Red team exercise

It can be valuable, as part of a board's high-level thinking, to consider how you would act as leader of a key competitor of your agency.

This can provide great insight into your current vulnerabilities, missed opportunities, and weaknesses in your strategy. The difference in perspective can spark great new ideas.

Objectives

In this exercise, the board will work through imaginary scenarios to consider how competitors may act.

Then the board will discuss insights and ideas gained from these scenarios and how they could be used now within the agency.

Pre-reading

In cyber-security, a 'red team' is when a group of your own experts takes the time to try to find your greatest points of weakness and develop plans for how they would exploit them and beat you, if they were the baddies.

This can provide valuable testing of your current operations and future strategy to find weaknesses, gaps, and risks — as well as new opportunities you could take yourselves.

To run a red team exercise, use one or more scenarios to explore and invite people with the relevant expertise to act as opponents in a table game of strategy.