SEMESTER: Summer 19

 

COURSE NUMBER: EWMBA296-2

 

This course is dual listed with the EMBA Program and taught in an EMBA Block Schedule

 

COURSE TITLE: Using Red Teaming to Make Better Decisions

 

UNITS OF CREDIT: 2 Units

 

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

 

E-MAIL ADDRESS: hischier@berkeley.edu

 

CLASS WEB PAGE LOCATION: bCourses

 

MEETING DAY(S)/TIME: TBD

 

PREREQUISITE(S): None

 

  CAREER FIELD: Agnostic- anyone in a decision-making capacity

 

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

 

BASIS FOR FINAL GRADE:

Participation (This includes team member evaluations and feedback):         25%. 

Reflection paper based on application of tool to an organization:                 50%

Homework assignments:                                                                                25%

 

ABSTRACT OF COURSE'S CONTENT AND OBJECTIVES:

      This 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 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 toward a real-time pulled-from the headlines situation:

 

1.      Liberating structures- collaborative communication tools to ensure each team member’s observations and insights are given due consideration.

2.      Argument dissection – critically evaluating evidence provided in support of a strategy or plan.

3.      Key assumptions check- recognizing assumptions vs. facts.

4.      Stakeholder mapping- a list of all groups that have a stake in the success or failure of the plan and how to influence them.

5.      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.

6.      Five whys- a tool to get to the root cause of strategic problems.

7.      Pre-mortem analysis- identifies the causes of failure, signposts along the way, and how to mitigate them

8.      Devil’s advocacy- take a belief that is central to an organization’s strategy and make a compelling case that the opposite is true

9.      Storytelling- conveying your perspective in a cogent and compelling way for leadership.

 

Students will also be asked to apply one of the tools to their job/an outside organization during the course of the program.

 

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 lecturer at Haas, partner at Red Team Thinking, and an instructor in the NSF’s I-Corps program on rapid commercialization.  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.