Red Teaming

I was in a client workshop last week and we were discussing the benefits of having an organisational culture and environment that encourages comfort with dissent. Many teams struggle with conflict but the ability to healthily disagree with each other is one of the foundations of psychological safety and high-performing teams.

One of Amy Edmonsdon’s key strategies for leaders looking to create an environment of psychological safety is to frame work as a learning problem, rather than an execution problem. Learning well requires everyone to speak up, and encouraging this recognises that each team member’s input and contribution has value in solving challenges, but also that debate is often needed to solve them well.

Ian Leslie’s book ‘Conflicted: Why Arguments Are Tearing Us Apart and How They Can Bring Us Together’ is full of great examples of the value of useful disagreement, and there’s plenty of academic studies that show the benefits of cognitive diversity including analysis of 150 senior teams by Alison Reynolds of Ashridge Business School and David Lewis of London Business School that found that cognitively diverse teams found solutions to problems faster than non-diverse teams.

One of the leaders present in the workshop mentioned about the practice of red teaming. Common in the cyber-security field, red teaming is where an intentionally formed team (internal or external) set out to challenge an organisations’ systems, processes and assumptions by emulating the actions of malicious actors. The idea is that by doing this, potential flaws or weaknesses emerge.

Red teaming is a somewhat adversarial approach but the principles behind the practice provide us with some interesting approaches to testing a team’s strategy, processes or thinking. It reminded me of Pixar’s ‘Braintrust’ approach, described in Ed Catmull’s wonderful Creativity Inc, in which a trusted group of Pixar staff meet regularly to review films that are in development. The objective of the Braintrust says Catmull, is to ‘push towards excellence, and root out mediocrity’. They challenge the creative team by giving candid feedback and asking the tricky questions, but this is done with a spirit of high trust and comfort with candor. And this is believed to be essential to the creative process. As Catmull says in this FastCompany piece:

‘Candor is the key to collaborating effectively. Lack of candor leads to dysfunctional environments’

Deliberately establishing a feedback process like this can be useful in overcoming groupthink, opening up assumptions, and avoiding confirmation bias. One thing that I’ve done before now when working to improve a client’s innovation and ideas process is set up a ‘good cop, bad cop’ feedback session which gives teams the freedom to challenge early ideas in a way that can improve them or identify areas that need to be looked at. Positive contributions are balanced with more challenging but constructive feedback. If this is done with care it serves to enhance ideas rather than kill them before they’ve had chance to breathe.

The same is true of many processes. Candid feedback helps teams to improve. If it’s set up in the right way a ‘red-teaming’ approach characterised by direct and constructive feedback can help everyone to raise their game.

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Photo by Alexander Mils on Unsplash