Red Teaming Handbook (3rd Edition)

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   Red teaming is the independent, structured challenge of your own plan in service of a better decision — not a team playing the enemy.

   Red Teaming Handbook (3rd Edition) · 2021

   The red team challenges your plan; the red cell plays the adversary.

   The British handbook separates four notions that are easily blurred. Red teaming is the activity: the independent application of structured, creative and critical thinking techniques so the decision-maker chooses better. A red team is a team formed specifically to subject an organisation's plans, programmes, ideas and assumptions to rigorous analysis and challenge. A red cell is something else: it adopts the viewpoint or even the persona of an adversary or key stakeholder, estimates what they would do, and can role-play them in wargames. NATO calls a closely related approach alternative analysis: the deliberate application of independent, critical thought and alternative perspective. The third edition adds the red team mindset — quick techniques used routinely by anyone who decides, not only by a separate team. How it is applied: the team works for a specific decision-maker, the end user in the definition; it stays independent of the plan's authors; it picks the techniques that fit the question; it hands over findings the decision-maker can actually use. It pays off before large, hard-to-reverse decisions. The traps: a red team is not immune to groupthink — the handbook devotes a section to it — and a team that wins by demolishing the plan, instead of making it more robust, has missed the point.

   “Red teaming is defined as: the independent application of a range of structured, creative and critical thinking techniques to assist the end user make a better-informed decision or produce a more robust product.”

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