Red Team Quotes

“astonishing number of senior leaders are systemically incapable of identifying their organization’s most glaring and dangerous shortcomings. This is not a function of stupidity, but rather stems from two routine pressures that constrain everybody’s thinking and behavior. The first is comprised of cognitive biases, such as mirror imaging, anchoring, and confirmation bias. These unconscious motivations on decision-making under uncertain conditions make it inherently difficult to evaluate one’s own judgments and actions. As David Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell University, has shown in countless environments, people who are highly incompetent in terms of their skills or knowledge are also terrible judges of their own performance. For example, people who perform the worst on pop quizzes also have the widest variance between how they thought they performed and the actual score that they earned.22”
― Micah Zenko, Red Team: How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy

“men can do easily is what they do habitually, and this decides what they can think and know easily. They feel at home in the range of ideas which is familiar through their everyday line of action. A habitual line of action constitutes a habitual line of thought, and gives the point of view from which facts and events are apprehended and reduced to a body of knowledge. What is consistent with the habitual course of action is consistent with the habitual line of thought, and gives the definitive ground of knowledge as well as the conventional standard of complacency or approval in any community.23”
― Micah Zenko, Red Team: How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy

“second related pressure stems from organizational biases—whereby employees become captured by the institutional culture that they experience daily and adopt the personal preferences of their bosses and workplaces more generally. Over a century ago, the brilliant economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen illustrated how our minds become shaped and narrowed by our daily occupations:”
― Micah Zenko, Red Team: How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy

“People are strongly shaped and constrained by their own personal biases, experiences, and everyday environments. No matter how open-minded people may think they are, studies show that most people exhibit a strong “existence bias”—the natural tendency for humans to believe that something is morally good simply because it exists. They cannot help but assume that the way things are at the moment must be innately correct, which results in overvaluing existing precedents and status quos, and making judgments based on mere existence rather than reason or principle.”
― Micah Zenko, Red Team: How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy

“The best red teamers tend to be self-described “oddballs” and “weirdoes,” as well as critical and divergent thinkers inherently skeptical of authority and conventional wisdom. Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Geisenhof, who is a red team instructor at Marine Corps University, characterized his own team by saying, “In many ways, we are in the land of misfit toys.” 16 Through”
― Micah Zenko, Red Team: How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy

“Indeed, improving the targeted institution should always be the ultimate objective of all red teams.”
― Micah Zenko, Red Team: How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy

“As Paul Van Riper, the retired Marine lieutenant general and widely acknowledged red-teaming guru, declared: “Unless the commanders themselves want it, support it, resource it, institutionalize it, and respond to it, it won’t matter.” 2”
― Micah Zenko, Red Team: How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy

“Yet, the dilemma for any institution operating in a competitive environment characterized by incomplete information and rapid change is how to determine when its standard processes and strategies are resulting in a suboptimal outcome, or, more seriously, leading to a potential catastrophe. Even worse, if the methods an institution uses to process corrective information are themselves flawed, they can become the ultimate cause of failure. This inherent problem leads to the central theme of this book: you cannot grade your own homework.”
― Micah Zenko, Red Team: How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy

“Former Iraq and Afghanistan commander General David Petraeus found that in order to encourage dissenting viewpoints within a command, “you have to create a culture that preserves and protects the iconoclasts.”5”
― Micah Zenko, Red Team: How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy

“They can attend the red team event to demonstrate their support, just as New York Police Department (NYPD) Commissioner Ray Kelly and his successor William Bratton made it a point to participate in every single tabletop exercise, described in chapter 4, that was conducted with senior commanders during his tenure. Red teams can also be rewarded for their work—for example, the CIA Red Cell has received the National Intelligence Meritorious Unit Citation on multiple occasions—or a proficient red teamer can conspicuously be promoted to a more senior position.”
― Micah Zenko, Red Team: How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy

“Organizations tend to be poor judges of their own performance, and are often blind to shortcomings and pitfalls. Indeed, in many instances, a readily apparent failure or disaster must have already occurred—resulting in meaningful human, financial, or reputational costs—before a boss will willingly listen to appeals for red teaming.”
― Micah Zenko, Red Team: How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy

“These biases often include mirror imaging, in which analysts instinctively assume that their adversary would think in the same way that the analyst would under similar circumstances; anchoring, when analysts rely too heavily on initial information or impressions that make significant shifts in their judgments unlikely; or confirmation bias, in which analysts favor those findings that support their personal theories or beliefs.”
― Micah Zenko, Red Team: How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy

“Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson researches why employees in a range of settings believe it is unsafe to admit to and report on failures that they observe in their workplaces. “We have a deep, hardwiring that we have inherited that leads us to be worried about impression-making in hierarchies,” she says, adding that “no one ever got fired for silence.”
― Micah Zenko, Red Team: How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy

“The trouble is that Pittman’s approach wrongly assumes that the people who work for these leaders have the skills to identify emerging problems (highly unlikely), that they will tell their bosses about these problems (potentially career damaging), and that they will face no negative consequences for bringing such issues to their leaders’ attention (rare, since it disrupts the conventional wisdom).”
― Micah Zenko, Red Team: How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy