Red Cells: The Antidote to Groupthink

“How can our leadership team avoid groupthink?” This is a question we’re asked frequently when advising on strategy. It’s a problem that many teams face when it comes to thinking strategically and there’s a variety of causes.

Sometimes it’s the team’s composition that’s the challenge—the team lacks diverse perspectives, the kind needed to cultivate truly new insights. In other situations, it’s that the team’s longstanding routines have grown stale generating few new ideas. It could be that novel, offbeat insights are frowned upon due to senior member behaviors or politics. Regardless of the reason, groupthink is an Achilles Heel to teams that prevents genuine creative thoughts from emerging. But there is a solution, one that comes straight from the military: red cells. 

Red cells were developed during the 1980’s by special operations leaders to pressure test the effectiveness of American military plans and tactics. The practice is often used in war games to represent an opposing force whose mission is to disrupt the friendly force’s plans. With that background, it’s easy to see how the concept can be applied to strategy efforts. There’s a few simple steps needed to make the practice work:

1. Charter, Select, and Separate Red Cell Members. A red cell should be expressly included as part of the strategy effort at the start. Team members should be comprised of leaders and employees who are know for their nontraditional views of the business. They should be told their mission but shouldn’t participate in any of the strategy efforts of the main team, at least initially. In fact, they should be separated from the main group entirely.

2. Steep the Red Cell in Competitor Tactics. While the main team engages in strategizing, so too should the red cell—but from the perspective of competitors. Red cell members diligently study competitor plans and strategies to get themselves into the mindset of their organization’s most significant competitors. This outside-in perspective is needed to ensure they are adequately prepared to respond from the viewpoint of an adversary.

3. Focus on Disrupting the Core Strategy. When the strategy is complete, the red cell analyzes it with the express purpose of identifying gaps and undermining the effort. They should make choices and conceive responses that would severely hamper or fully disrupt the strategy. 

4. Update the Strategy Using their Findings.  When their interrogation is complete, both teams should unite—main members and the red cell—to review their findings, revisit the core strategy, and make key adjustments. The red cell’s perspective will be both informative and instructive for the overall team.

If you’re unsure whether the red cell concept can be successfully applied outside of the military, don’t be. The idea has been similarly tested in a business book entitled Kill the Company (a very red cell like title). In short, it works.

Groupthink is a debilitating behavior that undermines the kind of strategic thinking teams need today. Employ a red cell and watch how the effectiveness of your strategizing improves.

If you’d like to learn more about strategic thinking, check out the Twelve Skills brief Mastering Strategic Thinking.

Serious about improving your strategic skills? Get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Strategic Thinking Workbook. Packed with thought provoking activities, hands on exercises, and bonus material, it’s a proven way to boost your knowhow. Best of all, IT’S FREE! 

Get your own complimentary copy here.

Strategic Leadership Starts with Strategic Thinking

Who are strategic leaders? There’s two answers to this question.

First, strategic leaders are specific people—the executives who sit at the top of an organization. They comprise members of the board of directors, the top management team (TMT), and senior leaders who head major business units, functions, or geographies.

Second, strategic leaders are those managers who think and act strategically. They are known not buy their position, but rather their behavior. They, too, are strategic leaders but by action, not title.

Many leaders aspire to be both—more strategic in their day-to-day work as well as senior leaders rising in their organization. We assert that focusing on the latter—becoming a more strategic leader behaviorally—is the best path to achieving the former—a strategic leadership post. So how does one get from the backroom to the boardroom? According to the authors of Becoming a Strategic Leader: Your Role in Your Organization’s Enduring Success there are three individual skills that are required:

1. Strategic thinking. The intellectual and social process skills needed to enable a broad understanding of the organization and how it fits (and evolves) with its environment.

2. Strategic acting. The actions necessary to drive the organization toward its desired future destination despite challenges, obstacles, setbacks, and uncertainties that arise along the way.

3. Strategic influence. The behaviors needed to gain commitment from stakeholders, both inside and outside the organization, to compel progress toward strategic outcomes.

While each of the three are essential, strategic acting and influence will be of limited value if they are taken absent effective strategic thinking.

Senior leaders are expected to have the conceptual skills needed to not only survive, but thrive in the fast moving VUCAD world—volatile uncertain, complex, ambiguous, and digital. Anyone who wants to ascend the corporate latter will need to be a proven strategic thinker well before they step into those roles.

If you’d like to learn more about strategic thinking, check out the Twelve Skills brief Mastering Strategic Thinking.

Serious about improving your strategic skills? Get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Strategic Thinking Workbook. Packed with thought provoking activities, hands on exercises, and bonus material, it’s a proven way to boost your knowhow. Best of all, IT’S FREE! 

Get your own complimentary copy here.

Think Before You Think Strategically

This might seem like an odd title for a post: Think Before You Think Strategically. You might be asking yourself, “Isn’t this what strategic thinking is all about? Changing the way I think?” It is. But to understand how to improve your approach to analyzing data and information, it helps to take the time to think about how you go about thinking in the first place. Unfortunately, people skip this activity to their detriment. Thinking about how you think—or metacognition as it’s known—is a key ingredient to thinking more effectively. If you’re interested on improving your own metacognition, here’s a few helpful hits to start you thinking.

1. People Often Aren’t as Smart as They Think. Do you know anyone who, no matter what you say to them, responds with “I knew that already”? There’s a possibility they did, but it’s more likely they’re suffering from a cognitive bias know as the Dunning-Kruger Effect. There’s ample research that shows when people are polled about things like driving, their health, and other behaviors, they rate themselves as well above average. People who are overconfident are especially prone to this bias. A dose of reality is a good starting point for upping your thinking.

2. You Can Improve Metacognition. Virtually everyone can improve how they think, if they try. There are a variety of resources available to assist. Prompts geared toward planning, monitoring, and evaluating highlight what you’re thinking in real time and encourage reflection when you’ve finished. Other techniques such as polling, conducting self and/or group assessments are beneficial practices too. Keeping a learning or reading log can be especially beneficial.

3. How You Organize Information Matters. If you do keep a learning log, one of the most effective approaches to structuring how you engage with, and process information, comes from the Cornell Note Taking System. As basic as this sounds, it’s a very effect tool that improves understanding and retention. Sound a little ‘old school’, note taking that is? Maybe. But research shows that writing notes by hand is more effective than with a computer. That said, the Cornell Note Taking System can be adapted for tech users as well. If you’re interested in learning more, The Learning Strategies Center at Cornell offers a free, publicly available online course in Canvas.  Even if you’re not interested in taking the course, there’s helpful videos to watch on the site.

Anne Hutchinson one of the early American feminists is quoted as saying, “I have been guilty of wrong thinking.”  She is not alone—most of us have. Take the time to explore your own cognition and your ability to think well and strategically will improve.

If you’d like to learn more about strategic thinking, check out the Twelve Skills brief Mastering Strategic Thinking.

Serious about improving your skills? Get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Strategic Thinking Workbook. Packed with thought provoking activities, hands on exercises, and bonus material, it’s a proven way to boost your knowhow. Best of all, IT’S FREE! 

Get your own complimentary copy here.

Starting Point for Strategic Thinking: A Good Question

There’s no shortage of advice on how to think strategically—current blog authors included (see below). There are principles, practices, processes, steps—that, if followed, promise to top up your thoughts on the challenges and opportunities the future holds. To be fair, there’s value in almost every piece of advice. But regardless of which approach you choose, all methods should start the same way: with a good question. A good question helps you avoid three problems that can frustrate your efforts from the start.

1. Alice in Wonderland Problem. In the book Alice in Wonderland, when Alice asks the Cheshire Cat which road to take, he responds laconically, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road can take you there.” This is true with strategic thinking and fairy tales (not to mention your life; see here if this applies to you). If you’re not sure what you’re looking for, all the web searches you conduct and articles you read won’t have much value. More likely, they’ll probably lead to frustration stemming from information overload.

2. Forest for the Trees Problem. You’ve no doubt heard someone quip, “She can’t see the forest for the trees” when a person is so close to a situation, they miss the big picture. When searching for information—especially when hopping from one bit to the next—it’s possible to become so focused on the particulars you lose sight of the overall scheme. The right question calibrates where you are in the details.

3. Blinding Flash of the Obvious Problem. There are few events more unnerving than conducting far-reaching research, getting to the end, summarizing what you learned only to discover that your ‘novel insights’ have been widely known for the past decade. As humorous (and humiliating) as this sounds, it happens.  An effective question ensures canvasing the information landscape yields as much of what’s known in an area of interest as possible.

Karl Wieck the renowned organizational theorist noted that research often starts with some issue or problem that piques your interest; a problem or paradox you’d like to know more about. Same with strategic thinking. Taking time to define and refine what you want to know, will put you on the path to better learnings. 

If you’d like to learn more about strategic thinking, check out the Twelve Skills brief Mastering Strategic Thinking.

Serious about improving your skills? Get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Strategic Thinking Workbook. Packed with thought provoking activities, hands on exercises, and bonus material, it’s a proven way to boost your knowhow. Best of all, IT’S FREE! 

Get your own complimentary copy here.

Four Steps to Thinking More Strategically

Senior leaders often wish their managers were more strategic. But it’s hard to think big thoughts when you have operational alligators snapping at your feet every day. Assuming you can shake them loose, the key question then is, “How do I get started?” Here’s a four-step process you can follow to get going.

1. Gather: Start by collecting and reviewing strategic information pertinent to your business: analyst reports—what the experts are thinking, shareholder reports—what your leaders are saying, articles written about your organization and your competitors—what the observers are seeing. Data like annual reports, employee surveys, customer information, are all great sources most managers have access to. Start there.

2. Analyze: Next, review this information in depth—that’s what analysis is. Make notes, create summaries—use a tool like a mind map to structure your thoughts. It’s not enough just to explore collected information, you need to structure it to identify trends, patterns, exceptions, major shifts, any insight that might stimulate your thinking about the future.

3. Project: Then, shift from analysis to creativity. Send your mind into the future by imagining what a future or futures plural could potentially look like. Envision a world where technology plays an even greater role than it does now, where work is vastly different, where existing energy sources yield to new ones, where no language or travel barriers exist, and collaboration is truly global. Picture different scenarios and how they might affect your organization. Shell is a company renowned for their multidecade scenarios—watch how they do it here—Shell Scenarios

4. Strategize: Finally, consider what actions you would take right now if you were a senior leader preparing for the future you see. Identify what would need to change today to be ready. Think about your products, services, workforce, investments, policies, competitors, stakeholders—any facet of organization life that would need to adapt to prepare for the eventualities of a new frontier.

Does this sound like something you can’t fit into your daily schedule? Good, don’t try. Set aside a time and place for this kind of reflection. Make it a habit and you will benefit from it. Imagine the value when a group of managers do it regularly—or an executive team.

If you’d like to learn more about strategic thinking, check out the Twelve Skills brief Mastering Strategic Thinking as well as all of the other Twelve Skills topics.

Serious about following the process highlighted in this post? Get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Strategic Thinking Workbook to get started now. Each activity follows the steps to help you boost your strategic thinking skills. Best of all, IT’S FREE! 

Get your own complimentary copy here.

What the Best Strategic Thinkers Do

Improving your strategic thinking might sound like a daunting task. With an ever-swelling ocean of information swirling about, it’s dizzying just imagining where to begin. The good news is becoming a great strategic thinker doesn’t start with endless web searches or petabytes of data to get going—it begins with simply setting time aside to think about the future. 

That sounds easy but it isn’t.  When people hear this advice, their response is often: “How do I set aside time to think about the future when I can’t even find time to finish the work I have today?” Here’s three simple steps you can follow to begin carving out the time you need.

1. Make a Commitment. You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘a journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step.’ But even before you take the first step, you’ll need to make a commitment for the journey. A commitment says—to you especially—becoming a stronger strategic thinker is a priority. The demands of operational work will always crowd out strategic thinking, putting the important at the mercy of the urgent. Those who excel at peering into the future deliberately set aside time today to contemplate what it might look like.

2. Find a Place. Not everyone does their best thinking in the same way or even in the same place. Some people can find solitude and peace of mind amidst the backdrop of a busy coffee shop. Others need the silence of a library to gain the clarity they need. Regardless of whether your best work is accomplished in the presence of a barista or alone in a quiet study room, locate a place where you can retreat and let your imagination run free.

3. Set a Routine. It would be wonderful if during your first thinking session you conjured your company’s next big product idea. Wonderful yes; likely, no. Becoming a great strategic thinker requires a routine. To start, block a time as short as 15 minutes on your calendar, every week, (and hold it no matter what) to start developing your point of view about what the future may bring.

As romantic as the blinding flash of insight sounds, most great ideas don’t come that way. It took Thomas Edison thousands of experiments to develop the incandescent lightbulb. Hopefully, your greatest discoveries won’t require that long; but like Edison, they’ll need commitment, a familiar place, and a regular routine to turn your thoughts into your own breakthrough thinking.

If you’d like to learn more about strategic thinking, check out the Twelve Skills brief Mastering Strategic Thinking as well as all of the other Twelve Skills topics.

Serious about improving your skills? Get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Strategic Thinking Workbook. Packed with thought provoking activities, hands on exercises, and bonus material, it’s a proven way to boost your knowhow. Best of all, IT’S FREE! 

Get your own complimentary copy here.