Red Teams versus Red Cells
Could direct competition offer a creative way of future-proofing school strategic planning?
Summary
This post is a response to Joe Kirby’s recent excellent post on red-teaming for school improvement planning.
The terms are often confused, a useful distinction we can make is between Red Teams and Red Cells
Red Team refers to an internal team whose job is to put your plans under intense critical analysis.
Red Cells refers to creating a team whose job is to work in direct opposition to you and your team. Doing so incentivises them to find gaps and flaws in your thinking. Unlike the Red Team, these are not critical friends, but are playing a role as active competitors.
Responding to Kirby
Showing respect through engagement, this post addresses Joe Kirby’s recent blogpost “Redteam: involve, don’t announce.”. Kirby demonstrated a great way of using some staff in the critical friend/devil’s advocate role to turbocharge the school improvement planning process. His approach will almost certainly yield benefits by improving the quality of the final plan, but more importantly, with regards to the all important always leave it unfinished maxim of school leadership. This phrase is typically used to describe the process of generating crucial buy-in which will be money in the bank when it comes to implementation. After all, all too many school improvement plans tend to be published on paper and then left to chance, with the focus on producing the plan, instead of the far more crucial ensuring that the plan is followed through with. Excellent as the post is, the approach Kirby advocates is a critical one, but not an adversarial one. The question then arises, alongside his Red Team is there also room in the school leader’s toolkit for a more directly adversarial approach? And if there is, how might we implement that?
Red Teams versus Red Cells
Let’s start by defining two different terms: red teaming and red cells. This can be a confusing topic as red teaming is often used interchangeably to describe what we will call red cells, but for our purposes we will use a clear definitional distinction. Beginning with how Kirby uses the term Red Team (also how the UK Ministry of Defence seem to use the term), we will define a Red Team as an internal team whose purpose is to critically scrutinise every aspect of your school improvement plan. This contrasts sharply with our second term Red Cell which we will define as a group created to act as a direct opponent or rival to your senior leadership team. As both approaches are so distinct it seems likely that they will have different strengths and weaknesses. and it may be the case that it becomes “horses for courses” depending on which one you will use. More specifically, it appears likely that a Red Team critical friend approach will be better for pressure testing a school improvement plan as its strength lies in critically assessing the details of the plan your school has produced. In sharp contrast, a Red Cell direct opposition approach will be aimed more at exposing and capitalising on any strategic weaknesses especially with regards to the external environment the school is operating in, it therefore appears likely that a Red Cell approach better for pressure testing a school strategic plan. We’ll look now at how you might set one up.
How a Red Cell approach might work
As Kirby describes his approach as “involve don’t announce”, this red cell approach could be described as “compete don’t involve”. This could look something like the following:
Select your Red Cell: This could include at least one member of your senior leadership team, but doesn’t have to and might be better if it doesn’t. It would be wise and potentially advantageous to include a broad range of staff as this will be a superb opportunity to look for hidden talents so definitely include anyone with strategic leanings.
Brief your Red Cell: Tell the redcell to play the role of a rival SLT for a for profit school which is moving into the area as a direct competitor for your school, and openly aims to take existing students away, while.
Explain your intent: Make sure the Red Cell know that they are to work in direct opposition to your SLT to create a rival strategic plan which aims to beat them by drawing away existing students and attracting more new students. Broadly, they might do this in one of three ways:
Identify your current school/plan’s weaknesses, then create a counter-plan to exploit them
Ignore your school and plan altogether and come up with a rival and alternative plan to meet the needs of the local community and environment.
Some combination of the above two
Define how they will compete: Leave this somewhat open but do suggest the following broad areas for their thinking:
Marketing strategy
Infrastructure to build,
Staff recruitment
Subjects to offer
Extracurriculars to offer.
Facilities to build
Pastoral program
Any partnerships with other organizations they may cultivate?
Set a timeline for when the two groups will present their rival plans
Appoint an independent adjudicator (perhaps a board member(s))to judge between the plans.
Start the process.
Final thoughts and caveats
While a Red Cell approach is likely to open up entirely new intellectual vistas in terms of how you think about strategy it is less likely to offer critique for your current plan. If that is your aim then you would be better using the approach Kirby recommends. Furthermore, if you are to reap the full benefits of using a Red Cell it is important that the members have full psychological safety to think hard, creatively and aggressively in opposition to your current plan, so be honest with yourself, and if you’re not the type of leader who can handle that then don’t use this approach. Alternatively, if you have a member of your SLT who you don’t think would be able to handle faculty members thinking this way, then the solution is simple, put them on the Red Cell team.
Further reading
Kirby’s original post is here
The UK Ministry of Defence has a very practical Red Teaming handbook which covers everything you could ever need to know