RED TEAM THINKING TOOLS & TECHNIQUES.

The RTT toolkit is constantly expanding and evolving with an array of proprietary and public domain tools and techniques designed to engage critical thinking and encourage diversity of thought.

Think-Write-Share: A simple technique for engaging critical thinking, creating psychological safety, and surfacing the best ideas that reside inside teams.

Weighted Anonymous Feedback™: A method for leveraging the wisdom of the group to overcome the blind spots of the individual while also providing a forum for people to share what they really think without fear.

Six Strategic Questions™: An easy-to-use tool that ensures teams are solving the right problem and have considered the full consequences of their actions while also creating clarity and alignment about the task, purpose, and desired end state.

Lies We Tell Ourselves™: A powerful exercise that reveals the comforting lies organizations tell themselves and the hard truths those are designed to conceal.

Assumptions Challenge™: A method for breaking plans and strategies down into the assumptions they are based on, then stress-testing those to reveal weaknesses and opportunities for improvement.

Pre-Mortem Analysis: A simple technique that reveals the ways a plan could fail the means of preventing that failure from occurring.

RTT Pre-Mortem Analysis: A more robust version that teams can use to explore multiple failed states and identify common points of failure so that those can be avoided and/or mitigated.

Influencer Engineering™: A tool for identifying and mapping critical stakeholders based on their level of influence and relative degrees of support or opposition.

Four Ways of Seeing: A technique that helps decision-makers see the situation from the point of view of critical stakeholders so that they can identify potential synergies to leverage and areas of conflict to avoid.

The Enemy Within™: An exercise that reveals an organization’s self-defeating policies and practices so that it can stop doing stupid things and increase the likelihood of success.

Alternative Futures Analysis: A method for exploring the different ways in which a strategy could unfold so that planners can steer toward the most desirable future while avoiding less-desirable outcomes.

Outside-In Analysis: A tool designed to zoom out and examine the macro conditions that surround an organization to help planners think more strategically and plan three-dimensionally.

Swan Dive™: A technique for examining the impact of a potential future development in order to reveal the challenges and opportunities it will create for the organization.

Mind the Gap™: A tool that reveals the disconnects between a plan’s objectives and the actual outcomes that strategy is likely to produce.

Branching Five Whys™: Our further evolution of Toyota’s powerful approach to root cause analysis that also works with nonlinear problems.

Us vs. Them Analysis™: A useful technique for evaluating two different courses of action in order to select the best one – or surface a third option that combines the best of both.

Being Your Own Worst Enemy™: An exercise that puts team members in the shoes of their competitor so that they can better understand how they think and how they are likely to react.

Devil’s Troika™: A powerful technique that shifts between iterative and contrarian thinking to develop and pressure-test plans and strategies.

On the Contrary™: A simple way of examining assumptions and hypotheses through a contrarian lens.

Triple Filter Method: A technique for moving from divergent thinking to convergent thinking, distilling multiple options down to the most critical and actionable ones.

Problem Restatement: A method for examining problems from multiple angels to ensure they are fully understood before trying to solve them.

Cynefin Framework: A means of understanding the nature of the problem you are trying to solve in order to ensure you apply the optimal approach to solving it.

Argument Dissection™: A technique for evaluating written and oral arguments to uncover logical fallacies and bias.

Toyota’s Five Whys: A simple method for uncovering the root cause of linear problems.

Branching Five Whys™: A more advanced method for uncovering the root cause(s) of nonlinear problems.

String of Pearls Analysis: A robust tool for exhaustively analyzing complex strategies and plans in order to reveal hidden dependencies, risky elements, and the second- and third-order effects that can lead to unintended consequences.