COURSE NUMBER: EWMBA296-1
This course is dual listed with EMBA

COURSE TITLE: Using Red Teaming to Make Better Decisions

UNITS OF CREDIT: 2 Units

INSTRUCTORS: Bryce G. Hoffman, Col. Steve Rotkoff, Whitney Hischier

EMAIL ADDRESS: hischier@berkeley.edu

CLASS WEB PAGE LOCATION: bCourses

MEETING DAY(S)/TIME: This is a block week course that meets 9AM-5PM from Monday, July 9-Friday July 13, 2018

PREREQUISITE(S):None

CAREER FIELD:

CLASS FORMAT: Exercises, cases

REQUIRED READINGS:

Red Teaming, Bryce G. Hoffman
Excerpts from

Superforecasting, Dan Gardner and Philip E. Tetlock
Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, Daniel Kahneman
The Logic of Failure, Dietrich Dorner
The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge
Sources of Power, Gary Klein
Asking the Right Questions, M. Neil Browne and Stuart M. Keeley

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

Recognize that this a 2 unit class where a semester’s preparation is done in advance of the first session and the class week will require your full attention.
Though the class meets in July, there will be weekly deliverables due starting in June (team assignments, individual assignments, readings, webinars).
Please understand that the final date to drop Summer Courses is May 3rd (the final day of Summer Drops).

ABSTRACT OF COURSE'S CONTENT AND OBJECTIVES: This one-week course is designed to introduce students to the practice and application of red teaming tools to decision making. In a world where the rate of change continues to increase and the future is harder to anticipate, red team thinking is designed to drive the consideration of alternative futures and associated indicators during the business planning process. Through hands-on exercises, the course addresses three areas of critical thinking: analytical, creative and contrarian. Students will work in teams throughout the week on both exercises as well as to red team a specific strategy.

The curriculum is designed to help students stress-test an organization’s strategies and plans by challenging an its assumptions, exposing hidden threats, and identifying missed opportunities. These techniques will help students think differently about their organizations and see how customers, competitors and other key constituencies will react to moves made in the marketplace before actually making them. Red teaming techniques will enable students to turn disruptive events to their advantage.
Below are the tools that we will be applying throughout the course:

Liberating structures- collaborative communication tools to ensure each team member’s observations and insights are given due consideration.
Argument dissection – critically evaluating evidence provided in support of a strategy or plan.
Key assumptions check- recognizing assumptions vs. facts.
Stakeholder mapping- a list of all groups that have a stake in the success or failure of the plan and how to influence them.
Four ways of seeing- a technique to yield insights into the way competitors, customers and other key constituencies view your company, industry and one another.
Five whys- a tool to get to the root cause of strategic problems.
Pre-mortem analysis- identifies the causes of failure, signposts along the way, and how to mitigate them
Devil’s advocacy- take a belief that is central to an organization’s strategy and make a compelling case that the opposite is true
Storytelling- conveying your perspective in a cogent and compelling way for leadership.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES:

Bryce Hoffman is a bestselling author, speaker and strategic advisor, as well as the founder and president of Red Team Thinking LLC. In 2015, he became the first civilian to graduate from the U.S. Army’s red team leader training program, which is considered the gold standard of red team training worldwide. Since then, Hoffman has worked with companies around the world to develop a new model for business red teaming — a model he presented in his 2017 book, Red Teaming: How Your Business Can Conquer the Competition by Challenging Everything.

Steve Rotkoff is a partner at Red Team Thinking LLC and former director of the U.S. Army’s University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies at Fort Leavenworth, also known as “Red Team University.” After serving as a senior intelligence officer during the invasion of Iraq, Rotkoff led the “lessons learned” team at the Pentagon that first developed the idea of decision support red teams for the Army and went on to help create the Army’s red team training curriculum. A graduate of West Point, Rotkoff had a distinguished 26-year career as an Army intelligence officer.

Whitney Hischier is a partner at Red Team Thinking LLC, as well as a lecturer at Haas, where she served as assistant dean for executive education for nearly a decade. Prior to coming to Berkeley, Hischier served as a management consultant at ABN Amro, KPMG UK, and Deloitte. She has taught business courses around the world and helped a number of major global corporations develop in-house executive education programs.