Applied Critical Thinking Handbook (Formerly the Red Team Handbook)

“The premise of the program at the University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies (UFMCS) is that people and organizations court failure in predictable ways, that they do so by degrees, almost imperceptibly, and that they do so according to their mindsets, biases, and experience, which are formed in large part by their own culture and context. The sources of these failures are simple, observable, and lamentably, often repeated. They are also preventable, and that is the point of ‘red teaming’. Our methods and education involve more than Socratic discussion and brainstorming. We believe that good decision processes are essential to good outcomes. To that end, our curriculum is rich in divergent processes, red teaming tools, and liberating structures, all aimed at decision support. We educate people to develop a disposition of curiosity, and help them become aware of biases and behavior that prevent them from real positive change in the ways they seek solutions and engage others. We borrow techniques, methods, frameworks, concepts, and best practices from several sources and disciplines to create an education, and practical applications, that we find to be the best safeguard against individual and organizational tendencies toward biases, errors in cognition, and groupthink. Red teaming is diagnostic, preventative, and corrective; yet it is neither predictive or a solution. Our goal is to be better prepared and less surprised in dealing with complexity.”

This book made me rethink how we should look at operational success. Very rarely do we consciously red team our own operations but it is absolutely crucial. Red teaming does not only apply to operations but can be used in any challenge one applies yourself to.

1: Why Red Teaming

Good decision processes are essential to good outcomes. Red teaming is diagnostic, preventative, and corrective; yet it is neither predictive or a solution. Our goal is to be better prepared and less surprised in dealing with complexity. This gives commanders the independent capability to fully explore alternatives.

However, Red Teams require top cover. Meaning it needs support from upper management to succeed. A Red Team works best behind the scenes, assisting the commander and staff in a non-critical, helpful manner, without taking credit.

Self-Awareness: Understanding how our values and beliefs affect how we think and decide … and how that differs for others. Major sub-elements:

• Personal reflection, Jungian typology, Personality Dimensions, Thomas-Kilmann conflict mode instruments, etc.

• Watershed event story telling

• Daily Journaling

Groupthink Mitigation & Decision Support: The challenges inherent in hierarchical environments and elite teams — groups which might value maintaining social relationships more than making a tough decision.

• Use of fungible, small group techniques to mitigate groupthink: use of anonymous feedback, liberating structures, etc.

• How to connect critical thinking to operational design, problem framing, assumption validation, assessment tools, and MDMP.

Critical Thinking: Support for planning and decision making -deconstructing arguments, examining analogies, challenging assumptions, and exploring alternatives.

• The role of intuition — System 1 versus System 2 thinking.

• Numerous tools to examine a plan through different lenses — Premortem Analysis, Stakeholder Mapping.

• Thinking meta-cognitively, and enabling graduates to understand how humans think, and how culture shapes thoughts.

Fostering Cultural Empathy: Developing better questions about culture, in order to facilitate strategic and operational decision making which is informed by cultural empathy.

•Culture examined from the perspective of a cultural anthropologist, versus “dos and don’ts.”

•Conscious examination of the roles of ethnocentrism, versus cultural relativism.

• Culturally-centric case studies.

• Tools to help understand foreign cultural contexts, and to foster empathy.

This basically sets out the skeleton for the rest of the book.

2: Self-Awareness

The self-aware person is more enabled as a critical thinker, more aware of personal biases and recognizes his or her own cultural framework. It is with this understanding of self that an expanded world view opens — one that is more empathetic to the differences of other cultures and ways of thinking and thus primed to engage as a Red Teamer.

This is broken down into the domains of personality, values, habits, needs, and emotions.

People undergo events that serve as crucibles, forging the individual’s character. An exercise called “Who Am I” is proposed as a method for deep introspection to allow one to better understand how they engage the world and hear the stories of their peers.

3: Fostering Cultural Empathy

For the Red Teamer, culture may be best approached with techniques borrowed from the perspective of a cultural anthropologist instead of a prescriptive framework or list of ‘dos and don’ts’; in other words, there is value in passively regarding what is. However, “Anthropology, or at least interpretive anthropology, is a science whose progress is marked less by a perfection of consensus than by a refinement of debate. What gets better is the precision with which we vex each other.” This will not do. What is needed is a systemic approach to culture the outcome of which is designed to enhance military planning.

The rest of the chapter covers the approach itself starting with highlighting the issue of ethnocentrism. This breeds stereotypes. Stereotypes by themselves are not negative. At issue here is whether they are accurate or distorted. Distorted stereotypes are polarized, simplistic, and self-serving. Race and ethnicity are common characteristics that are historically susceptible to distorted stereotypes.

Cultures have social and psychological as well as geographical contexts. Culture’s complexity is illustrated by the hundreds or perhaps even thousands of culturally learned identities, affiliations, and roles we each assume at one time or another. ~ Connerley & Pederson, 2005

When seeking to interpret, understand, or analyze a culture, nothing is more essential than to realize the extent to which the interpretation is uniquely our own, with all the inherent and inescapable biases and ethnocentricity that comes with it.

The key point to remember is it is all theory until you get there.

Culture…

• Is learned.

• Is shared.

• Changes over time.

• Is not always rational to outsiders.

The challenge for a Red Teamer is to render reality as simple as possible but not simpler for the purpose of military planning.

This approach is good for looking at the outcomes and effects as it lets you identify what is important across specific areas. It also synchronises knowledge and analysis across multiple levels in terms of institutions/hierarchies.

The study of culture is not performed in isolation. It is only meaningful when regarded as part of a larger body of thought (e.g., strategy, design, campaign planning).

We study culture because cultural knowledge helps locate individuals, their wealth, and their supporters. To control anonymity, you must know culture.

Cultural knowledge can improve communications with others so as to endear and not offend, to facilitate collaboration and compromise, and to settle disputes peacefully when preferable.

To identify objects of desire, sources and holders of power, grievances, agents.

To set reasonable objectives. Knowing how or if to change the social compact, how long it might reasonably take you to implement such a change, and how long the changes might last. To put things in the right places.

To correctly time actions and activities. Knowing when to act and not act.

To get the joke or make the joke. Jokes work the same mental pathways as military deceptions.

4: Critical Thinking

“A process by which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skillfully taking charge of the structures inherent in thinking and imposing intellectual standards upon them… [It requires] a commitment to overcome our native egocentrism and sociocentrism.”

So what is critical thinking?

Look at the definition by Drs. Paul and Elder above. Several tangible ideas emerge: critical thinking is a process, and it deals with the quality of thinking by imposing intellectual standards. In fact, in other writing these two authors assert that critical thinking considers points of view, the quality of information, interpretation and inference, assumptions, and implications and consequences.

Critical thinking consists of an awareness of a set of interrelated critical questions, plus the ability and willingness to ask and answer them at appropriate times”

Critical thinking means developing an ever better worldview and using it well in all aspects of your life…

Searching for hidden assumptions, noticing various facets, unraveling different strands, and evaluating what is most significant …[and] adopt a skeptical attitude.” “Critical thinking means questioning not only the assumptions of others, but also questioning your own assumptions”

Here’s a list

Critical thinking is:

• awareness.
• a process.
• quality of thinking.
• imposing intellectual standards.
• challenging assumptions and exploring alternatives.
• searching for hidden assumptions.
• questioning and arguing logically.
• developing an ever better worldview.

Otherwise, we take for granted that the first thing that comes to our mind is the way it really is — we fall prey to default-mode thinking. Most human beings are on “cognitive autopilot” most of the time.Our minds are full of biases and assumptions. Unless we are forced to stop and think through a particular challenge, we are able to blot out much of the complexity surrounding us and rely on routines of habit.

Most of these mental models, like our values and beliefs, reside in our subconscious, which means that we are not normally cognizant when we are using them.

Frames are hard to recognize, and distort what we see. Most of us don’t realize that we have various frames and mental models.

Given all of the information that is physically filtered out, we are inclined to fill in the gaps by making assumptions in a way that makes sense to us: we assign meaning to what we perceive, because we are generally uncomfortable with a completely abstract picture devoid of meaning.

In all cases, the first requirement of a critical thinker is to realize that he is resorting to inductive reasoning, and as such acknowledge that his inferences and conclusions are at best probabilities.

We fail to differentiate between causation and correlation. Distinguishing between cause and correlation is an important function of critical thinking. Most of us are unaware that the two concepts exist, and tend to fall into a trap of connecting two events in a linear cause-and-effect relationship.

The ideal critical thinker is habitually inquisitive, well-informed, trustful of reason, open-minded, flexible, fair-minded in evaluation, honest in facing personal biases, prudent in making judgments, willing to reconsider, clear about issues, orderly in complex matters, diligent in seeking relevant information, reasonable in the selection of criteria, focused in inquiry, and persistent in seeking results which are as precise as the subject and circumstances of inquiry permit.

5: Groupthink Mitigation & Decision Support

Clausewitz reminded us, “Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.”

Janis points out however, “The more amiability and esprit de corps among the members of a policy making in-group, the greater is the danger that independent critical thinking will be replaced by groupthink, which is likely to result in irrational and dehumanizing actions directed against out-groups.”

To mitigate group think, senior leaders need to set the right tone, allow groups to explore impartially other courses of action, and even set up multiple groups to examine the same problem.

One of the keys to mitigating groupthink is to have all members of the group express their opinion absent pressure from the leader or group to conform. Weighted anonymous feedback techniques give the individual the ability to express his or her opinion in an anonymous fashion without being crushed by group pressure.

When the problem is framed, then you conduct mission analysis.

Design can be used to aid the commander’s visualisation of the problem.

6: Red Teaming Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures

This handbook goes in depth into how you can achieve your goals through certain methods. I will mention those I find most useful.

Argument deconstruction

Argument = Issue (or premise, or thesis) + Reasons + Conclusion

Check for value conflicts, prescriptive assumptions (author assumes things as it should be, wishful thinking), descriptive assumptions (author assumes the way things are).

BATNA- Best Altnernative to a Negotiated Agreement

Vigorous exploration of what you will do if you do not reach agreement can greatly strengthen your hand. BATNA thus not only enables you to determine what is a minimally acceptable agreement, it will probably raise that minimum.

Challenges to effective planning

1. Flawed organisational processes
2. Pull towards conformity
3. Strong directive leadership that limit the options for staff to consider
4. Complacency and using established patterns
5. Mirror imaging — applying YOUR attitudes about trends, capabilities, beliefs, culture onto another
6. Ethnocentrism
7. Mindsets and expectations — assuming that the operational environment has remained the same
8. Oversimplifying — people court failure in predictable ways. Complicated situations elicit habits of thought that may not measure up to the demands of the system
9. Flawed analogies. When used well, analogies help make sense of a new situation. But we must remember that is not the situation.
10. Hubris and overconfidence — we need to have planning systems that can react quickly ot changes and events

Cognitive Biases

1. Anchoring — people over rely on an initial anchor value provided by someone else
2. Statuts quo bias
3. Confirmation bias — to check for premature conclusions
4. Sunk cost loss aversion bias
5. Halo effect — to see something as attractive regardless of actual capabilities or qualities
6. Narrative fallacy — to invite reality from connected or disconnected facts

Critical Variables

1. Physical environment — defines the physical circumstances and conditions that surround and influence air, land, sea, and space operations. The defining factors are terrain, weather, topography, hydrology, and environmental conditions.
2. Nature and stability of critical actors — the internal cohesiveness of actors. It evaluates the population, economic infrastructures, political processes and authority, military forces, goals, and agendas.
3. Sociological demographics — Perceived inequities among sectors of a population can breed envy and resentment. This often results in conflict.
4. Culture — Understanding a culture requires examining multiple elements, including its core values, history, myths, traditions, and other factors. A culture can change over time. Cultures transmit their shared values and beliefs from generation to generation through learning and social interaction. Finally, a culture in and of itself does not cause a conflict. The friction that comes from the interaction between two different cultures creates the potential for conflict.
5. Nation states and non-state actors — hen actors create alliances, they can add to their collective capability and broaden the scale of operations and actions. Effects created in one part of the world at the operational or tactical level could have global, cascading outcomes at the strategic level.
6. Information — Various actors seek to use perception management to control how the public sees things. Complicated networks provide a vast web of communications capabilities. Redundant communications systems allow for the constant flow of information.
7. National will and will of critical actor — Through this unity, all parties are willing to sacrifice individually for the achievement of the unified goal.
8. Time is a critical factor and a tool to manipulate tactical, operational, and strategic advantages. It drives the conduct of operations and campaigns. Time is one of the most significant planning factors driving decision-making. How much time is available and how long events might take will affect every aspect of military planning. Every culture views time differently. An opponent’s view of time might be radically different from ours. This different view of time causes disjointedness in operational tempo.
9. Economics — Economic power and the ability to mobilize it
10. Religion — Religion provides man with a way to deal with uncertainty that they otherwise cannot control.30 Religion is interwoven with a nation’s culture. It can be a cornerstone that affects every aspect of culture.

Deception Detection

• Does a foreign actor have the motive, opportunity, and means (MOM) to deceive?

• Would this potential deception be consistent with past opposition practices?

• Do we have cause for concern regarding the manipulability of sources?

• What can be learned from the evaluation of evidence?

Devil’s advocacy

Devil’s Advocacy is used to consider whether stated beliefs or assertions have been formed prematurely, without first considering alternative perspectives. It is a technique designed to help expose implicit assumptions and faulty reasoning.

Do this by 1) considering the same evidence, some of which may have been disregarded or ignored, and by 2) finding new and disconfirming evidence originally unavailable.

High-impact Low-probability analysis

To have you consider unlikely events that are plausible.

Indicators or signposts of change

An analyst or team can create an indicators or signposts list of observable events that one would expect to see if a postulated situation is developing.

Using an indicators list can clarify substantive disagreements, once all sides agree on the set of objective criteria used to measure the topic under study.

My 15%

Most people have about 15 percent control over their work situations. The other 85 percent rests in the broader context, shaped by the general structures, systems, events and culture in which they operate. The challenge rests in finding ways of creating transformational change incrementally.

Premorterm analysis

Find key vulnerabilities in a plan.

Problem restatement

• Paraphrase the problem statement
• State the problem in an opposite manner
• Broaden the focus
• Redirect the focus

Assumptions and dependencies

Appropriate assumptions have two characteristics:

• They are valid, that is, they are likely to be true, and

• They are necessary, that is, they are essential to continuing the problem solving process.
• Assumptions replace unknown facts in order to enable continued planning.
• If an assumption is invalid, the task associated with it may fail or may be at risk of failure.
• A dependency is a critical condition or precursor action necessary for successful execution of the task.
• Another task can be a dependency.

Events or actions are sometimes called 1st order effects as they actually occur in the physical domain. 2nd order effects represent how individuals feel about the event; emotions in the affective domain. 3rd order effects represent thoughts about the event; thinking in the cognitive domain.

To identify cascade effects requires a knowledge of physics, a hard science question. To identify 2nd & 3rd order effects and predict their consequences requires an understanding of culture, history, and sociology among other social, or “soft” sciences.