Red Team Drills Teach Pattern Recognition, Not Judgment

Pressure doesn't create leaders—it reveals what we failed to rehearse.

The argument sounds clean until you ask what it actually means to rehearse the moments that matter. Can a manager practice responding to a Slack message announcing layoffs, or can a director stage the split-second judgment required when a teammate contradicts them in a crowded meeting?

The unstated assumption is that small-moment leadership is trainable through repetition, the way you train anything else. Run the scenario again, tighten the response, internalize the pattern—but rehearsal and performance occupy different psychological spaces. A rehearsal exists in the presence of stakes everyone knows are manufactured.

The U. S. military discovered this in the 1990s when it shifted from command-and-control drills to red team exercises, hoping to improve junior officer decision-making under fire. Red teams were supposed to stage realistic scenarios so officers could practice judgment in ambiguity. What happened instead was predictable—officers learned to recognize the shape of red team scenarios. Pattern recognition works beautifully until reality violates the pattern.

Colonel John Boyd, who pioneered the concept of decision-making in combat, understood this through his study of fighter pilots. Pilots who survived weren't the ones with the best memorized responses. They were the ones who had built a mental model flexible enough to absorb information that contradicted their expectations—and that can't be rehearsed, only built through exposure to genuine unpredictability. The real question isn't whether leaders rehearse the mundane moments, it's whether they stay genuinely curious about the moments when their rehearsal fails to fit. That curiosity, when it actually exists, is what separates leaders from the people going through the motions in both contexts.