Red teaming my life

Have you ever heard of the concept of "red teaming"?

As you may already know, I spent 25 years in survival mode due to my illness, and my primary focus all those years was merely getting through each day. Making plans and facing new challenges terrified me, as I lacked the resources and strength to cope effectively and bring about meaningful changes when needed. From the outside, it may not have been so obvious—I managed to earn my degrees and even moved to a new country on my own at one point. However, the truth was that no matter where I lived or what I did, all of my efforts were devoted to dealing with the "here and now" and I lived in constant emergency mode. I had no vision for my life, no problem-solving skills, and no way to frame challenges as opportunities. I felt stuck, and my emotions were often overwhelming, leading me down a self-destructive path. As Seneca so brilliantly put it, "If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable".

At the beginning of this year I decided that enough was enough. With my eating disorders finally under control, it was time for me to cultivate a problem-solving mindset, sharpen my thinking skills and learn to make better decisions, and build resilience. The question was, where to begin? Enter Red Teaming—the art of rigorously challenging assumptions, plans, decisions, and systems through critical thinking and adopting a contrarian point of view. Initially used by the military to evaluate the strength of their strategies from an external perspective (the Red Team), this practice is now widely used in the context of cybersecurity and it is finding its way to organizations.

My introduction to this concept came through a coaching business that goes by the name Red Team Thinking. They draw upon ideas and tools that the US Army and other entities and thinkers have come up with. While their primary focus is helping organizations develop better plans and consider alternative points of view, I've found that many of these lessons can be applied to our personal lives as well. Beyond following their lead, I've been exploring other resources and connecting with individuals who operate in this space, and I look forward to sharing more insights with you in the coming weeks and months.

Let me start by sharing that the founders of Red Team Thinking host a podcast named The Thinking Leader. The show's tag line is "Bad leaders react, good leaders plan, and great leaders think". And really, shouldn't we all strive for that—learn to stop merely reacting to situations and events, and instead, learn to think things through to come up with effective responses? After listening to a few of their most recent episodes, I decided to delve deeper and went all the way back to their very first episode, which featured Alan Mulally, who famously saved both Boeing and Ford Motor Co. from bankruptcy. Mulally shared invaluable insights into navigating through times of crisis, and some key takeaways stood out to me.

Firstly, he stressed the importance of fully accepting the current reality in its entirety. As I've mentioned previously, I still grapple with letting go of the past and fully accepting where I stand today as a result of what's happened to me. But living in denial or in anger certainly won't help me make meaningful changes, just as Boeing and Ford's leadership wouldn't have succeeded in turning things around without squarely facing their companies' catastrophic situations.

Secondly, when making decisions in the present, we must also ask ourselves what the future is going to look like for us. It's about thinking beyond the immediate moment, contemplating the long-term implications, and envisioning future value creation. Again, that really resonated with me, since living in emergency mode and only ever making short-term decisions has been my standard operating procedure for so long.

Finally, we should always try to see opportunity in every challenge. How can we use crises and difficulties to reevaluate things, see what we could do differently, and emerge stronger? That's the question I ask myself every day, and this blog is part of the answer.