Strategy From a Different Perspective

Red Teaming: How Your Business Can Conquer the Competition by Challenging Everything – Bryce G. Hoffman (Crown Business)

Your seen firsthand. You probably at one point participated in it. Someone higher up the management food chain comes to the table during a strategic planning session and present what they think is a brilliant idea and they can site statistics and dialogue that soundly supports their take on things; it sounds like a winner. Then all of the yes men line up and sound off in support of the proposal, no one steps into the breach to challenge any assumptions.

Then six months or a year into the execution cycle the wheels fall off and the strategy either heads back to the drawing board for a retooling or gets scraped completely. More often than not no one gets held accountable and we all move on to the next brilliant strategy that we can all get behind. If you’re like me, this kind of thing will drive you crazy. As I gained experience and confidence, more and more often I would offer push back to challenge assumptions and often tweak or improve on strategies. Often, that’s not an easy thing to do.

So what’s a better why to be the contrarian in the room? While it’s being billed as a revolutionary new way of approaching strategic thinking, red teaming as it’s been dubbed, is a strategic approach that has been around for awhile, but more recently gained the title and has evolved and been honed into a business planning strategy.

Bestselling author Bryce G. Hoffman (American Icon) has penned book to 

summarize not only the process but of his stint working side by side with the 

military to learn firsthand how the process all works. In Red Teaming: How Your Business Can Conquer the Competition by Challenging Everything Hoffman gives you the historical reference for red teaming and walk through how the process moved from military application to the board room and how major corporations and even small business can used the process to improve results.

The process really boils down to elevating critical thinking and expanding the strategic planning process. While so often we tend to focus on our own business during the planning process, Red Teaming really forces us to change our focus; to help identify holes in the plan, challenges from the competition and I think most importantly identify opportunities in the competitive environment.

For the strategist that is familiar with the red teaming process, Hoffman’s book may seem a bit basic, but it never hurts to have access to a primer on any subject. For those looking to delve deeper into the process I would recommend searching out the military’s Applied Critical Thinking Handbook, which was formerly called the Red Teaming Handbook. You can easily Google it and find it in PDF form or Amazon has the Kindle Version for less than ten bucks.