Red Team Challenge
Critically challenging and improving strategies, procedures, and decisions.
Our Red Team Challenge identifies (potentially catastrophic) rationality vulnerabilities, reasoning errors, and blind spots in strategies, procedures, and specific decision-making situations.
Why the Red Team Challenge?
Red Teams (also known as Red Teaming) is a concept from the military and intelligence services developed in the 2000s. A Red Team has the task of critically reviewing existing strategies, procedures, and decisions in an organization in order to identify blind spots and reasoning errors.
The main benefit of Red Teams is that they question the status quo independently and critically. Internally, without Red Teams, such a critical challenge of the status quo is not possible, because distorting biases like groupthink, wishful thinking, confirmation bias and many others cloud the inner view.
Our Red Team Challenge identifies «Unknown Unknowns» – problems you didn’t even know could exist. The results of our analysis will help you and your organization to improve quickly and massively.
Our Red Team services
We work with three Red Team approaches:
Compact, quick, goal-oriented:
Sparring
Red Team Sparring is a compact analysis best suited for individual decision-making situations and clearly outlined and defined problems.
- Duration: 0.5 – 3 days
- Working methods (as needed): Conversation / interview; document analysis; workshop; standardized survey.
- Output: Short report with recommendations.
- Kill your Business workshop: In order to uncover hitherto unknown possibilities for improvements in a company, we conduct a Kill your Business workshop. The goal of that workshop is to develop one or several fictional competitors who would do a better job than the company in question. This counterfactual exercise quickly and effectively uncovers strategies for improvement.
- Personnel decision: A large company is looking for a new CEO. The board of directors has chosen one favourite and several also potentially qualified candidates. In order to minimize biases such as the halo effect and groupthink, we accompany the personnel decision and assess the decision-making quality within the board.
- Change management: A retail company is faced with the decision of whether to rebuild its stores in order to keep up with new consumer trends. Senior management and senior executives are critical of the project. In order to rule out biases and judgement errors such as the status quo bias, we carry out a reversal test with the core decision-makers.
Comprehensive, deep, detailed:
Stress Test
Our Red Team Stress Test is a comprehensive analysis for more complex problems and for more extensive decision-making contexts.
- Duration: contingent on the problem at hand
- Working methods (as needed): Conversation / interview; document analysis; workshop; standardized survey; literature research; ethnographic observation; statistical analysis.
- Output: Report with recommendations.
- Strategy development: A large company is renewing its global corporate strategy. We evaluate the new strategy and especially the thought and reasoning patterns that led to it. In doing so, we uncover whether cognitive pitfalls such as the sunk cost fallacy, the fonfirmation fias, and many more have distorted the strategy development process and the strategy.
- Pre-Mortem analysis: A university is planning a large-scale research project that involves over several institutes. In order to ensure that the project goals are not missed (e.g. deadlines missed, budget too tightly calculated, etc.), we conduct a systematic pre-mortem analysis and show how and why the project might fail, either completely or partially. The pre-mortem analysis is an effective measure against the planning fallacy.
- Impact analysis: Every year, a large city funds projects that are supposed to motivate children and young people engage in sports and physical exercise. In a critical impact analysis, we first conduct a literature review of the scientific evidence on the question of how best to achieve that goal. The result of the analysis is a framework that shows how best to use the available resources in the future.
For innovation management:
Innovation Check
The Innovation Check is our specialized product for innovation management: Make sure your innovation projects succeed by challenging them.
- Duration: contingent on the problem at hand
- Working methods (as needed): Conversation / interview; document analysis; workshop; standardized survey; literature research; ethnographic observation; statistical analysis.
- Output: Report with recommendations.
- Investment challenge: A large company wants to invest several millions in an experimental product in the IT sector. We accompany this innovation process and uncover whether thinking errors like the bandwagon effect («Everyone does it, so that’s why we have to, too!») have a negative impact on decision-making.
- Process optimization for innovation funding: A public funding agency funds and supports innovation projects in companies. We accompany the funding process critically and ensure that the funding activity is not influenced by distorting and biasing factors such as the halo effect (due to, for example, professional PR work) or groupthink (such as, for example, conformism in the decision-making body of the agency).
- Strategy for establishing an innovation culture: A company wants to develop a strategy for an effective and sustainable innovation culture. We accompany the development of the strategy and ensure that it has the greatest possible impact and does not simply, for example, pick up on current innovation trends in a superficial manner. In order to do this, we collect and systematize the best evidence of what works and what doesn’t.
Procedure
We work with a three-phase model in our Red Team Challenge services:
1. Problem outline
In the problem outline, the concrete problem is described objectively and clearly. This is the starting point for our analysis. With the problem outline, you have to make explicit things that you may never have thought of before.
2. Diagnosis
The second phase, the diagnosis, is crucial. In this phase, we identify the potential Unknown Unknowns – all the cognitive blind spots that are creeping in and doing all sorts of damage.
3. Challenge
In the third phase, you hear what you would rather *not* hear: We confront you with your Unknown Unknowns in this phase and present our recommendations for action.
Your benefit
Our Red Team Challenge has a 4-fold benefit for you and your organization:
I. Shock effect
We detect and point out serious problems that you had no idea could even exist (Unknown Unknowns).
II. Independence
We have more than just an outsider perspective – our very job is telling you what you do *not* want to hear.
III. Impact
The findings of our Red Team Challenge allow you and your organization to make profound improvements.
IV. Sustainability
With our Red Team Challenge you will learn how to avoid biases, reasoning errors and other problems in the future.
Unser Red Team Challenge bestseller:
Kill your Business
The Kill your Business workshop quickly and effectively uncovers where your organization has blind spots and vulnerabilities. In the workshop, you create a fictional competitor that is much better than you. You create a competitor that destroys you – and you learn from it.
Would you like to learn more?
We look forward to hearing from you: In a non-binding 60- to 90-minute conversation we will show you our approach and our offer.