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Red Team – Blue Team
Introduction: The red team/blue team technique is an application of game theory the military adopted as a way to challenge their assumptions and anticipate how an enemy might counter their tactics or strategies. The red team plays the role of the enemy in typical exercises, whether they’re conducted in the field or in the classroom.
For our purposes, the blue team represents the company actively engaged in planning new initiatives or enacting current ones. The red team works to counter the initiatives, find the flaws in the plans, or find another way to attack/approach the problem.
Detailed Instructions - Using the Red Team/Blue Team Approach:
The value of this exercise is in its simplicity. You don’t have to follow rigid steps and exact protocols. Set it up in ways that intuitively position you to learn as much as you can. You don’t want to set it up so that your pet idea is the winner.
You want the red team to compete within the laws and ethics you respect in the day-to-day conduct of your business. Apart from that, you want the teams to be as clever, resourceful and motivated as possible. It is helpful to use an outside facilitator to help you get started in using this red/blue teaming technique, or in situations where the senior leadership group is strongly invested in a plan or initiative and may, as a result, have a tough time being unbiased. Do you have folks in the organization who have been involved in red team/blue team experiences in military or in school? They can be valuable resources no matter what their position in the company.
Establishing the teams:
How the teams are filled out and positioned has great importance. Even though this is an exercise, you want it to be as realistic as possible. You want to ensure a balance of good thinkers on both teams.
Create multi-level, cross-functional teams. Mix the skill levels, including seasoned folks and younger talent on both teams. Doing so provides an opportunity to get fresh, untraditional ideas from the younger people, even as the youngsters are positioned to work alongside seasoned people and learn from watching, and from being coached in the situation. Appoint a seasoned leader who is a strong thinker as the leader of each team. Demand rigor. It is worse to do this half-baked than not at all.
Creating the competitive situation (the mission):
You have great flexibility to set the mission for maximum learning. You want to test your assumptions. You want to discover what you might have missed when you were developing strategies or setting tactics. You may have the red team take the role of a particular competitor, or act as representatives of an alternate point of view.
You’ll get the most out of these exercises by having your leadership team talk through the issues and identify critical assumptions to test or issues to clarify before deciding on how to craft the missions for the two teams. You’ll find that the senior team often learns in the planning and that makes the actual exercise even more powerful.
Make sure that the mission is well understood by everyone involved.
Set up the rules/constraints/ parameters:
Establish the fundamental rules of the competition before hand, but don’t try to over structure the exercise. Define the goals. Clarify the criteria for success. If you want periodic updates make that clear. How much time do people have to work? What, if any, tools and resources are available to them?
Conduct the exercise:
You want to give the teams an opportunity to set up as teams and understand their missions. They need to scout the environment – do their research/homework. When moving into this action phase of the exercise, someone on each team needs to capture the essence of the thinking, the essence of the conversations and the execution of its intentions (in other words, someone needs to take progress notes).
All of this will be part of the after action review conducted at the end of the exercise. Protect these running notes from spies. If both teams are in the same location, you may find it necessary to give each a secure place to talk, work and keep their records.
Evaluate the performance:
- Assess teamwork and intra-team communication
- Assess the quality of the intelligence gathering and analysis
- Assess the use of tools and resources
- Assess the rigor of the thinking – the analysis of the intelligence and the quality of the problem-solving, innovative thinking, and decision-making
- Assess the outcomes
Extract the lessons and apply them to your planning:
After the exercise, debrief with everyone. Debrief by team, but let both teams sit in on both conversations to maximize the dissemination of the lessons so that the members can learn from each other. After the debriefings of the teams, it is time for the senior managers to consider the results of the exercise. Capture all of the relevant learnings and make plans to act on what you’ve learned.