How You Think is a Leadership Behavior

What Red Team Thinking reveals about bias, truth-telling, and healthy leadership in high-stakes decisions.

You've been in that room.

The one where everyone nods in agreement. The plan sounds solid, the data seems to support it, but there are holes. You know it. And you know your colleagues know it too, because you heard them saying exactly that an hour ago in the hallway.

But now? Silence. Nodding. Agreement.

How does this keep happening in rooms full of highly capable people?

You've seen it play out everywhere. The team that talks itself into a bad decision because no one wants to kill the momentum. The leader who keeps hearing what confirms what they already believe, and stops hearing everything else. The group that stays on a failing path because too much has already been invested to turn back. 

These aren't character flaws. They're cognitive patterns. Invisible, predictable, and expensive -in dollars, in trust, and in time.

It's not about intelligence. It's about the invisible patterns shaping how smart people think, and whether their environment allows them to think, speak, and decide clearly.

When Critical Thinking Becomes a Movement

If you spent 22 years as an award-winning financial journalist, wrote a bestselling book on Alan Mulally's historic turnaround at Ford Motor Company, and then became the first and only civilian to graduate from the U.S. Army's Red Team Leader course, what would you do?

 Bryce Hoffman built a global movement. What began as a military methodology is now reshaping how executives, commanders, and strategists around the world pressure‑test their thinking before reality does it for them.

He then wrote Red Teaming: How Your Business Can Conquer the Competition by Challenging Everything, a methodology now translated into multiple languages and used by organizations worldwide to stress-test strategies before reality does it for them.

His mantra? "Question the unquestionable. Think the unthinkable. Challenge everything."

Red Team Thinking has its roots in Socrates, the first in the Western tradition to apply critical thinking deliberately, asking "why" until he reached truth or revealed there wasn't much truth to be found. It evolved in the Prussian military, which, after being crushed by Napoleon, developed tabletop exercises to test its strategies before battle. It was the Prussians who painted their pieces red, which is where the term "red team" originates.

What happens without it? History is full of answers. Plans that seemed bulletproof until they weren't. Strategies built on assumptions no one thought to question. After 9/11, the 9/11 Commission described what went wrong as a “failure of imagination.” The warnings were there—foreign partners sounded alarms, two future hijackers were already on a watch list, and the President’s Daily Brief just weeks before the attack was titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.” The dots existed. People knew things. But the structures to challenge assumptions, connect information, and surface what was being missed simply weren’t in place.

This is what Red Team Thinking was built to prevent.

Drawing on his experience across the military and intelligence communities and the latest research in cognitive psychology, Bryce created a methodology designed to overcome the mental blind spots and biases that individuals and organizations fall victim to when making big decisions or solving complex problems. 

The result is both a science and an art, a structured, disciplined set of tools and a mindset. The ability to look at the world through a critical, contrarian lens, not just in a formal exercise, but as a habit of leadership.

Where Thinking Tools Meet Leadership Capacity

This is where the work stopped being theoretical for me.

I came to Red Team Thinking not through strategy or consulting, but through working with leaders on what it actually means to be healthy, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally. The patterns we carry. The stories we tell ourselves. The way our thinking, when left unexamined, quietly shapes every decision, every relationship, every result we create.

And here is the connection I couldn't unsee: thinking is the common thread at every level. Inside a single leader's head. Around a team table. In a boardroom, making million-dollar decisions. It is not a soft skill. It is the skill. And Bryce was proving it at the highest levels in the world.

Whether you’re in a war room, a living room, or navigating the noise inside your own head, the work is the same: managing how you think. Challenging cognitive bias. Questioning the stories we automatically believe. Recognizing the emotional patterns that hijack our thinking before we even realize it. And it turns out that practice matters just as much in a NATO strategy session or a billion-dollar acquisition as it does in the decision you made before your first cup of coffee.

This is why I pursued certification directly under Bryce. Not because it was adjacent to my work. But because it was the same work viewed through a different lens. Red Team Thinking provides the structure for challenging assumptions. Self-leadership builds the capacity to actually do it.

And the two cannot be separated.

• You cannot challenge assumptions when you are defensive. 
• You cannot hear dissent when you feel threatened. 
• You cannot think clearly when your nervous system is hijacked.

Which brings us back to that room. The nodding. The silence. The plan everyone privately doubted, but no one said out loud. That moment isn't just a cultural failure. It’s a thinking failure. It’s what happens when individuals lack the internal clarity to speak, when teams lack the psychological safety to dissent, and when organizations lack the structures that allow truth to surface.

Where Thinking Tools Meet Leadership Capacity

Healthy leadership means having the clarity to see what's true, the steadiness to hear what's hard, and the courage to act on both. It lives at every level, inside a single leader, across a team, and throughout an organization. And Red Team Thinking is how it comes alive at scale, tools specifically designed to normalize healthy dissent, remove ego and hierarchy from the equation, and ensure the best ideas win.

When leaders get curious about how they think, something shifts. Leaders stop feeling isolated at the top. Teams stop just performing and start actually connecting. Organizations stop recycling the same decisions, and what gets said at the water cooler finally makes it into the room.

Because the alternative is costly. Not just in failed strategies and missed opportunities, but in cultures that slowly stop telling the truth.

From Idea to Practice

The need has never been greater. The gap has never been more costly. Most organizations know they need better thinking. Few have built the structures to make it happen.

Red Team Thinking and healthy leadership are how we close it.

On February 25th at 12 pm ET, I’ll be talking with Bryce Hoffman inside The Healthy Leader Expert Forum about exactly this gap - how to build the structures that make better thinking the norm, not the exception. If you’re responsible for decisions that carry real financial, strategic, or human weight, you’re invited to bring your toughest question and test it in real time.

Reserve your seat at thehealthyleader.com/expertforum