you a business example. One of the companies that I’ve worked with that I talk about is Dale Carnegie & Associates, the personal development company. And they have a new CEO who came in and was given the task of revitalizing the brand and making it as relevant in the 21st century as it had been in the 20th century. And so he put together a comprehensive turnaround strategy for the company and he asked me to lead his executive team through a Red Teaming analysis of this plan before they turned it over to the board of directors for final approval.

And what we found when we did this analysis is there were two or three major elements of the turnaround strategy that they thought were addressing key strategic targets, key strategic objectives of the turnaround that, in fact, were fixing what wasn’t broken not what was broken. And so the plan was modified majorly to account for these things and they’ve been very successful to-date in executing on that. But if you talk to any of the executives, what they’ll say is, “We would never have seen these things until they started becoming problems in the execution if we hadn’t Red Teamed it first.”

So Red Teaming is it’s spending a few extra minutes, hours or days, whatever it merited based on the complexity of the plan you’re looking at and how important it is to your organization upfront to save you from months, years or a lifetime of anguish later.

Red Teaming is a little uncomfortable. Red Teaming is not something that’s warm and fuzzy. It’s designed to push your envelopes a little bit and to challenge your assumptions by design and to make people a little bit uncomfortable because that’s how you get at the hard truths that organizations need to address in order to be successful.

And the thing is you cannot do those things, you can choose not to do those things, or you can choose not to Red Team, but if you do, your competitors are one day, maybe not tomorrow, but some day, are going to do it to you if you don’t do it yourself. So what I tell companies is that, “By using these tools and techniques, by Red Teaming yourself today, you can make yourself, you company, one of the disruptors rather than one of the disrupted.” And I think everybody would rather change themselves than have change forced upon them by external events.

Pete Mockaitis
Before we dig into the three subcomponents there, can you share the emotional discomfort piece? Are there any best practices, ground rules, stuff to do to help mitigate or navigate that whole emotional landscape there?

Bryce Hoffman
Absolutely, and it’s an important part of Red Teaming and, in fact, I devote a whole chapter in my book to talking about what I call the rules of Red Teaming. And chief amongst them is that Red Teaming is something that walks a fine line. Red Teaming is about being skeptical but not being cynical. It’s being critical but in a constructive way not in a destructive way. And, to put it bluntly, one of the challenges of a Red Teamer is to provide this critical analysis, this contrarian analysis in a constructive and collegial way and not fall into just being a smart ass.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Or to receive the criticism and not crumble, or be like, “Oh, that jerk-face hates me,” or, “What does he know anyway?”

Bryce Hoffman
Absolutely. But one of the beauties of Red Teaming is that by making it a process – I was just at, unfortunately I can’t say what company this was – but I was just talking to the CEO of a Silicon Valley company that everybody would recognize, sorry, not the CEO, one of the founders of the company. And he was telling me, “The thing that I find attractive about this Red Teaming approach is that, right now, when one of the senior leaders of our company says, ‘Hey, even though we’re uber-successful and we’re making billions of dollars right now – at least on paper – maybe there’s a way to do what we do better.”

“Whenever we do that right now,” he says, “it’s personal, right? There’s an implied criticism of the way things are.” But he said, “If we make Red Teaming part of our strategic planning process then you have that same discussion as a matter of course. And if it’s just part of your planning process then it’s not personal anymore.” And that’s exactly, I told him, you hit the nail on the head. That’s the value of this.

Is because you could be Cassandra, you could be that lone voice in your organization that sees where the peril lies and bangs your head against the wall, screaming about “Turn the ship around” type of thing, or you could make this part of a process in your organization that allows people to point out ways to do things better. And just as I digress very slightly here, Pete, it’s important to understand Red Teaming is not just about finding faults and finding weaknesses in plans. It’s also about finding the opportunities that you’ve missed.

Because when you start to do a Red Teaming analysis what you often find is that the plan is good but there are things about the plan that could be made better. And so it’s also about finding those upsides as well as the potential weaknesses. And if you do that in a systematic way then it could be done in a very constructive and collegial way and not in a personal threatening political sort of way.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s so good. When it’s just a matter of course, that’s sort of how you operate, then it does, it makes all the difference. It also reminds me a little bit of just sort of following up with people. I used to have a challenge with this when I was leading groups. It’s like if I made a mistake on both sides of the equation, if I only follow-up with someone when I perceived that something may be at risk or behind then my follow-up, my outreach to somebody I’m leading becomes associated with, “I think you’re not doing your job.”

Bryce Hoffman
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Whereas, if I have just a regular follow-up on the calendar, it’s like, “You know what, Fridays at 9:00 o’clock, this is when we just sort of talk about progress and anything I can kind of help you with,” it changes everything.

Bryce Hoffman
Absolutely, and that’s exactly, Pete, you got it. That’s how Red Teaming works when it works best, is by just making it part of the system. Another way that I explain it to people is that Red Teaming is not a better planning process. It’s a process that makes your plans better.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Bryce Hoffman
So it’s not designed to replace what you’re already doing, it’s designed to complement it. And it’s not a threat to leadership is the other thing because it’s designed to simply give leaders another basket of data, another set of things to consider before they make a decision. And that can be a powerful thing particularly in hierarchical organizations.

There’s a story that Red Teamers like to tell in the military that was told by a four-star general, and at this point, a four-star general is the highest rank in the US Army. And he tells a story how a few years ago when he was promoted from three-star general to four-star general. The military has what they call pinning-on ceremonies when you get promoted as an officer or some other officer pins on your new rank.

And so another four-star general was pinning his four star on, and as he pinned on, he pulled him close and whispered into his ear, and said, “Congratulations! Now no one will ever tell you the truth again.” Because that’s what happens when you find yourself at the top of the pyramid, right? And yet good leaders want to hear the truth. So, once again, Red Teaming is designed to help them hear the sometimes uncomfortable truths that exists in their organizations.

I’ll give you another example of something that we do when we work with clients that just gives you kind of a taste of this that’s really effective and most of our clients are just kind of amazed at just this one exercise. Because I really believe in sharing people’s pain, so not to make it light like, “You guys are the only ones that have problems.” I always tell people, “I used to be a financial journalist, and I spent 22 years in the newspaper industry watching it collapse around me. And one of the things that I know from that experience is that the newspaper industry told itself all sorts of lies.”

“It told itself a lie that people couldn’t live without us, for instance. That even if they got upset with us and cancelled their subscriptions, or even if they became fascinated with this new shiny thing called the internet that they would come back to us at the end of the day because they needed us. That we were something like oxygen that they could not survive without.” That was one of the lies we told ourselves.

Another lie that we told ourselves was that people didn’t care about who was first with information. They cared about who had the most in-depth analysis and so it was okay if people could get their news and information from TV and radio and the internet first because we would provide them with this deeper analysis that they couldn’t get anywhere else.

Now, those of us who had not drunk the Kool-Aid to the dregs knew that these things were not true and yet everybody acted as if they were. So I tell this story to companies and then I give all the people who are in the audience a three and a half by five card, and I give them the same pen, the same colored pen, and I say, “Write in block letters one of the lies your company tells itself.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes.

Bryce Hoffman
And then I collect them, and I read some of them, and it’s always pretty amazing to watch the reactions on the face of the senior executives in the room because they always… and they don’t get angry. They get frustrated that they’re just hearing these things for the first time. And so if you think about places you worked before, I bet you have some good ideas about how that might’ve played out.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good, yes. And I think it’s true that once they have kind of welcomed it for real, the input, and there’s that safety of anonymity that comes about with the notecard then that’s great. So, well, you just shared one excellent tactic. I’d love it if you could drop several of these insights of these three areas of the breaking down of assumptions, firstly.

Bryce Hoffman
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Then, secondly, the looking at how things can unfold. And, three, the group-think busting approaches.

Bryce Hoffman
So on the assumptions part of the situation, I mentioned this technique called the key assumptions check. There’s a fairly formal process to it that I talk about in the book but there’s also a quick-and-dirty process that you can do right now. And the way that it works, as I said, Pete, you just take your plan, take your plan or your strategy, and break it down into all the stated and unstated assumptions that it is based on. So, for instance, think of an example. Just give me an off-the-cuff example of a plan that a business might be thinking about doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure thing. Well, I would even like to zoom in a little bit closer to, maybe not so much like the CEO level but a manager level.

Bryce Hoffman
Yeah, you can absolutely use these things at any level where you have the ability to make decisions.

Pete Mockaitis
So I guess I’m thinking, it’s like maybe we need a plan to better service our customer base. Let’s talk about that.

Bryce Hoffman
So, again, Red Teaming is not designed to create the plans. It’s designed to create the plan better. So how might you better service the customer base? Maybe you make a decision that we’re going to open a call center in India to make sure that our customers have 24-hour access to customer support. Okay?

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.

Bryce Hoffman
So there’s a lot of assumptions in there.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Bryce Hoffman
There’s assumptions that your company has the global… is facile enough with navigating the global economy that you can open a call center in India. There’s an assumption that you can train workers there to answer your customers’ questions in an effective way. There’s an assumption there that your customers won’t be put off when they get someone with an Indian accent answering the phone even if they say their name is Steve. And there’s an assumption that this is going to move the needle enough in terms of your customer satisfaction to make it worth the investment. There’s a whole bunch of other assumptions but those are just some of them, for instance.

So you would make a list, and then you would ask yourself a series of questions about each of those assumptions. Questions like this: “Is it logical? Is this accurate? Is it based on preconceived notions or biases? Is it based on historical analogies? And if so, are they relevant analogies? What has to happen for this to become true? How much competence do the planners have that this will happen? And if it becomes true, will it remain true under all conditions? And if it proves untrue, how would that alter the plan?”

So you can ask yourself those questions and just kind of go down the list and adjust the plan as necessary once you see the results of that, because I guarantee you, when you ask those questions, you will illuminate a lot of things about your plan or strategy.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think you’ll also sort of illuminate a plan of action because I have a feeling that several of those questions, the answer is like, “Oh, we’re actually not quite sure yet.”

Bryce Hoffman
Exactly, and that’s one of the things that we often find when we do Red Teaming exercises with companies is that just the act of Red Teaming something reveals that there’s a whole bunch of data that’s missing that people just think is there, and then when they actually go to look for it, they find it’s actually not there, “We actually don’t know these things.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s so good. So we’ve broken down those assumptions, asked some key questions, and then that gives rise to finding that information. And I imagine that’s a whole another ball of wax in terms of, “Do we do a survey? Do we interview some people? Do we observe behavior and how it unfolds? Do we consult outside experts, etcetera?”

Bryce Hoffman
Absolutely. And so that’s a whole discussion that you can have there. And I want to be clear, Pete, because this raises an important point that I think needs to be said. You don’t want a Red Team everything. Red Teaming is for big important decisions for setting strategy and for solving complex problems.

If you want to open a new office in Chicago and you want to know what a fair price to pay is for a class A commercial real estate on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, you don’t need to Red Team that. You can call a commercial real estate agent to find the answer. So Red Teaming is only for those things where the answers are not obvious or where the stakes are high. And in those situations, it’s worth taking that time and effort.

But there are Red Teaming tools that you can do in as little as 15 minutes too. I’ll give you another example of one that your listeners can use right now because it’s a great story. In my class, we had a major who is from Delta Force, and he asked early on in the course, “This stuff sounds great but I’m often leading teams in the field, super high stakes where we don’t have a lot of time to plan because we literally get called by the President and told, ‘Go here. Do this.’”
And he said, “What’s the minimum amount of time that I need to Red Team something?” And our instructor said, “The minimum amount of time that you need to Red Team something is 10 or 15 minutes. Let me explain to you what I mean by that.” He said, “If you’re given a task to do into this village and secure this compound, for instance, you can gather your guys together on the outskirts of that village and say, ‘Hey, everybody take a knee,’ and then you can just spend 10 or 15 minutes answering one question. If this all goes to hell, how’s it going to go to hell?”

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. Nice.

Bryce Hoffman
And businesses can do the same thing, right? Before you make a decision, and it doesn’t have to be a decision that’s your decision. If you’re a frontline manager, if you’re a middle manager and you’re given the task from on high to execute, you can gather your team together and say, “Okay, guys, here’s what we’ve been asked to do. But before we do this, I want to ask you guys, let’s spend 15 minutes and have a discussion here. If this all goes south, how’s it going to go south?”

Now what do you get from that? What you get from that is two things. One is you might find some weaknesses in the strategy or plan that you can come up with ways to address proactively so they don’t become problems. In other words, kind of patching the holes in your plan. But the other thing you get from this is signposts. Because you have these discussions, things will occur to you, like, to go back to my example, “Well, we could go into this village but when we get to that intersection out there, somebody could be standing on the rooftop and alert us or raise the alarm that we’re here, and then everything could break loose.”

Well, if you had that come up in your discussion then, as you’re entering that avenue in that village, one of the things you might take or recognize, “Let’s keep an eye on those rooftops that if we see anybody moving there, let’s assume we’ve been discovered and act accordingly.” Businesses can do the same thing. Having that discussion, you can surface some things that could go wrong and say, “Guys, if we see that happening over the next six months as we execute this, let’s hit pause and try to adjust this so that we don’t end up where we don’t want to be.”

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Thank you. Well, it’s so funny, I’m thinking, my wife and I are looking at buying a home soon and, as you say that, that really shines a bright light on what matters most and is worthy of our prioritization. I’m thinking, “Let’s really make sure there’s no hidden nasty expensive repair that throws all of our financial plans into chaos.”

Bryce Hoffman
You know, there’s a great analogy that you’ve given right there, Pete, in this, because I talk in the book about the different ways that you could use Red Teaming in different situations. And one of the ways that I talk about, and this again is a real-world example, of investment banking firm down in Texas that is using Red Teaming to make their investment decisions.

And one of the senior partners there, the one who came up with the idea of using Red Teaming, and they use a kind of simple version of one of the most powerful Red Teaming tools which is Devil’s Advocacy where you basically take a strategy or plan and you try to argue as strongly as possible the opposite is true.

So how do they use that to make investment decisions? Well, here’s what he explained to me. He said, “We have a team of guys that were hired by myself and the other senior partners, and we hired them because we know that they know how to make money. And yet the way that most investment firms work, is one of the partners will come up with an investment thesis and then we’ll have a meeting of the team and they’ll present their thesis and show us how they think we can make money off of this deal.

He said, “But I realized, really, these guys know how to make money. If they’re going to take the time to come to me with an investment strategy, then clearly they’ve already figured out how they can make money off of this otherwise they wouldn’t have wasted their time. So instead of having that discussion, we use that time to ask this question: ‘How could we lose money off of this deal?’”

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect.

Bryce Hoffman
“And we have a robust discussion about the ways in which this deal could go south and the ways in which we could end up losing money off of it. And then when we’ve had that discussion, we kind of take a straw and pull, and say, ‘Do people still feel, knowing these risks, that the upside of this is worth it?’” And that’s how they make their investment decisions. They’ve been much more successful than a lot of their peers using this strategy.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Excellent. So we talked about talking assumptions, we talked about imagining how it could go awry. So, thirdly, how do we go about doing that group-think busting?

Bryce Hoffman
So the group-think busting is one of my favorite parts, and one example that I really talk about is the example of just asking the question, “What are the lies we tell ourselves?” But there’s a lot of deeper techniques. And one of the ones that I think is one of my favorite ones is called weighted anonymous feedback, and there’s a couple of ways in the book to do this.

You could do this through a system called dot voting. I’ll explain that one. It’s probably the most interesting one. So one of the things that when you use these tools and techniques are all complementary to each other. So let’s say that you’re looking at an important strategic decision as a company, as an organization, or even a division within a company, or what have you, and let’s say you’ve used your key assumptions check to figure out what the assumptions are that underline the strategy.

Well, one thing that we often do is then use a technique called dot voting to evaluate those assumptions. And the way it works is this. I ask folks, “Look at this list of assumptions here. Don’t discuss it, just look at it yourselves.” I usually have the assumptions printed out on a sheet. And I give everyone, you know those little colored sticker dots like they use for filing and stuff? Give everyone a certain number of dots and I say and I explain this in more detail in the book, but the idea is you tell people, “Figure out the assumptions on this list that you think are most likely to prove untrue in the execution of this strategy.”

And we set the number of dots based on how many assumptions there are and how many people there are. There’s a whole system again that I talk about in the book. But let’s say you have seven dots. You can vote all seven of those on one assumption if you feel really strongly if that is going to be the thing that’s going to go wrong and destroy this strategy, or you could vote for seven different assumptions that you think are risky. You can use your dots however you want.

We do that and everyone gets a chance to go up and place their dots on the list. Nobody knows who placed what dot. And when it’s done we tally the totals. We collect all the list and we tally the totals, all the dots, and it’s always illuminating because, Pete, usually what you see is that there’s two or three or four assumptions that get 90% of the votes. And what that tells you is that those are the elements of the strategy or plan that people don’t have confidence in.

Now, I’ve done this exercise in companies where before we did this exercise we went around the table and everybody said they had a 100% confidence in the strategy or plan.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah?

Bryce Hoffman
Because there were saying it in front of everyone else but when they could do it privately everybody said, “Actually we think there’s some elements of the plan that they’re completely ridiculous and that they’re going to fail.”

Pete Mockaitis
If I can ask, with the private dot voting, to get real tactical here, is it still anonymous if people could see them in the room with their dots?

Bryce Hoffman
No, you give everyone a sheet and a set of dots, and everyone gets to put their dots on a sheet. Then I collect the sheets and tally.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, multiple sheets not one master sheet.

Bryce Hoffman
Yeah, I’m sorry. Yeah, it’s a little hard to explain but it’s all in the book. And so that’s what usually happens. Now here’s something else that has happened a couple of times in companies I worked with. We do this and there’s dots everywhere. Now what does that tell you? What that tells you is there’s something fundamentally wrong with the plan, that people just don’t have confidence. And that was my sense the first time I did this and saw that, and I talked with some of the colonels that had developed this at the Army, and I said, “What does this mean?” And they said, “It means people don’t have confidence in the plan.” So I said, “Really?” And they said, “Yeah, if it’s all over the map like this, it means people just don’t have confidence in the plan.”

So I went back into the room and I said, “Hey, everyone, here’s your results. They’re all over the place. So, now that we’ve all voiced this, I want to have a real heart-to-heart talk.” Again, like I said, this is tough love for companies. “You all said you had confidence in this plan but you’ve all voted for different things. Who, here, is going to be the brave person that’s going to point to the elephant in the room and say that, ‘We actually don’t believe this plan is the best plan’?” Every single hand went up.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Bold.

Bryce Hoffman
That’s how you get through group-think. This is not me, this is not the Army kind of, this is based on decades of science and research into how to overcome cognitive bias and group-think. So one of the things, have you ever heard of the Asch Experiments in the 1950s?

Pete Mockaitis
I don’t think I have. Please do tell.

Bryce Hoffman
So this is one of the formative kind of pieces of research in group-think and it’s scary. So this research, Professor Asch, did a whole series of experiments where he created a set of slides that had three lines on them. So try to imagine, it should be easy to imagine this because the lines weren’t even remotely close to each other in length. One was really long, one was really short, you know.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Bryce Hoffman
And he told people that they were taking part in a test of perception and that they were part of a group of 12 people who were going to study human perception and they were shown these slides and asked to go around the room and say which line is the same length as the line in the first slide which only had one line on it. In the control group, the margin of error was less than one-tenth of 1%. You would have to be blind not to be able to get the right answer.

But the problem is, or sort of not the problem but the fact was that most people weren’t in the control group. Most people were the one person in a group with 11 actors who were all given a script beforehand and who were instructed that even though they went around the room and asked somebody different each time, the actors always spoke first. And after getting the first two or three right, the actors just started picking answers that were so patently obvious that you would have to be a complete imbecile not to see were wrong.

Pete Mockaitis
And they aligned with one another?

Bryce Hoffman
They all agreed. They all agreed with each other. And in over 50% of the time, at least once, the controls, the person who was actually the subject, would agree with the group even though it was completely obvious that the answer the group was giving was wrong. So that was one thing but then Asch took it to another level which is he then had one actor say, “I disagree with the group. I think it’s this line.” They didn’t even have to pick the right line. They just had to disagree. And when they disagreed, 909% of the time the subject gave the right answer because somebody else had disagreed and that gave them permission to think for themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s perfect. And so I want to ask you a final question before I hear out your favorite things. And that is, all right, if you are, I guess, the Cassandra, nice allusion there, if you are the voice of one in the wilderness who or has a strong belief that, “Nope, nope, I think we are mistaken here,” but you’re not in power, you’re not in control, what recourse do you have? What should you do?

Bryce Hoffman
You have two recourses: one is you can buy a copy of my book and put on your boss’s desk or his or her inbox, or you can do what the Army teaches in our class which is a technique, the last Red Teaming technique, if you will. It’s called My 15%. And it’s designed to deal with the exact issue you just said there which is that no matter how good your analysis may be, we all find times when we are in an organization that just doesn’t want to hear the truth.

So rather than falling victim to despair, My 15% is based on, and I don’t have time to go into all the science behind it, but based on a lot of organizational science that shows that in any organization, no matter how rigid the hierarchy is, no matter how blind the leadership is, there’s always about 15% of a person’s work life that they can influence themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Bryce Hoffman
And so the Army’s advice to officers is that, “If you find yourself in a division where the general in charge is just a complete idiot and doesn’t want to hear the truth, focus on your 15%, the things that you can change, and maybe they’re small changes but if you make them, and if the person next to you makes them, and if the person next to them makes them, you can make your whole organization better over time.

Pete Mockaitis
And so could you have an example then of, “I can’t get the big win right now but I’ll do my 15%?” What that might look like in practice?

Bryce Hoffman
Yes. So, for example, one story and I can’t go into all the details of it because it was classified but it was shared by one of our classmates, was there were issues where the patrols they were doing in their part of Afghanistan were creating a lot of tension with the local population because a kid had been hit by a Humvee and killed where they were playing in the street. But the commander of the unit had orders that they had to patrol five times a week, damn it. So they were going to patrol five times a week no matter what.

And this particular officer and some of his fellow officers felt that, “Look, maybe we should just like stop the patrols for a few weeks and let our base temper simmer down,” and that was not an option because this person, their boss said, “No, you’ve got to do this.” So what they decided to do is, “You know what, we’ll do our patrols but we’ll do it down this side street that nobody’s ever at.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Because that’s what they control, “Hey, I’m the one in the Humvee, so.”

Bryce Hoffman
Exactly. And they come back the day of the week they’re supposed to lead a patrol and they’d say, “Did you do your patrol in village X?” “Yes, sir, we did,” but they’d drive down a backstreet where there are no kids playing and no danger of anybody getting mud splashed on them by the Humvee driving by or anything like that. And did it solve the problem? No. But did they contribute to slightly reducing tensions in that village where they felt? They did.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, so now, can you share with us a favorite quote, something that you find inspiring?

Bryce Hoffman
I will. I think I’ll share with you the quote that I open the book with because I think it’s so important and it’s kind of ancient military wisdom but it’s so applicable to the challenges of business today and explains why we need Red Teaming, and it’s from Sun Tzu, of course, “Know the enemy and know yourself. In a hundred battles you will never be in peril. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning and losing are equal. But if you’re ignorant of both your enemy and yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril.” So Red Team yourself and know yourself and know your enemy.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Bryce Hoffman
A favorite book. I am a big fan of Team of Teams by General McChrystal.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And how about a favorite tool?

Bryce Hoffman
A favorite tool is Red Teaming. Sorry, I’ve got say it.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure. And a favorite habit?

Bryce Hoffman        
A favorite habit is to challenge your own assumptions. So I’m not talking about in a business context here. I’m saying that as an individual, seek out things that challenge your way of thinking. And this is not a political statement. This is just strengthening your own critical thinking skills. If you’re a Liberal and listen to NPR all the time, listen to Rush Limbaugh. If you’re a Conservative and listen to Rush Limbaugh all the time, listen to NPR. One day a week, make yourself do it and don’t just get angry at the radio and turn it off and curse what you heard. Listen to it and think about the argument you’re hearing because if you’re right it’ll hone your own observations but it may also open your eyes to some different things. There’s a lot of science that proves that the best decision-makers are people who actively seek out information that challenges what they already believe.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And how about a favorite nugget, an articulation of your message that really seems to get people nodding their heads, taking notes and saying, “Bryce, you’re brilliant”?

Bryce Hoffman
I don’t know if I have anything that powerful but what I like to tell people is that I think the best way to sum it up is question the unquestionable, think the unthinkable and challenge everything.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve got the Don Quixote Impossible Dream in my head now. Thank you.

Bryce Hoffman
One of many services I provide, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Bryce Hoffman
They can go to BryceHoffman.com, or if they want to learn more about Red Teaming in particular, they can go to RedTeamThinking.com, or they can buy a copy of my book.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. And if folks want to, or if you could leave people with a final challenge if they’re looking to become more awesome at their jobs, what would that call to action be?

Bryce Hoffman
My call to action is this: find someone you trust and ask them to look at your plans, to look at your strategies, to look at your decisions, and tell you what’s wrong with them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Bryce, thank you so much for this. This was eye-opening and helpful and I wish you lots of luck with all you’re up to, and stay safe and don’t get hacked or your secret is compromised.

Bryce Hoffman
Thanks a lot, Pete. Really enjoyed speaking with you.