Don’t outsource thinking
All too often, I see companies outsource their strategic thinking and advice to consultants, when the answers are already within the organisation, waiting to be found through structured practices and analytical thinking rather than bought in from AI or expensive consultants.
A strategy can be coherent, well researched and widely supported while still resting on assumptions that nobody has tested. The more work invested in it, the harder those assumptions can become to see or question.
Red Team Thinking® provides structured, constructive challenge through methods adapted from military and intelligence tradecraft for business. I deliver the licensed training and tailor its application to the organisation, backed by my Red Team Thinking® certifications.
The purpose is not to criticise for effect or replace the people responsible for a decision. It is to give your team practical methods for examining how conclusions were reached, finding missing perspectives and testing whether plans remain credible when conditions change.
Two sessions, six tools and a follow-up
The RTT Accelerator programme includes:
- two four-hour sessions, on-site or online;
- advance reflection questions, with nothing to submit;
- a participant workbook and certificate; and
- a follow-up around 60 days later to support transfer into real decisions.
What’s covered
Across the two sessions, your team learns six practical tools for stronger decision-making:
- Think-Write-Share, a structured way of surfacing ideas from the whole team rather than just the loudest voices in the room.
- Weighted Anonymous Feedback, which draws out honest input on a plan or idea without it being filtered by hierarchy.
- Lies We Tell Ourselves, a technique for surfacing the comfortable assumptions an organisation uses to avoid uncomfortable truths.
- Six Strategic Questions, a quick discipline for checking that a plan is solving the right problem before committing resources to it.
- Assumptions Challenge, for identifying and stress-testing the assumptions a plan depends on, whether stated or unstated.
- Pre-Mortem Analysis, which asks a team to imagine a plan has already failed and work backwards to find out why, so weaknesses surface while there’s still time to fix them.
The wider Red Team Thinking® toolkit goes well beyond these six tools. Sessions can draw on other techniques, from stakeholder analysis to structured stress-testing methods, where they fit your situation better.
An introduction to the approach
My Red Team Thinking® conference talk introduces the concepts at a high level; the licensed training is substantially deeper.
Student experience
Learning is hands-on throughout rather than lecture-based. Teams work through a realistic strategic planning case study together, applying each tool to a live-feeling scenario before turning it on their own real plans and decisions.
Tailored to your organisation
Every organisation’s decision-making challenges are different, so the mix of tools, case material and balance between the sessions is adapted to your team. The training can focus on challenges such as:
- A strategy, business case, investment proposal or transformation plan.
- The assumptions behind a programme or major decision.
- Confidence in forecasts, dependencies and measures of success.
- Whether dissenting evidence or alternative explanations have been overlooked.
- How a plan may be understood by customers, partners, competitors or critics.
- AI-generated analysis that appears convincing but has not been objectively tested.
What you leave with
Your team leaves with a shared set of repeatable tools for surfacing assumptions, gathering candid perspectives and turning challenge into practical choices. The workbook supports continued use after the sessions, while the follow-up helps embed the methods in real decisions rather than leaving them in the training room.
The goal is not certainty where certainty is impossible, but stronger thinking: plans that have faced meaningful challenge and teams better equipped to explain what they decided and why.
When this is useful
Red Team Thinking® Training is particularly useful when:
- a decision is difficult to reverse;
- a proposal has strong internal momentum;
- senior stakeholders broadly agree and want to guard against groupthink;
- the team needs challenge without creating an adversarial review;
- assumptions have not been revisited as circumstances changed; or
- failure would carry significant financial, operational or reputational cost.
When this isn’t the right fit
This training is not the right fit if you want an external expert to make the decision for you or provide a one-off critique of a live plan. If your team needs facilitated support to work through a specific decision rather than learning a repeatable set of tools, a Decision Support Workshop is the better fit.
Build repeatable challenge capability
Describe your team’s current decision-making challenges and the plans or decisions where sharper thinking would make the most difference. We can shape the right programme together.
If your team’s challenge is specifically about using AI well in decision-making, see AI-assisted decision support, critically challenged.
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