Red Teaming with Colonel (Ret.) Steven Rotkoff

Steve Rotkoff,  former director of the U.S. Army’s “Red Team University”, unpacks the principles of Red Teaming and its powerful application in various arenas, beyond just warfare. This process emphasizes the significance of divergence before convergence and the mitigation of groupthink, leading to the development of innovative solutions.

We journey through the evolution of the University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies (UFMCS) curriculum and delve into stories of how Red Teaming is being applied in diverse fields such as software, social media, telecommunications, and international policy schools. Steve Rotkoff shares his personal experiences and lessons learned from these implementations, emphasizing the importance of cognitive diversity and understanding how to leverage it effectively.

Steven Rotkoff on LinkedIn

Steve Rotkoff is the former director of the U.S. Army’s University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies at Fort Leavenworth, also known as “Red Team University” and one of the principal architects of the Army’s red team training program. 

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Transcript

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 0:57

We all have a face for radio, so it doesn't matter. So we're a good shape there, all right, hey, mark, I'm fired up to have Colonel retired Steve Rotkoff here today. Many people that follow our work and follow his work should be excited about this conversation as well. We're going to talk about red teams, red teaming, mitigating cognitive biases, critical thinking amazing concepts that are applicable to not just warfare but to business as well, and you and I have known this for quite some time. So, without further ado, I want to introduce our guest. It's Colonel retired Steve Rotkoff. He's here with us today. Where are you calling in from, sir?

Steve Rotkoff: 1:36

I'm outside of Leavenworth, so I live in Lansing, kansas. The school was established in Leavenworth because it was the Army's University town and after teaching and then running the school, I just stayed here.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:53

All right, and the school you're referring to as UFMCS, it's the.

Steve Rotkoff: 1:56

Yeah, yes.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:57

Yeah, it's the.

Steve Rotkoff: 1:59

University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies, and that was the name that was given to it by General Schumacher when he was Chief of Staff of the Army, and it was a deception operation because he did not want our adversaries to know that we had invested in red teaming education. So he wanted to come up with a name that was a cover story, and that's how, because we're not, we were never a university, we had subordinate colleges or a football team. It was just a cover name because he did not want to call it red team university, which is what we wanted to call it.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 2:37

I'd never do that story. I used to be a foreign area officer in the US Navy. I worked with a lot of foreign area officers within the US Army and Marine Corps and, of course, the Air Force. When I became familiar with the school, it actually was after my active duty time and I came across this thing known as liberating structures. Keith McCandless is up there in Seattle, so I got some time with him on learning about liberating structures. We came across the UFMCS Liberating Structures Guide and I'm like what is this thing? At the time I was also doing consulting for a military-themed company and we used a lot of red team approaches not necessarily red teaming approach, but red team approaches and that's something that I would like to have you kind of help navigate and separate. What is a red team and what is red teaming? What does all this mean when we look at red teaming in general? So that's my first question to you is when we look at red teaming versus a red team, what's the difference?

Steve Rotkoff: 3:29

Okay, so red teaming as a concept is a meta way of thinking. That's why I believe, and that's, certain underlying principles that drive your conduct of red teaming. One is divergence before convergence. Right, You're going to get as many ideas onto the table before you decide which is the best idea. So that is a key element. Learning structures, which you've already talked about, are key in terms of methodology to get at that.

Steve Rotkoff: 4:09

Divergence Tools around groupthink mitigation, and those can be use of role play. They can be some sort of structured methodology that gets people to touch with the power. They can clearly be the use of anonymity, which is very powerful. But it's this idea that if we could get everybody to give us their best ideas and then we could separate the source of the idea from the quality of the idea, right, Because the idea of the senior person in the room isn't necessarily the best idea, nor is the idea of the person who is most eloquent. You can have somebody with a really good idea who just can't garner their arguments very effectively, but their idea is fundamentally sound. Or nor is the idea of the guy who simply will outlast you He'll just continue to plow away. So you want to separate the quality idea from the source of the idea. You want the best idea to win, and red teaming is about how do we get there. And while we're doing that, how do we ensure that our bias, that our system one to go back to canamine isn't driving what we're deciding? So it's a meta approach to conversations in groups and decision making.

Steve Rotkoff: 5:42

A red team is a group that is brought together to solve a specific problem using red teaming methods. Right, and those red teams can look very different. I spent two years working for Verizon. They now have a red team capacity inside of their strategy group. They took what we did and taught them and adjusted it in some serious ways to meet the needs of their company. That's fine. There's no orthodoxy in terms of how you conduct a red team. As long as you're adhering to the principles divergence before convergence best ideas win. So I don't know if that answers your question, but that's my shot at it.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 6:32

No, I think it does a great job and we talk a lot about John Boyd on this show, his Oodaloop, and one way I explain red teaming and a red team is a lot of the To me. If you look at John Boyd's Oodaloop, it's a thing that interacts with an external environment. So that's one way to look at John Boyd's Oodaloop. It's something that's interacting with an environment. So if you put a boundary around a team, that team is a thing that's interacting with an external customer or whatever it may be.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 7:02

Red teaming encompasses the red team on the outside and the critical thinking, mitigating cognitive biases, tools and techniques that we use on the inside. So the way I'm looking at this is for red teaming, I want to use things like Think, write, share, driz, 5get you 25. We could talk about these a little bit more down the road. And on the outside I have an independent group that's going to provide information from the as an external source to the thing in the middle, in this case a team. So we can look at John Boyd's Oodaloop and look at it red teaming as the overarching idea of what's external, what's internal. Red team external, red teaming, internal. Am I wrong in thinking like that?

Steve Rotkoff: 7:47

I haven't thought about that before. I'd have to think a little bit more deeply about it. But I think you're right in the macro sense that a red team can't be insular. It has to bring information in Frequently. The quality of the red team work will depend upon how well they build a relationship with the blue team and how much they recognize the blue team's pain and goals and things like that. So there's clearly an external interchange for the red team to be successful. You can't sit in a monastery by yourself and red team Right. You can't be in a red team individually. But the key dynamic inside the red team that is different from external to the red team is how the red team communicates internally, how it values insight, what its composition is Right. I mean the analogy I use for people when they ask me how do I build my red team?

Steve Rotkoff: 8:56

As I said, the analogy I use, just because it makes sense to me, is, if you are going to red team, how to do better surgical procedures for brain surgery. You're going to talk about brain surgery. You don't want all brain surgeons, right? If you have all brain surgeons, they've all been trained to already do it a certain way and they're fairly limited in terms of how they think. But you don't want carpenters either, right? So you might want a thoracic surgeon, you might want an operating room nurse, you might want a brain surgeon or two. You might want somebody who deals with. You know, I don't know. You know the bone structure. I don't know.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 9:43

Right right.

Steve Rotkoff: 9:44

They should be brain surgery adjacent, but not all brain surgeons. So the composition of the red team matters a lot. And then, once you have the right people in the room who have expertise around the problem but don't all have the same expertise around the problem how they then communicate internally, how they engage externally to bring information in, right. I mean you can have a great red team that reaches out to the blue team and says, hey, we're looking at your plan, so are you guys just stupid? Right? In which case the red team will not work. So those engagements matter as well. But I haven't thought about it in terms of how it interleaves or overlaps with the oodaloupe. When you get to the oodaloupe, I have thought about and I just think it's interesting. I think it's interesting to look at the oodaloupe vis-a-vis MDMP, right, because what's the last step of MDMP?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 10:44

It should be orders, orders and production right.

Steve Rotkoff: 10:47

You know production of orders, okay. So what does that mean? It means we're done right. There's no loop to that.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 10:54

Yeah, you're right, absolutely yeah.

Steve Rotkoff: 10:57

I mean there's no. Okay, now we've told everybody what to do and we're done. So now where's the observed part? You know, because that's the act part. So where does the loop come in? And there is no oodaloupe in MDMP, no matter how much we think it's valuable.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 11:13

Yeah, so, mdmp, for our listeners that aren't familiar, it's the military decision-making process, right, mdmp?

Steve Rotkoff: 11:20

It is, and it's pretty much universally accepted across the services and most of our allies.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 11:25

Yeah, and there are some challenges with it that you know when you have to build a coa, that you throw away a course of action. There's some funny things that we used to do when we were working at the operational level of warfare with it. So it's not perfect and, if I understand you correctly, it doesn't have that element where we get feedback from the external environment. It's just a passive approach to planning.

Steve Rotkoff: 11:49

Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, yeah, we'll leave it at that. Yeah, okay, I have lots of problems with MDMP. Oh yeah, I'm with you.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 11:58

Yeah, yeah, it's a nice place to start, but I don't know how old it is. You know, we used different planning processes within fighter aviation that I think are far better than that, and I think the planning process that we offer up to clients are better than that. And, of course, it's hard to write a nonlinear planning process on a piece of paper, right, right? Well, that's the problem with UDA.

Steve Rotkoff: 12:23

right, Everybody starts at O yeah, and it's a loop for crying out loud you know, yeah, right, you can start anywhere. And you know, I mean the Israelis, in their current situation, are probably going to have to start at A Yep. Right, they're going to act and they're going to observe, then they're going to orient, then they're going to decide, then they're going to act again Because they can't observe everything they want to observe, because they're in tunnels and you know they practice good opsec and that kind of thing.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 12:51

Yeah, you're right. So we've done a lot of connections between John Boyd's Doodle Loop and the Kinevan framework. So everything you just said is spot on. In the Kinevan framework, you have to start. If you're in chaos which I believe they were for temporarily you have to act, you have to do something, and what you're trying to do is get back to a complex environment or a complicated environment. That way you can find repeatability and execute Absolutely.

Steve Rotkoff: 13:14

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 13:15

And that's I think that's what Redteam allows us to do as well. And Redteam allows us to do is create that environment where we have to shift from using again the Kinevan framework, from an ordered system to an unordered system, and find our way back Right and always use the divergent convergent approach.

Steve Rotkoff: 13:34

And the other thing I'd say that Redteam as I've been practicing at these past few years allows you to do is by using the anonymous techniques and what I call weighted anonymous feedback. So you know, dot voting is weighted anonymous feedback, five will get you 25 is weighted anonymous feedback. You can do some other tools and methods for weight anonymous feedback, but when you do that, what you're able to do is separate the key and essential thing that you have to focus your attention on from those things that are important but not critical. And I think that's one of the hardest things is we allow ourselves to be distracted by things that are legitimately important but they're just not central.

Steve Rotkoff: 14:40

I was telling you earlier that one of my jobs was to orchestrate FM3O the first FM3O. So you know, offense, defense, stability and support. And as we wrote the draft, we went and showed the draft to General Scales, who at that time was the head of the War College at Carlisle, and we briefed him on it and he said something I've always carried with me that I thought was really silly at first but I think is essential for quality planning. And that is he said remember, as you write this book, that the main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing, right, and frequently you don't keep the main thing, the main thing.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 15:27

I want to go back in time to UFMCS, when you're standing up at school, and to some of the research. You know what? Where did you? I know you looked at Gary Klein's work, the premortem, which is fantastic. We use it all the time. We had Gary on the show as well. But what research did you gravitate towards when you were working on coming up with the red team approach for the, for the US Army and the DOD?

Steve Rotkoff: 15:53

Okay, so first you have to have a little, a little history on why, the why the army chose to build UFMCS. Right, and the reason the army chose to build UFMCS is there was a recognition at the senior levels. This is now, in 2004, that Iraq specifically because we were much more involved in Iraq at the time than Afghanistan but Iraq had not turned out how we had expected. And then the question was why and I was at the time the chief of staff for lessons learned for General Alexander, who was the two of the army at the time and there was this myth inside army intel, and it was very prevalent, and that was if you only had all the information, you would always make the right decision. Okay, so it was about data management, and my experience at in the run up to the war was that that was simply not true, that we had a lot of people who told us what we were going to encounter, but we were incapable of hearing it, incapable of changing our minds, incapable of challenging our senior leaders and assumptions, etc. And so by the time I'm working for Alexander, there's a recognition that all that had happened, that that we had lots of people who told us what Iraq was going to be like and we didn't plan for any of it. And so the question was how do we change it? So Schumacher grew up as a special forces officer and he had this idea of red teaming, where you would, in prepping for a special special lot, you would have people really challenge it, really murder, board it or they or they play red and you'd you know, you'd go through an exercise. And so he bought into this idea. So I shopped the idea around to a bunch of different places and ultimately trade ox signed on and said you know, maxine McFarland said I'll take this.

Steve Rotkoff: 17:59

When that happened, we had no idea what this was. We knew that we needed to try and change the nature of army decision making, but we weren't sure how. So one thing that we knew was that we were culturally blind, that that in that for most soldiers and Marines that went into Iraq there was this notion that inside every Iraqi there was this little American just struggling to get out right and you know, if we, if we help them be more like us, they'd be happy. That was clearly not true. So we knew we needed anthropology. So the first person we reached out to is Misty McFate, who was an anthropologist who had written several articles saying that the academe of anthropology were wrong to put up sort of a fire law with the military, which was a consequence of Vietnam Project Phoenix, things like that, and that we, that the anthropologist, should not stand on the sideline and yell at the military that you don't understand Iraqis and then be unwilling to teach us anything about Iraqis. Right, you couldn't have it both ways.

Steve Rotkoff: 19:21

So she and a bunch of other anthropologists designed a curriculum so we had anthropology that piece. Then we knew that we needed military history case studies. Remember Greg Fontenot was the director. He had been a director of SAMS. So the course initially looked very SAMS like. There was a lot of reading, a lot of case studies and some anthropology that's how I would describe it, like the first two years. Then we got a call from who was the chairman? Who a chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff who preceded Millie Dunford, General Dunford.

Steve Rotkoff: 20:11

But preceded Dunford.

Steve Rotkoff: 20:13

Dempsey, that's what I'm trying to think of. So Dempsey is a tradeoff commander and Dempsey had been downrange a lot and knew that he needed to fix the way the army made decisions and the way the army communicated amongst itself. And he had read a book by Ori Brothman called the Starfish and the Spider and he loved that book. So he said I want to make the army more star fishy, right For your listeners. The difference is that if you destroy a web, the spider and everybody who uses that web basically dries up and dies. You destroy the web, you destroy the spider. If you cut a leg off of a starfish, the starfish grows a new leg and the leg grows a new starfish. So starfish organizations are things like Alcoholics Anonymous, the abolitionist movement, isis, al Qaeda, etc. And the problem is that spider organizations have this really hierarchical decision making that goes up to the top of the web when starfish organizations, every leg makes its own decisions inside of a general ethic or set of values. So you can be in Al Qaeda or ISIS and you can blow something up. You don't need anybody's permission, as long as you're blowing up the right people, whereas as we try to make change, you have to go through this chain of events. So Dempsey reached out and he said I think you guys could be the agent for this star fishy change in the military. So for two years I ran around with Ori Brothman and he and I gave the starfish program.

Steve Rotkoff: 22:03

It is out of the starfish program that came liberating structures, groupthink mitigation. Those are both a direct consequence of starfish because he brought in people who did those things. We also, much more greatly, we were already on the line of doing some of this, but we further embraced the idea of knowing yourself and fostering empathy. That also came out of starfish. The things that were probably already there before starfish were anthropology and this idea that we could foster empathy for other cultures and alternative futures, the idea that the future is not going to turn out the way you want it to, no matter how much you plan it. So that's how it came together.

Steve Rotkoff: 22:56

And then I had had all the starfish experience and when Greg retired I became the director and I changed the program along these four basic pillars that are UFMCS Know yourself and sharing that shared vulnerability, so that people understand that other people bring a different perspective to the table and that that perspective should be valued. That's how you encourage honored divergence of thought, then fostering empathy, trying to get your head into other cultures. We have a bunch of tools that we taught around that specific thing Groupthink, mitigation, a lot of alberting structures and then finally, alternative futures, scenario planning, premortem analysis, etc. So that's the evolution of sort of the UFMCS curriculum in a nutshell.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 23:51

Okay, and then what happened to it? We know, in the last couple of years they shut down the school. Why is that.

Steve Rotkoff: 23:57

Well, they didn't shut it down, just to be clear. They made it. They put it in a warm mode, if you will. So what happened was I can't remember when exactly, but the government was hemorrhaging money I think it had to do with COVID, probably and there was a bill on the table hey, you know, we need to save money. And in the room where that decision was made there was nobody who understood what UFMCS was or could advocate for it. So it was chump change. I mean, I was gone by that time. It was $3 million a year, nothing really, and it budgeted us. So what they ended up doing is they went down to one administrator, that's Steve Hall, and then three contractors, and then what happened was Special Forces Command, or it might be the school, I don't remember, but somewhere in the Special Forces world, it could be JASIFSA, or it could be SOCOM, or somebody said you know what we like this so much? We're going to continue to pay for these three contractors. So they continue to pay for them, they continue to do programs for SOF, and then, when they're not doing SOF programs, these same three guys can run around the Army and do programs.

Steve Rotkoff: 25:24

And then what happened was last year, maybe a little over a year ago, secretary of Defense Austin published a paper. His office published a paper called Civilian Harm Mitigation. It's something like that. Cmhr is what it is, and this was a study that was done in response to the killing of the Afghan family following our departure from Afghanistan. When they responded by killing this family, that was really innocent because they were looking for the terrorists that hit us, hit the Marines.

Steve Rotkoff: 26:09

So they did this big study and the study has five recommendations. One of the recommendations is we need a red team program. We need to challenge the conventional wisdom. So Steve Hall, if you want to talk to Steve, has been heavily involved with the Army and with joint staff trying to figure out how to rebuild the red team program, where to rebuild it, what it would look like. Interestingly enough, the paper also recommended a reestablishment of something like the human terrain system, which is adjacent in many ways but was also killed. It was permanently and totally killed, unlike UFMCS. So that's what's happened In the meantime. I used to say as director all the time that the graduates of our program needed to go out and spread the virus, that that was their job, and I think we've done a pretty good job of spreading the virus. The virus is out there in lots of places, so I don't think it's died. I think it's a little bit warm or it's popped up in other places.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 27:21

Well, I'll tell you, one of the key deliverables we have when we engage with the clients is it's usually think, write, share, write into a red team liberating structure to show them something that they can use immediately. And the response is just through the roof. They're like where'd you find this, how do you know this? And it's like these are fundamental things you need to know to mitigate cognitive biases. It doesn't necessarily create psychological safety. There's other aspects that are ways to do that, but we were finding that companies love this and they don't know what it is right. So we tell them it's red team.

Steve Rotkoff: 27:55

So I will give you a quick tool. It's not in the red team handbook I don't think you can use with clients that I found to be enormously successful. So I was still the director of UFMCS at the time and I was asked to come to the New York Federal Reserve in the city and they had a bunch of leaders there and they had one hour and they said we've heard about this red team thing, we want to know more about it. Can you demonstrate for us in one hour what the value of this is? So I said OK, we're going to do a quick exercise. I said all large institutions tell themselves lies. I said I'm going to give you two lies that the Army tells itself.

Steve Rotkoff: 28:40

The first lie that all of DOD tells itself is that the draft was terrible and we don't want it back. And that's fundamentally not true. General's do I mean at the more junior levels they don't necessarily buy that lie, but senior leaders will always say we don't want a draft and the reason is they're never going to get it back, so they might as well not want it. But the reality is that there are lots of good things about the draft. There's all sorts of data about you know, if you have a corporal from Harvard in your infantry platoon, he makes the entire infantry platoon smarter, right, I mean, and there's a lot of data about that. But we tell ourselves we don't want a draft because we're not going to get it. We also tell ourselves that we're a pure meritocracy, and that's nonsense. Right, you have lots of sons and daughters of guys who have the same last name, who happen to be generals who have done well, or you have the acolytes of somebody who've done well.

Steve Rotkoff: 29:41

So I said I want you to take this five by eight card and I give everybody the same color pan, the exact same pan. I bring them with me and I want you to block letter so we maintain anonymity. I want you to write down a lie. The Federal Reserve tells itself. They wrote those down and we gave it to the guy who was in charge and they were so blown away. They had me back three more times until the leadership changed. And then, of course, when the leaders changed, they're never interested in what the previous guy did, but I've used that in several places. It's quick, it's enormously powerful and you get to talk about things you otherwise would never talk about.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 30:19

Yeah, the block letter thing is fantastic. We use the little three by five cards in the same pen and all that and it's amazing how well that works. But what I'm getting at is when businesses, organizations they're dealing with the same type of complexities that we had in the military. Nobody's going to necessarily die from it. However, their organization may fail in the future if they don't figure out how to improve their decision making skills. So let's talk about that. Where are you seeing companies pick up on red teaming and you mentioned Verizon earlier Do you have any other success stories where companies embrace this type of thinking?

Steve Rotkoff: 31:00

So we have a couple of different companies we've worked with. I'm trying to think of who I can share and can't share. So we've done a lot of work for Nextdoor. They deal with a lot of issues around. You know, without going into any detail, social media it's tough. There are a lot of issues that come up in their business. We've done a lot of work for them. We did work for one company that was in the software intelligence, software space.

Steve Rotkoff: 31:36

I think this story is interesting because the CEO I won't mention the company he hated us, hated us with a passion because we had signed a contract for three engagements. We did all three, but he hated us because our methodology was hey, you may be the smartest person in the room, but you're not the only smart person in there and you need to hear from other people. So at the end of three engagements he said I don't want you guys anymore, it's okay. I got a call from one of their people a couple of months later and he said Steve, I have to tell you. You know the rest of the executive leadership team. We all loved what you guys did and we started doing it on our own, without the CEO there, and recently we brought a recommendation to the CEO. This was several months ago. This was before the event I'm about to describe, he says, when we looked at vulnerabilities in our company and so we went to our CEO and we said, you know, we realize that we have all of our money in Silicon Valley Bank and maybe we should do something about that. And he said, oh, this is a bunch of red team crap. He said, no, we're fine, it'll be fine, just leave it alone. Now, you know as it turned out, it was covered down. I mean, people, they probably got their money out, but nonetheless, you know, you can't force red teaming on toxic leaders, right? I mean, there's just no way to do that. And this is a good illustration of where the red team was great. Their ability to affect the changes was poor.

Steve Rotkoff: 33:21

So we've done software, we've done social media, we've done telecommunications, we've done Department of Energy, worked a lot with the Department of Energy on. My partner as a woman named Whitney Hisher, and Whitney was in charge of executive education at Berkeley High School of Business Many years. So she's got an MBA and she's a Stanford and Berkeley graduate, and so we've done a lot of work for the Department of Energy on how do you build the business case for rare earth minerals in support of specific technologies, and that's been very successful and interesting. And we also do some work for Los Alamos, for Lawrence Livermore. We do some work for USAID in Cambodia, and that's a very interesting work because the Cambodians are traumatized by, you know, the Khmer Rouge and the ability to get people to speak truth to power is pretty difficult in a place where you know your parents and grandparents. If they spoke truth to power, they were killed. So that's been interesting. And then we're doing some work for Fletcher, which is the International Policy School of Tufts University. So we've done a variety of different things.

Steve Rotkoff: 35:01

I've been the red teamer on the Lieutenant General Honorary Task Force that looked at security in the national capital region following January 6th, and that was very interesting. So my point is and I think you know, give me an opportunity to make that point this idea of better decision making, bringing people into the room group, think mitigation, alternative futures, all that stuff. It's really universally applicable. It's not just applicable to the military, it's not just applicable to business, it's applicable to anything where you don't have the enemy in the wire, and that's the one caveat I would make. Red teaming takes time and there's nothing you can do about that. It's intended to take time. It's intended to slow the decision making process so you can make a better decision. It's not in Boyd's very rapid application illustrations. It's not the same right, because the side piece is longer, because you're going to apply different tools and you bring different people into the conversation. So that is the one place where I tell people you know, if the enemy is in the wire, just do your crew drill, you know no red team it.

Steve Rotkoff: 36:26

You know there's no time to red team it. You bring in a lot of interesting points there with culture.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 36:31

So power distance index is critical and we always are asked these questions how does red teaming, things like liberating structures, think rights, share, think, chat, send all these things? How do they help in different cultures? And the point is, if you're given the opportunity to be heard and you're giving it, in this case, liberating structure to do that, you're going to see an increase in participation. We've seen that in many cultures, especially in software, so we know it works quite well in planning. So when we teach people how to plan, let's go back to MDMP. We give them better approach to planning and we give them different red teaming techniques that they can use to mitigate cognitive biases and enable critical thinking and they plug and play those things as necessary right. So we build that internal capability up.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 37:20

And I want to go back to your toxic leader point. If there's a toxic leader on the team or leading the team, you're not going to do this right, you're not going to actually take the time, because you do have to slow down to leverage the diversity of people you have in the room or cognitive diversity. I want to focus on that and that's essential. So everybody talks about we need diversity of thought. They hire diverse folks to become into their organization and then what do they do? They just continue to do what they normally do, right? They just expect magical things to happen. In my view, red teaming allows us to leverage that cognitive diversity so you can get multiple perspectives to create a better reality or better orientation of the external environment, and that's what's required in this environment. With the amount of VUCA, we use volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. So I don't know of a better way to explain to folks or maybe you have one why they need red teaming and red team techniques in their organization. Do you have an elevator pitch for that?

Steve Rotkoff: 38:30

Well, I think the reason you need red team techniques in your organization is that group think in any small group. Group think is not a function of bad leadership. Group think is a function of human condition, right? Human beings immediately assess who the power is in the room. We do that all the time, and then we self-censor. And so I'm convinced that the Pope and the Dalai Lama have people who lie to them, not because they're bad people, but because they're in charge. So if you want people to tell you the truth, you need methods.

Steve Rotkoff: 39:12

It's not enough to say come on, everybody, I'm open, let's brainstorm. People don't believe you. And besides, brainstorming is a broken system anyway, Because the way you win at brainstorming is to be the first person to talk, and then everybody talks about what you're talking about, right? So I'll give you an example of I can't fix toxic leadership. I get that, but a lot of times you don't know if the leader is toxic or not. The leader is there. The leader may be a good leader, they may be a positive leader, but that doesn't mean people are afraid of what they're going to say in that room, because they don't know what's in the head of that leader and they're afraid that somehow they'll step on an unseen landmine and they'll piss that leader off. That's human nature. You can't say well, you ought to have the courage of your convictions. Yeah, that's swell, it's just not true. People aren't going to do that.

Steve Rotkoff: 40:09

So I was once brought in by a new one star who had taken a job in the Pentagon. And it was one of these jobs where you'd come in for a year and then you'd go to another job. I mean, they'd have a new one star almost every year and the guys who ran the office were the 15s or the 14s SES, whatever they had who were there year after year after year. So I used anonymous techniques I don't need to go into details, but anonymous techniques to get everybody to say because the general's question was I've only here a year, I want to make a difference, when should I focus my attention? And we collected all the ideas around the room and they were put on a board and then everybody voted anonymously and at the end, when we tallied all the votes, it was way to anonymous feedback. At the end, the ideas are up there, the votes are up there, and the general goes to the board and points an idea that has one vote and he says that's my idea, that's my vote.

Steve Rotkoff: 41:20

Tell me what I just don't understand about this office, because clearly I don't understand this office. So you guys who gave lots of votes here and lots of votes there, talked to me about why those things are so important, because they weren't even on my radar screen. Now that guy had me back year after year after year after year until he retired as a four star, and so you don't know that the leader is necessarily toxic. You just know he's there, and so the fact that he's there drives you to use anonymous techniques, because otherwise people will undoubtedly self-censor. The other thing I would mention when you talk about power, distance and sort of empowering people is do you guys use my 15%?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 42:15

I haven't in a long time. No.

Steve Rotkoff: 42:18

I find that to be very, very effective and the more depressing the organization is the more hierarchical it is, the more effective it is, because you ask people to look at.

Steve Rotkoff: 42:32

You know the pitch for this tool is nobody controls everything, and the exception, possibly, of Kim Jong-un. Everybody else has to coordinate with somebody. Okay, you know, the president has to deal with both parties, has to deal with, you know, the press has to deal with foreign leaders. Nobody controls everything, but everybody controls 15%, and the 15% that everybody controls is how they treat other people, what they prioritize, you know how they organize their time, things like that.

Steve Rotkoff: 43:11

And so what I want you to do is I want you to light a candle, vice, curse the darkness in your organization, and I want you to write down what your 15% is. What can you do without any additional resources, without any change in policy, without anybody's help, to make your organization just a little bit better? That's your 15%, and you have people do that, and then you share that and what you find out is there are a whole bunch of ideas that people have. They can write a SOP that they found that they wish somebody had right. They can counsel in a different way. They can, you know, do coffee and donuts once a month, whatever it is, but it's very empowering, and it's a tool that I recommend if you're not using it already.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 44:01

No, I love it. You know, what I like about this work is it's not standalone, right, it's. You just don't teach red teaming, we don't anyway. We look at things like effective planning, effective communication, decision making with the Kinevin framework, worldly mapping. We even do story pointing occasionally with software teams if that's what they want to do, and we use the dot voting technique that's in the UFMCS red teaming handbook, the applied thinking, critical thinking handbook as well.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 44:29

So what does this mean? It means that when you bring in red teaming tools and techniques and methods, you can apply them to what works as well. For example, worldly mapping. We try to map the external environment, starting with the customer, their needs and figuring out the activities that we need to focus on as a production team I'll just call it a production team for now. Use liberated structures for that, or red teaming techniques to help that.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 44:55

You accelerate ideas, the quality of ideas that are out there. But what's nice about this is, once you show people how to do this and why it works because inattentional, blindness and some other biases out there, why we want to do these things they start to do them on their own. So you start to develop this internal capability. You're not going to be dependent on Mark McGrath coming into your place every quarter to run a planning session. It's something that you can do, you can teach your coaches to do, you can teach your leaders to do, and it's absolutely critical. What's fascinating about this is in universities I didn't learn this in a university, I learned it in the military right and you ask your kids are they learning any of these techniques at school? And the answer is no. And, mark, I don't know if your kids have that experience at all with their education. Are they learning any of these techniques anywhere?

Mark McGrath: 45:49

No, they're not, and you said the L word. It's all about learning and expanding the orientation and keeping it aligned to the reality such that when things happen, you're able to act faster. Steve, you mentioned earlier the current situation unfolding in the Middle East. The Israelis went right to act because the orientation is aligned enough that they can. It's implicitly getting a controlling action that they can get to it right away, because they've spent the time maybe learning, weighing out these ideas, talking about these sorts of things, to gain more perspectives.

Steve Rotkoff: 46:25

Yeah, the one thing I want to say, ponch yeah, I agree, mark, about what you said, that it's very important to me is, you know, when we stood up UFMCS our client, if you will, our customer we're going to be mostly majors. That's who we were aiming at, and those majors were going to be all over the place and they were going to have all sorts of resources available. Some might be, you know, in a place where they've got all sorts of bandwidth and data and they can do all sorts of fancy stuff, and some might be in a tense someplace with a butcher board, and we were very rigorous about the idea that these tools need to be simple, they need to be replicable, that people, when we walk away, can do what we did for them and they can pass the word. That's what spreading the virus is about. So I think it's very important that the tools be easily understood, intuitive. I mean I love it when somebody you know I teach a tool and somebody says why the hell didn't, I think about that. That's I mean, that's so easy, so easy to do, and so that's kind of my focus.

Steve Rotkoff: 47:52

If the tool becomes too complicated like there are tools in the Red Team Handbook, like Stringer Pearls, other tools. I don't do them at all Because they're too damn complex for me. I can't keep track of them. How can I expect my customer to keep track of them or to ever do them after I leave?

Steve Rotkoff: 48:11

And then the last thing I would say is that part of Red Teaming being a meta way of thinking is that the tools that are taught, or the tools that you know, are not all the tools there are. Sometimes you have to design a tool. You go huh, none of the tools that I have really fit this problem exactly. So let's take a tool and modify it or change it or conduct it in a different way. Sometimes I will need to bring in somebody from the company I'm working with and make them a seconded Red Team, because I don't understand enough about their work to intelligently craft the tools. But I can explain the tools and the intent and then they help me craft that tool so that it works for their business. But I have found myself creating lots of tools since the Handbook was published that aren't in the Handbook because I needed them.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 49:19

So in the flow system we added something known as complex facilitation techniques, which kind of sounds like Red Teaming. It's separate. So Dave Snowden recommended that we separate them out and it would be something like the future backwards, something that he created, the future backwards, maybe some side casting and back casting as well, ritual descent, something like that. We don't call them. I actually call them part of Red Teaming because it's easier to explain to a client than hey, here's complex facilitation techniques and here's a Red Teaming technique. But you're right, you can still use the basic think, write, share to come up with a future backwards scenario which is fantastic to use to help leaders stay on course, to make sure they avoid the pitfalls of execution two months, three months down the road. So it is a mix and match thing. I tell you we have so much fun with it once the coaches and the coachees learn how to use it, because you never know how it's going to come, what's going to emerge from that, what you're going to see. And I'll give you an example. You used to do Ritual Descent quite a bit, which is something we get from Dave Snowden's Cognitive Edger, the Conevan company. You do that, which is very, very complicated to set up, it's hard to do, but it's very powerful. And the organization we were working with some of the people learned that and came to me and said, hey, we want a Red Team. I'm like, well, they're two different things. Ritual Descent and the Red Team are two different things, but the language gets mixed and some coach tells them that this is what this is, and so forth.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 50:53

The bottom line is you're using something that leverages that divergent thinking, which is absolutely critical in all aspects of planning, executing and assessing that feedback loop. So if you can learn how to do something, even if it's one thing think right, share you're going to get better at planning, executing and assessing. And once you learn how to build these, or build these Red Teaming techniques with complex facilitation techniques together, you start to see things you couldn't see before. And it's so powerful and so exciting to see teams and organizations pick up on this and we have to thank UFMCS for this. We try to stay as true as possible to a free document anybody can download online, which brings me up to this thing. So Mark and I want to create a certification tomorrow on UFMCS's Red Team Handbook or the Applied Critical Thinking Handbook. What's stopping us from doing that? Is there anything?

Steve Rotkoff: 51:56

I don't think anything. I will tell you that Bryce Hoffman and his Red Team thinking, I think, is named as his company. He's got a whole bunch of certification programs and all of it. That's out there. A lot of it, not everything. I would say that Mark Mateski has created a whole bunch of tools independent of UFMCS, but most of the tools that are out there they have their lineage in the Red Team Handbook. So I don't think there's anything that prevents you from doing that. Just one comment, poncho, on what you said, but I don't want to let it go before I forget. You said you can use Think Right Share in concert with X, y or Z. I would tell you we do not do a single exercise, a single tool in any of our practice that doesn't start with Think Right Share, always Think Right Share, and we beat it into them. So it doesn't matter what we're doing, it always starts with Think Right Share.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 53:00

You're going to love this, steve. At the beginning of COVID we had to shift from being in person to going online. I'm like, how do we do Red Teaming techniques online? And I say there's an advantage to doing it online. So with the mural boards, the different white boards out there, you can do Think Chat Send. You can do it on Microsoft Teams, you can do it on Zoom. There are different ways to do it. So think about it, put it in chat, send it to one person Either you're a Scrum Master or a designated leader or a designated facilitator. You keep everything pure in there and it works. And the same thing with dot voting and you could do several things online using Red Teaming techniques that I wasn't expecting in 2019 to use in 2020, 2021. So it's pretty universal.

Steve Rotkoff: 53:48

Are you guys using a lot of role play?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 53:51

We do a lot of experiential learning activities and simulation where we use Red Team techniques.

Steve Rotkoff: 53:56

Yes, no role play.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 53:59

No, not right now.

Steve Rotkoff: 54:01

So I would tell you one thing to consider because I think it is really illustrative is let's say you have a problem and you say, for the purposes of this exercise, we're going to take the guy who's in charge of marketing and you're no longer in charge of marketing For this exercise, you're in charge of sales and the guy who's in charge of sales for this exercise you're in charge of marketing or logistics and supply or whatever it is, and you force them into an alternative perspective as they think about the problem and they will garner insights that they otherwise would not have, because being forced into that role forces them to think like that designated person. So just a thought I use a lot of role play. I find it very valuable. I take that back.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 54:58

I take that back.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 54:59

So we do it all the time with a customer and that's very hard for people to do because when we get back to like wardly mapping, put yourself in your customer's shoes and ask what do I need, and that changes everything. This goes back to empathy. Can you empathize with your customer and figure out what it is they need, because they may not need what you're trying to give them? And generally I'll tell you when we get a red team or when we do think right, share, get everybody using sticky notes or notes on a whiteboard, electronic whiteboard, start with the customer. Who is your customer? Answer that question, think right, share, go Right, and that's an amazing conversation right there. That is just the most critical conversations to have as an organization. And then you move on to what do they need and then, once you get that, everything starts falling in place. I mean, it just starts working.

Steve Rotkoff: 55:52

The only piece I'd add in there. First of all, I think that's great. So the other big thing that we spend a lot of time up front is asking people to look at the problem and using think right, share, make the explicit and implicit assumptions what are you assuming about the future? What are you assuming about supply chain? What are you assuming about the economy? What are you assuming about the workforce? What are your assumptions? And then you can not vote the assumptions and say, okay, which of these assumptions is really critical? Because the problem is that and I saw this in the military all the time once you'd gone through the step of collecting assumptions, it was okay, we did that step check mark, let's move on. Well, if an assumption is critical, then there needs to be metrics around that assumption. You need to be tracking that assumption, because if the assumption does not become true, your plan needs to change and we don't spend enough time on that. So that's something we do. I don't know if you guys do that or not. Absolutely, it's something I would recommend.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 57:06

Yeah, we use that for contingency planning. Yeah, so we'll do that in a okay, let's think right, share possible threats to our current objective or outcome or whatever it may be, and we can look and prioritize those threats, because you can't go after everything, right, and kind of go, do we have contingencies around these things that we can control? And how do we monitor? This goes back to, I think, your human terrain mapping experiences. How do we monitor what's going on? So get into the fat tail risks of what's going. The black swans you can't identify a black swan. In the same manner, you can't identify a unknown unknown, you just know you need to scan for it. And you can use red teaming techniques to continually scan the environment, right? So there's so much more to how we use these tools and techniques within an organization and what they can do for safety, resilience, innovation and agility that I mean there's not enough time to talk about on this podcast. But that's why you have, that's why you do what you do, that's why we do what we do. That's why we're here is to help people hedge and I'm gonna use a term from the markets hedge against the future, right? How do we hedge against something that could happen, or probable, plausible and possible things. How do we do that?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 58:18

And you think about the current context and we're one and a half weeks into the Israeli, palestinian, hamas issue. I mean, think about what's going on now in our US military. Are they using red teaming techniques? I hope they are. I might believe that they're not, you know. I do know that the Israelis have one heck of a design school for operation design, strategic design. They're very advanced in their thinking when it comes to leveraging the wisdom of crowds, if you will. But I wanna get your thoughts on the current condition. What do you think is going on in the Pentagon when it comes to red teaming right now? What should be happening and how should businesses be using red teaming techniques in this current environment?

Steve Rotkoff: 59:16

So I think that, ultimately, you know, red teaming is not about predicting the future. Right, you can't predict the future, and one of the traps that planners fall into is belief that if I have three sleepless nights and giant whiteboards with all sorts of matrices on them and all sorts of actors on them, that somehow I can get the future to conform to my will. And you know that's just not the case. What red teaming is about is making you open to the fact that the future is going to be emergent and that there are things about the future, as the future emerges, that you need to track. You need to. I mean, that's what premortem analysis, as we teach it is all about. Right, what are the things that I want to measure and track as I move into the future, to recognize whether or not I'm now going down a divergent path. And you know, I think that it's not only that, but the piece about alternative perspectives. I mean, you know, I think that the failure, when people talk about intelligence failure whether it's Hamas or it's 9-11 or whatever it is it's really about two failures A failure to respect your opponent and a failure of imagination. And the failure to respect your opponent is to believe that somehow what worked yesterday and defeated your opponent is going to work tomorrow, because your opponent is not a learning part of a learning organization themselves. Right, you guys are familiar with the 11th Tachelcopter Regiment story from Operation Rocky Freedom. Are you familiar with that story? Okay, so that is a story that also helped inform the decision to develop red teaming. It's written about in the official history of Seaflic of the war. So the 11th Tachelcopter Regiment is the worst going on and it's been given the mission to do a deep attack to take out one of the tank divisions that's, you know, gonna enter into the fight and kill them before they can get to the battle space. And they're doing a. They're doing a rock drill and, because they're in the desert and it's 2003, they're doing it old fashioned way. They've got blue ribbon laying out the rivers, right, they've got some camouflage netting for the desert, they have boxes for the built up areas and they're doing their walkthrough and they're thinking about the suppression of enemy air defense and how they're gonna do that. And you know who they're gonna jam, who are they gonna shoot at, et cetera. And they're walking through and they're rehearsing it and you've got the XO of the regiment who's leading this, with all the senior pilots walking through, and there's one person in the room who looks different than all the others and that is a female Lieutenant, mi. And she raises her hand during the rock drill and she says can I ask a question? And they say sure, what's your question? She said what if, instead of using air defense which we can track, the Iraqis somehow figure out a way to coordinate massed small arms fire? What would that look like and what would we do about it? And the XO of the regiment says, in effect I mean, he doesn't say these exact words, but what he says in effect is men are talking here, you know, why don't you go in the corner of someplace? And color? We got this.

Steve Rotkoff: 1:03:27

So then the radio traffic in the operation. You can hear them, pilots, talking to each other because as they're flying over, each built up area there's a guy with binoculars and a cell phone who's tracking them. And they talk about that. They said I wonder what that's about? Hell, I don't know. You know, maybe he's never seen a helicopter before, you know, maybe it's just fun.

Steve Rotkoff: 1:03:48

And but each built up area there's a new guy with, you know, cell phone, binoculars. And when they arrive at the battle area, they are met by mass small arms. Fire everything that you can pick up and fire in the air. And of the 51 helicopters that go out on the mission, one is shot down and the pilot and copilot take him prisoner, and the other 50 returned to base without killing a single tank full of holes. That takes months to recover. Okay, so that is a failure to respect the enemy. That lieutenant in the room was the only one who respected the fact that the Iraqis could learn something from the Valley of Death during Desert Storm and change their tactics. I think that's the same thing that happened with Hamas, and that they didn't respect the fact that Hamas was gonna figure out a way to defeat Israeli streps.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:04:50

And yeah, I wanna bring up something there. So we call that a weak signal. So when we use red teaming techniques, you can potentially uncover that lieutenant that identified that one off thing right that nobody else saw. And this goes back to inattentional blindness. You only see what we expect to see. So we demonstrate this quite a bit to folks in the workshops and when we work with clients that I forgot the number 20% of the folks in the room are gonna see something that the other 80% don't see. Right, it might actually I think it's 17%, but you wanna look for those signals in your organization. You could see them once you do a think right, share, you can cluster them up or you can bucket them and you can see the one offs that go hey, look at these things over here, what are we doing about them? Right, and that's that lieutenant story, right there. That is exactly how do we uncover weak signals so we can include that in our decision-making process.

Mark McGrath: 1:05:49

It sounds like the team that developed digital photography at Kodak even right.

Steve Rotkoff: 1:05:55

Oh sure, it's all those stories, it's Blockbuster and Netflix, it's all those stories. But yeah, I think that I don't remember where I was going with all this. Other than, that was also one of the stories that informed the decision by the army. I mean, there were lots of stories, but it was one of them. They said, okay, so we need to change our decision-making methods, we need to be able to hear from that lieutenant. And again, a lot of times when I tell that story, people focus on the misogyny of it, and that's certainly a part of it, but that's not really the key takeaway. The key takeaway is the disrespect of the enemy, and I think that we do that all the time.

Steve Rotkoff: 1:06:39

I did a I can't mention the names in this particular case, but I did a red team work for a corporate client and they had a competitor who invariably would make fun of them, try and discredit any of their initiatives, and they were very, they were hyper aware of this competitor and they had a giant initiative that they were, that they were getting ready to launch, spent a lot of money on them and they said we need to red team this. So I went out and I bought t-shirts from the competitor, of the competitor's name and brand, and I, when I went into the red team, I said okay, I want you guys to all wear these t-shirts. You are this company. You are no longer your own company. You are now this other company. You know everything there is to know about this initiative that's coming out. I want you to craft the counter programming. What would that look like? That comes out, how are you gonna respond? How are you gonna denigrate it, how are you gonna suborn it, et cetera. And then we briefed that to the board of directors and they changed the initiative.

Steve Rotkoff: 1:07:55

You know, once they were faced with people role playing, this alternative view, because unfortunately, most people look at whatever decision they're gonna make only through their own eyes, which is why another tool that we use all the time very valuable is the Four Ways of Sea, and I would tell you that I did work, before I retired, in Korea where we did the 25 Ways of Sea, and it was China, the US, north Korea, south Korea and then the US South Korea Alliance, which operated as an independent entity because it saw things differently than either South Korea or the US. It acted independently. So you had these five on one side and we had how they saw each other and how they saw themselves, and we out briefed it to the two star general and it changed some of their planning. It changed some of the ways that they went about business, because once you're forced to take that alternative perspective, you start to think differently about what you're doing.

Steve Rotkoff: 1:09:07

I mean, there were things that we were doing that were that were absolutely going to elicit a reaction from the North and we hadn't looked at it from a North Korean perspective, so we could still continue to do those things. We can't continue to do those things and not expect the North to react From a Northern perspective. That was a I don't know, I can't grab the right word, but it was a provocative event. So anyway, I think Four Ways of Seeing is very powerful.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:09:49

Steve on Four Ways of Seeing. I want to know if you ever used Pemissi to help organizations. I know it's one of our constructs with politics, military economics, social infrastructure, intelligence.

Steve Rotkoff: 1:10:00

So, Bonch, I will tell you that I'll go back to what I said earlier I believe in simplicity. I don't use jargon. I don't use any of the decision-making jargon. I don't use difficult tools. So when I have the cause to do something like that, I use dime.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:10:21

It's simple, it gets it most of them.

Steve Rotkoff: 1:10:24

Pemissi just takes more time. It's more complex. Who needs it?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:10:29

So dime is a diplomatic, information, military, economic, is that right? Yeah, so, and I think what you're saying is look through this through these lenses. In this case, we may not want to use dime with the company. You can use economic, you can use infrastructure, maybe I don't know, but if you provide the make tool to go, okay, how are you going to look at this? Look at it from these different lenses, all right, and use the techniques to do that. There's another question that I want to ask you Absolutely.

Steve Rotkoff: 1:11:01

What we generally do. Are you there? You look like you're frozen, you guys there? Yep, we're here, you're there now. Okay, yeah, you're frozen on my screen.

Steve Rotkoff: 1:11:11

So I will tell you that, although I absolutely believe in tailored programs and I do tailor my programs to the needs of the customer and I have long conversations with the customer before I build the program but the fundamentals that we do when we do a program are assumptions analysis first and foremost. Okay, we do that upfront. What are the assumptions about the future and how do those assumptions inform your planning? Then we do stakeholders and we lay out stakeholders to try to identify the stakeholders that are both critical and not on the team already with the plan. So we're not interested in stakeholders that are really supportive and don't matter, or stakeholders that are not supportive and don't matter. We're only interested in those that are not entirely supportive and matter. And then we do a four ways of seeing around that stakeholder. How are you going to influence that stakeholder? Then we might do a scenario planning tool where we look at four alternative futures that the company or organization cannot control.

Steve Rotkoff: 1:12:22

So I did this with a relative of mine once who works for construction and he asked me to outline a tool that he could use quickly. And he does this massive construction. And I said, okay, chris, you cannot control the cost of building materials. He says that's true. I said, okay, on one axis it's going to be the cost of building materials. Remain stable or get cheaper, or they get much more expensive. So the much more expensive axis is here, the cheaper axis is at the end of the axis, is on the other side. The other thing you can't control is the weather right, and the weather matters. So the weather is conducive or the weather is not conducive. You know you have bad weather. I said now you have four alternative futures. You have a future where the weather is good and building materials cheap. You have a future where the weather is good but building materials are expensive. You have a future where the weather is stocks and building materials are expensive, or the weather sucks and building materials are cheap. Those are four different futures, none of which your company controls, but all of which are possible.

Steve Rotkoff: 1:13:38

So if you knew that was the future, what would you be doing today In order to prepare yourself for that future? And then, when you look across those four matrices, you come up with some common things that you can do to better prepare yourself for going into that future. And so we'll do that, or we'll do dine, or we'll do something else to help them develop and test the plan, and then we'll always end with a premortem. So here's your plan let's do premortem. We do premortems individually, think right, share. Then we collectively share premortems.

Steve Rotkoff: 1:14:15

What's supposed to come out of the premortem at the end are three things. The first is how do I change the plan to preclude these kinds of things from happening? The second is if they're going to happen, how will I know they're happening? One of my indicators and warnings. And finally, if they happen, despite my best efforts, what am I going to do about it? How am I going to react to it? So that's sort of our program in a nutshell. We can do that in about two days with a company. With some companies we'll stretch it out, we'll do it in five days and they can go in more depth to different things. But that's what our red team program generally looks like.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:14:59

I love it. I want to ask a question about something I saw in an article you wrote several years ago. This connects back to effects-based operations that we had in the military. I don't know if you remember that Value-focused I do.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:15:12

One of the challenges that we see in organizations they try to start with a desired future state with a SMART goal specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time box goal. The problem we tell them with that is in some cases, and actually in a lot of cases, you can't predict the future. So how can you give me a SMART goal when you don't even know what the future looks like? So in the military, at the operational level of war, we were quite successful in using effects-based operations, especially in the Air Operations Center, which is paring weapons to targets. It's pretty complicated work. It's not complex work.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:15:47

So we see a lot of these military-themed companies come out and say this is how we did it in the military, this is how you need to do it. But I believe it conflicts with the definition of a complex environment. You cannot do that. So we have to start a direction of travel and say we're going to go in that direction, whatever it may be, and we're going to do these little probes and we're going to use red teaming techniques, if you will, to figure out what this environment or this landscape actually looks like. So my question to you is where do you stand with effects-based operations, value-focused thinking, starting with a defined, high-definition future state in mind and working backwards from that, based on your experience in the red teaming school and what you're seeing now?

Steve Rotkoff: 1:16:33

So I think that in general, if you are talking about conventional warfare, conventional ops, that effects-based operations make sense. I think the less you're in killing people and breaking things and the more you're in influencing and trying to generally move in a general direction, the challenge becomes that you have the illusion of precision in effects-based operations and people buy into that illusion of precision much more than they should. So I think a tool can be really good in one circumstance and can deceive the user in another circumstance. I agree with your idea that what you really want for the future are general trends. Here's where I'd like to see the general trend in this situation be. Now, how far am I going to get down that trend line? I don't know and I'm going to have to act and then observe and then orient and then decide and act again, Because it's not knowable how far I'm going to get down that trend line and that trend line may not even be correct. I may discover things as I'm on that path that redirect me.

Steve Rotkoff: 1:18:11

But my challenge with effects-based operations, with design, with a lot of those things, is that they create this illusion of precision. And I'm not a fan of methodology, to be honest with you. I believe that when you have a rigorous step-by-step methodology, then completion of the process becomes the product. We got through MDMP, we did our job, we are a go at this station and what happens is people want to stop thinking in order to move to the next step. So I don't believe in that and I believe design is just another process. I believe that you take each problem, you try and understand the root cause of that problem, so that you're not solving the symptoms of the problem, but you're getting at the root causes, and then you design a methodology for engagement around. How many people do I have in the room? How much time do I have to discuss this, what is the nature of the problem and which tools do I apply?

Steve Rotkoff: 1:19:23

So my analogy for the use of red teaming tools is that of golf. The more expert you are as a golfer, the more you can use all those tools in your bag. If you don't know, Jack, about golf you don't golf very frequently you'll end up using three or four clubs right, Because the nuance in the other clubs doesn't work for you. The more you learn to golf, the better a golfer you become, the better you can apply the right tool to the right problem. So it's about constantly practicing and applying the right tools. That takes experience, and you don't get that out of a book. That's why you need a red team practitioner who's done a lot of this. I'm not pimping myself for work, but I would tell you I've done more of it than anybody on the planet at this stage.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:20:21

You know a guy right? Yeah, you heard it again, I do.

Steve Rotkoff: 1:20:25

I'm happy to help you guys as well. I love it. You know I'm always a… I love this. I mean, I do this because I love it. I believe that the VUCA world that you describe requires a different way of thinking, and that way of thinking can be called red teaming or it can be called something else, but it requires a different way of thinking and making decisions.

Mark McGrath: 1:20:48

There's no way out. That's, I think Boyd would agree, in the brief conceptual spiral. You know, you brought up earlier the illusion of precision and he said that mathematical and precision is one of the things, one of the factors that affect us as we continue to operate within complexity. And there's no way out with that continuous reorientation to learn. And I think red teaming is a phenomenal way to ensure your learning. It also makes me think of destruction, creation, where you can't determine the character or the nature of a system within itself. Moreover, attempts to do so lead to confusion and disorder. So, by challenging assumptions and taking opposite views and doing as we've laid out, as we've discussed here, that's how you keep your orientation matched and aligned and that's how you can identify mismatches faster. Going back to your example, they can just act. That's the real value of red teaming, is the ability to keep the orientation dialed in, constantly learning, constantly adapting in order to thrive and improve the capacity for free, independent action.

Steve Rotkoff: 1:21:58

And to go back to where we started, the problem with MDMP is it ends on act. It never loops back.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:22:06

Yeah, I want to bring up a point there. A good planning process always has a feedback loop at the end of it. We call it assessment, it's called debrief and AAR. Debriefing is part of your plan. It's the most important thing you can do right, and that's why feedback loops, according to neuroscience and some of the folks that we've had on the show, James Gimmie and being one of them saying that feedback is a factor of 10 greater than feet forward. So I agree with you 100%. Yeah.

Mark McGrath: 1:22:40

That makes sense Absolutely Well, steve, we've loved this. We've enjoyed this. We'd love to have you back because I think that we could go in several different directions and maybe even boil down on some of the techniques that we could continue to help individuals and teams with, as they look to thrive in complexity and now it's really in line. Thanks for sharing the story, too, about the School of Fort Leavenworth sitting majors. We hope that there's a good model of people going to a school to learn that they could go back and, as you say, spread the virus and a lot of the things that we've talked about on no Way Out with various things like fighter weapons school either, both in the Air Force and in Top Gun. Maybe we'll be close with. Do you have any good success stories about those that went to learn red teaming and took it back to their home units that were the most successful in spreading the virus? Were there any techniques or ideas that made them more successful than others?

Steve Rotkoff: 1:23:49

Well, I mean, there have been several general officers that have really embraced this and then brought it into their units and brought UFMCS or UFMCS trained people back in to continue proliferating the program and unfortunately I'm having a senior moment, I can't get their names, but I will, I'll send them to you. But a lot of them retired as four star generals and they engaged with red teaming at every step along the way. They got introduced to it as Michael Tennant-Colonels and then they continued throughout. So in their organizations there's been some spreading of the virus.

Steve Rotkoff: 1:24:36

I still I get notes from people all the time that went through school and say hey, I just want you to know I still use this and you know it really made a difference in my life and how I think and all that kind of stuff. There can be a downside, I will tell you. Frequently my wife turns to me and says stop red teaming me. So, so, so you have to use it when it's appropriate and let it go when it's not. So, guys, I have another appointment. I was great talking to you. Thank you so much for inviting me and I look forward to hearing from you again.

Mark McGrath: 1:25:14

Yeah, we'll look forward to having you back. Thanks again for your time, Steve. We really appreciate it.

Steve Rotkoff: 1:25:18

Take care Bye.