Foreign and Defence Sec in Japan, Minister in Aus, NZ, Fiji and Tonga, Arm & AZ results
A Beijing to Britain briefing
Hello,
I’ve spent this week speaking with three different groups: policymakers, academics and business leaders. I’m stuck again by how much of a gap exists between all three when it comes to their assessments of China-related issues, especially on subjects like Taiwan.
It’s got me thinking about ‘red-teaming’ again. This is a concept that will be familiar to some readers, but not to others. In simple terms, this refers to a group of people who pretend to be the enemy during a strategy exercise - be that a hostile state, hacking group or commercial competitor. Throughout the exercise, they try and think and act as the opponent would - finding weak spots, exploiting group think, and flawed assumptions - with the overall aim being to make the organisation more resilient and strategically sound. Red teaming mattes - the Ministry of Defence’s booklet on the issue opens by citing lessons learned from The Chilcot Inquiry, saying “There is a strong argument that red teaming [the planned invasion of Iraq] could have produced a more robust analysis and thus a more functional outcome.”
In Micah Zenko’s excellent book on this issue, he notes “you cannot grade your own homework…[an] astonishing number of senior leaders are systemically incapable of identifying their organization’s most glaring and dangerous shortcomings. This is not a function of stupidity, but rather stems from two routine pressures that constrain everybody’s thinking and behavior. The first is comprised of cognitive biases, such as mirror imaging, anchoring, and confirmation bias. [The] second related pressure stems from organizational biases—whereby employees become captured by the institutional culture that they experience daily and adopt the personal preferences of their bosses and workplaces more generally.”
Of late, I hear about more companies running these simulations - red gaming their operations with experts, and internally. We’ve discussed previously that Parliament’s Select Committees have also embraced it, and Beijing to Britain knows the Integrated Review (and consequent refresh) were red teamed too.
- Sam Hogg, Editor
In this week’s briefing:
Parliamentary discussions around China-related issues
The G7 Foreign Ministers on China
Political and diplomatic activity in the Indo-Pacific
UK-Taiwan action
CIIE and Newport Wafer Fab