Colonel (USA Retired) Jeanne Arnold is a Principal and one of the founding members of Arnold & Schroeder, LLC., a strategic planning consulting and Red Team Training company. She is also a senior consultant with Red Team Thinking, LLC. She holds a Master of Education from Texas State University and a Master of Business Administration from The University of Texas McCombs School of Business (EMBA ’14).
Jeanne shared some quotes with us that resonated with our business instincts:
"No matter how great your business is today, the only way it can stay great is to continue to evolve." "Change is the only constant" "There is no end state for any business"
What is Red Team Training?
Red Team Training is a structured and iterative process executed by trained, educated and practiced team members with access to relevant subject matter and using structured analytic techniques.
The US failed in Iraq because we failed to understand the people and the culture. Realization of this 'miss', drove the creation of the Red Team Training. Jeanne spent the last 8 years of her 34 years of service in the US Army in the Red Team. She has been leading Red Team training since 2004. Today, Red Team University teaches people to look at any environment through different lens.
Why?
Our premise is that people and organizations court failure in predictable ways and that they do so by degrees almost imperceptible according to their mindset and biases.
Goal: Help broaden range of possible outcomes considered.
How?
Red Team tactics, techniques and procedures enhance decision making through utilizing the 4 ways of seeing people and situations.
If you knew the enemy and know your self you need not fear the results of a hundred battles. Red Team techniques can be used in decision support and can provide a critical review of concepts, organizational designs, and processes to identify potential weaknesses, vulnerabilities or gaps in analysis or plans. Plans that have gone through a Red Team process tend to take into account possible future scenarios, which can help an organization become more adaptable and agile when faced with in-forecasted or predictable change. You will learn pre-mortum exercises and be more prepared to handle a Black Swan (catastrophic unplanned event). You will learn to challenge assumptions because Red Team Training acts as a catalyst to challenge thinking.
A properly trained Red Team with the right people and with the right "top cover" can provide timely value-added input to challenge the organizations thinking and assumptions while identifying vulnerabilities, opportunities, consequences and alternatives not considered.
Red Team Training is abut helping the organization learn, adapt, and change before being forced to by the enemy or through other pressures.
Red Team Facilitation for Corporations:
* Improve your self and corporate and whole environment.
* Mitigate group think, cognitive biases and other obstacles to effective decision making. Higher danger = Higher group think.
* Identify gaps, seams, disconnects and unintended consequences in plans, concepts, policies.
* Improve critical and creative thinking.