The world lost one of its most brilliant minds this week with the passing of Dr. Daniel Kahneman – a man who did more than anyone I know to unravel the mystery of the human mind, how it works, and how it fails us.
I first met Dr. Kahneman for breakfast at a little cafe across from NYU where he was teaching back in 2015. I had just graduated from the U.S. Army’s Red Team Leader course at the Command and General Staff College where a great deal of our time was devoted to studying his work – work that provides much of the psychological foundation for both red teaming in general and Red Team Thinking in particular. I was just beginning work on my book on the topic and wanted his guidance.
It was an immediately humbling experience.
My attempt at some introductory small talk was swatted away with a question that got right to the point: “What is red teaming?”
Stammering as I ground my mental gears, I told Kahneman that red teaming was a methodology developed by the U.S. military and intelligence agencies to make critical and contrarian thinking part of their strategic planning processes – a set of tools and techniques designed to overcome cognitive bias and groupthink, force decision makers to challenge their assumptions, and to avoid the “failures of imagination” that led to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the disastrous wars which followed them.
He seemed skeptical.
“In the Israeli military, perhaps,” he said. “In the U.S. military, I don’t think so.”
Kahneman reminded me that he had done a lot of work with both countries’ militaries. In the Israeli Defence Forces, junior officers had no compunction about speaking up and challenging their superiors. It was an integral part of Israeli culture. In the U.S. military, that was almost unheard of and always unwelcome.
“The U.S. military is too rigid and hierarchical,” Kahneman observed.
“But that’s what these tools are designed to overcome,” I countered, trying to put a brave face on while inwardly questioning the underlying premises of my new book.
“How?” he asked. “Give me an example.”
Over cappuccinos and croissants, I walked Kahneman through a few of the different red teaming techniques I had learned and shared some of my own ideas for improving on them. Kahneman kept asking tough questions, pointing out ways that some elements of the process could be subverted – intentionally or unintentionally – and also suggesting alternative ways of framing different aspects of this approach.
“Interesting,” was the closest I got to praise or encouragement. But Kahneman was not done red teaming me!
“What about your business model?” he asked. “I assume you are planning on doing more with this methodology you’re developing than just writing a book about it.”
I told him that I was and proceeded to outline the go-to-market strategy for the company I had just founded, Red Team Thinking – how I planned to port this approach from the military to business and use it to help companies stress-test their strategies, identify unseen threats and missed opportunities, and more successfully navigate this increasingly complex and uncertain world.
Once again, Kahneman shook his head.
“It’s the same problem you have whenever you bring in consultants,” he told me. “If they don’t like the answers you give them, they’ll just ignore them and do what they were going to do anyway. They’ll tell themselves that you don’t really understand their business.”
“That’s not going to happen,” I said.
“What do you mean that’s not going to happen? It happens to me all the time, and I have a Nobel Prize,” Kahneman chuckled. “You don’t!”
I explained that I was not a consultant, and Red Team Thinking was not going to be a consulting company.
“We’re not going to give them the answers,” I told Kahneman. “We’re going to give them the tools they need to find the answers themselves.”
“What does that look like?” he asked.
I walked him through a weeklong workshop I had just wrapped up with the CEO and senior leadership team of an iconic company that was working on a turnaround strategy, explaining the different techniques I employed to force them to challenge their assumptions, consider the ways in which their plan could fail, and modify their plan to close off those pathways to failure. I shared some of the breakthroughs the team had achieved – the epiphanies about their own strategy, the things they had failed to see before that were now clear to everyone, how they changed the plan to address those.
I felt like a grad student defending his thesis and doing a pretty poor job of it at that. But, in the end, Kahneman allowed that my approach to red teaming “might work.”
I counted that as a high praise from a man who had many times said he held out little hope for humanity, at the cognitive level at least.
It was enough encouragement for me to continue on, and over the next year, Kahneman continued to offer guidance and insights as I wrote refined my ideas and wrote Red Teaming. He continued to challenge my thinking and continued to ask tough questions. I was and remain incredibly thankful for that – because that, after all, is the essence of both red teaming and Red Team Thinking. And, in doing so, Kahneman made my work better, he made my book better, and he made me a better thinker.