In business, and especially in podiatry, the pace of change is relentless. Competitors innovate, patient expectations shift, and unforeseen threats can appear overnight. That’s why I invited my good friend Dave Frees back to the Podiatry Legends Podcast for his third appearance, to share a strategic process borrowed from the military and intelligence community: Red Team, Blue Team, and Purple Team thinking.
This approach isn’t just about defence. It’s about identifying vulnerabilities before they hurt you, spotting opportunities others miss, and creating a culture of constant improvement.
Learn more about Dave’s training at Business Black Ops.
What is Red Team, Blue Team, Purple Team?
The concept comes from military war games and intelligence operations. The Red Team plays the role of the attacker, finding ways to exploit weaknesses in your systems, service delivery, or marketing. The Blue Team focuses on defending your business, strengthening systems, and seizing opportunities. When the two teams come together, you form the Purple Team, combining insights to improve and protect your business.
It’s a forward-thinking method that moves beyond the traditional SWOT analysis. While SWOT helps identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, Red and Blue Teaming makes you think in real-world terms – “If I wanted to destroy this business, how would I do it?” and “How would I stop that from happening?”
Why It Matters in Podiatry
Most podiatry clinics don’t revisit their marketing campaigns, service delivery, or systems after launch. Dave and I discussed how dangerous that is. Without review, you could be leaving money on the table, letting problems fester, or ignoring opportunities that could transform your clinic.
Imagine if your competition found out your orthotic turnaround time was two weeks, while they could do it in 24 hours. If they marketed that difference, you could lose patients fast. Red Teaming helps you spot these vulnerabilities before your competitors do.
Beyond the Obvious Threats
This process isn’t limited to marketing or operations. It can address:
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Data security – protecting patient records from breaches.
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Staff turnover – planning for sudden departures of key team members.
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Regulatory compliance – avoiding costly fines and reputation damage.
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Physical disruptions – from a car crashing into your clinic to a fire or flood.
When you’ve considered these scenarios in advance, you react calmly, quickly, and effectively – instead of panicking.
Opportunities Hiding in Plain Sight
The Blue Team also identifies opportunities that can be exploited for growth – whether it’s a new service offering, an underserved patient segment, or a technology change that makes your clinic more efficient.
When the Purple Team comes together, the best defensive ideas merge with the most powerful growth strategies. This means you’re not just surviving – you’re getting stronger.
Practical Steps for Podiatry Owners
A) Choose your teams – Randomly assign staff to Red or Blue Teams. If possible, it is best to use an external facilitator. To learn more about this, please email me at tf@tysonfranklin.com
B) Separate sessions – Red and Blue Teams work independently to avoid influencing each other’s thinking. This is crucial.
C) Combine for the Purple Team – Share insights, challenge assumptions, and prioritise the most urgent and impactful actions.
D) Document everything – Consider developing a “disaster and opportunity” folder, which is accessible to your team.
E) Repeat regularly – Repeat this every year, and do a SWOT analysis twice a year.
Final Thoughts
When you implement Red, Blue, and Purple Team thinking in your podiatry clinic, you stop reacting to problems and start anticipating them. You also uncover opportunities that competitors overlook.
As Dave says, it’s not just figuring out how to succeed, but identifying what could destroy your success and eliminating it. In podiatry, where patient trust and operational efficiency are everything, that mindset is invaluable.
If you found this episode helpful, share it with another podiatrist or business owner. And if you’d like guidance on implementing Red Team, Blue Team, Purple Team thinking in your practice, please get in touch with me at tf@tysonfrasnklin.com or visit my website www.tysonfranklin.com, I’d love to help you future-proof your business.
If you’re looking for a speaker for an upcoming event or a facilitator to run a pre-conference workshop, please visit my Speaker Page to see the range of topics I cover.
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UN-EDITED PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
Tyson Franklin: [00:00:00] Okay, Dave, it is fantastic to have you back on the Podiatry Legend podcast, your third visit, welcome back. Thank you very much
David Frees: for having me back. It’s a great pleasure and I’ve enjoyed every one of those enormously, and I learned so much.
Each time I do it you ask me questions that nobody else in the world asks me.
Tyson Franklin: I said that to somebody else once before they went you have a different sort of interviewing process. And I went, yeah, it’s ’cause I have no questions written down. That’s good
okay. So today we are talking about red team, blue team. Explain, okay. Anyone goes what the, what is red team? Blue team?
David Frees: Maybe Red team, blue team and purple team. You had said to me once we were talking, you were coaching some Podiatry practices and Yeah. One of the small professional practices face in a rapidly changing environment is that they’re dangers to them.
They’re not even [00:01:00] aware of or thinking about. And these could be very profound dangers and there’s opportunities sitting there that they don’t even see or detect. And a traditional SWOT analysis would help a little bit with this, but you and I are involved in a group called Business Black Ops that really applies.
Techniques and the mindset and beliefs and the strategies of the tactical force multipliers of spies, interrogators, and special forces operators. So you and I started talking about how would they approach it? How would the military or an intelligence agency approach this problem where all these changes are taking place and danger is out there and opportunities there, and we don’t necessarily see or have them on our radar.
And one of the things that the military does is called an after action report. So if somebody goes out and they do something when they come back, there’s a total debriefing as to what happened so that we could detect what are things that we did wrong that next [00:02:00] time we could do right. What are things that happened that were unexpected?
That shows that the enemy has learned something we didn’t know they learned. Okay. This is an even better version of that because that is like your tax preparer or preparing your taxes and telling you how much you owe. With looking in the rear view mirror, the red team blue team may be purple team that’s looking ahead and trying to predict and trying to gather information that’ll make you better at planning for them.
Both planning for how things might happen that would be harmful or destructive to your practice and the sort of things that you could do on a forward thinking basis to make your practice healthier and more profitable and more stable. And I like to remind people of something that is going on now, like with gangbusters, which is the Red Queen hypothesis.
Oh yeah. It used to be. It was a model of practicing Podiatry, and if you followed that model, you weren’t guaranteed success, but you [00:03:00] developed your skills of working with patients and being a Podiatry and you chose your location, why wisely? You followed a few fundamentals, you are going to be financially successful.
But in this world where so much is changing so fast and the expectations of our clients and our patients and our customers are changing so rapidly that we have to run faster just to keep up and we need to be more aware in real time of the changes that are taking place, or we can end up being devoured by our competition or just on the dust heap of an old practice, that never adapted to the new changes in the world.
So that’s what Red Team, blue Team and maybe Purple Team are all about. And it is a technique that they use in spycraft and in the military to be very forward thinking and to identify threats and opportunities. So you want me to describe basically how No, it works.
Tyson Franklin: No, but you were saying, [00:04:00] so the military, every time they do any.
Form of war games, even if it’s just practice, they will reflect on that and go, what could, what did we learn from that? Or if they do have contact with the enemy in some way, they always sit back and go, what could we have done better? What did we not expect? They had defenses there that we were totally unaware of.
How can we make sure that doesn’t happen again? So it’s just constant, and like you said, with Podiatry or sort of any professional practice, it’s that constant evolution. And I talk about a lot, I refer to it as like Podiatry evolution. Whereas if you have not evolved and you’re not constantly evolving, you will get left behind by all the other podiatrists that are coming through who are picking up the new skills and are constantly wanting to get better.
David Frees: Yeah. And a little thing can make a. Big, if a diet comes out and looks at your practice and goes and they’re gonna go into [00:05:00] competition with you, and they go, oh I hear from people that come from that practice that they didn’t get their orthotics for X number of weeks and that that may.
It could be that you’re now hiring a different kind of person that could streamline that process. It could be that you’re creating a better system, but if you’re not paying attention to that competition, and the competition is they’re paying attention to what you’re good at and what you’re bad at, and they’re not gonna fight you in the things you’re good at, they’re gonna fight you in the things you’re bad at, and they’re paying attention to what the patient really wants and how the patient’s desires are changing.
They’re going to eat your lunch because they are paying attention to that evolving environment. The Red Queen hypothesis is named after a Louis Carroll book where the red queen says to Alice and Alice in Wonderland you have to run faster just to stand still in this weird world. And that was then later applied in a bio evolutionary study.
So like in [00:06:00] evolution, what happens is, let’s say there’s a swamp and the swamp starts to dry up because of a change in the climate, some trees and plants will do better in the dryer, in environment. And so they’ll begin to thrive. That’s what we want to do in our businesses and professional practices. We wanna be aware that the swamps drying up and so that we hire the right people to do the right things, to deliver the right results to the right patients in the right timeframe.
Because all of that stuff changes. As the environment changes, the economy changes, people’s expectations change, but it this one little thing, like being aware of something could cause you to hire different people with different skill sets. Build different systems. Modify systems, train people in different things that you didn’t have to train them in before.
So there, if you have a tool, which we’re gonna discuss how Red Team Blue team, maybe Purple Team does this, if you have a tool that can help you to see risks and to understand changes that would be [00:07:00] otherwise overlooked, that can be super powerful. And then you were just saying about the after action report.
Yes. This process in time to constantly do it, we call that the OODA LOOP: observe, orient, decide, act. So you’re constantly scanning your environment, the people that come to you and your community, and how your services are delivered and what people want and how you reach out to them. You’re seeing that you’re deciding what your next options are, or you’re determining what your next options are.
You’re gonna pick one, decide to do it. Maybe it’s to do a particular type of ad or to launch a blog with information of some kind or another. So you observe. The battle space, you see what your options are, you decide to do one, and then you take action on it. But then it’s a loop. Once you act, you go back and see, did that thing that I just did in my practice, get me more of the right people, help me to deliver the orthotics more quickly, or whatever the desired result [00:08:00] is.
You’re always looking, did it work to do what I wanted it to do, or do I have to modify? Yeah. And the red team, blue team, and maybe purple team that helps to set up and make it clearer as you observe the battle space, what you’re gonna do and how you’re gonna act. But very few practices ever go back and review what they did right or wrong.
And very few practices ever try to look into the future and make reasonable predictions about what their vulnerabilities are and how they could defend against them.
Tyson Franklin: Yeah, that’s a really good point. ’cause I know when I used to, even if I went and visited a another a professional referrer might’ve had a visit with the gp, I’ve met them.
We had a talk. Every time I came back from that meeting, I would grab an a four sheet of paper the date at the top and all right, if I had that meeting again, if I could repeat that. If I could go back in time, like Groundhog Day and do that again, would I approach the meeting differently? Would I have [00:09:00] spoken about a different topic?
Would I have taken something different to give a, as a sample? And I’d, I would reflect on that constantly. And therefore, every time I had a meeting, I would look through those old notes and that made the next meeting ev even better. And it just constantly kept improving. But I’ve spoken to podiatrists when they’ll say, oh, we did this marketing campaign.
I go, oh, I did it work. And they go, we’re not sure. I go what was your goal? What did you wanna achieve from it? We wanted to achieve this, but the phone was busy. I go, okay, the phone was busy, but did you get what you wanted from it? No, not, I don’t, I don’t dunno. And then because they dunno, they then just jump on the next marketing campaign without really thinking about what they’ve learned.
David Frees: A lot of marketing from practices that don’t think about it strategically is just done sporadically. And to your point, they leap from one thing to the next. So I’ve had a similar situation where I told a law [00:10:00] firm to do a direct mail campaign. They were reaching out to very wealthy people and it was they didn’t wanna do it ’cause direct mail was expensive and they were gonna have to make this thing look very fancy.
And I was saying, don’t send it by regular mail. Send it by Federal Express or UPS or something so that it’s going to get onto the professional’s desk. You gonna open it and look at it. Anyway, in the end, they did a test. So they didn’t send 5,000 out. They sent 500 out to this list that they of people that, of the kind of person they wanted to get.
And they told me later that the the direct mail campaign had failed. I was like, really? That’s surprising. It could happen. It could be a bad list. It could be this, it could be that there are many reasons why such a campaign would fail, but why do you say that it failed? And they said, oh, we only got six clients from that.
And I said, you sent 500 pieces. The total, the total I think cost to do it was something like $2,500. Yeah. And they got [00:11:00] six clients that the first spend was worth over $25,000 to them. But they thought, oh, well we said 500. Now shouldn’t we have gotten like 482 clients? But the amount that they made so far exceeded the cost of doing the campaign.
And this was just the first round. Would those people buy more? Would they come back and update? Would they make referrals? These are all things where, to your point, Tyson, I try to get people to think about it in advance. So I want them to be doing some marketing to the right prospects. Who are the ones that are probably already aware that they have a problem, a podiatric problem.
They’re looking for a solution. I have ankle pain. I have healed. I’m looking for a solution to that. Whether or not they know you and they have the money to pay for that solution and maybe the time on their hands to come so that they’re not trying to get you to stay late at the office that day. There are all of these things you wanna market to the right prospects with the right offer who [00:12:00] have the ability to pay for it.
There are all of these things, which you think of them in advance and we say if we did that what would tell us. What would the measurement be that would tell us that it was successful or that it may be was close and that we need to tweak it a little bit. But to your point, people don’t make those decisions in advance.
So they have no way of judging and they don’t pay attention after, and they just leap from one thing to the other. And one thing, one of the things they did might have been working fabulously well and produced a giant return on investment, but they would never know it.
Tyson Franklin: Because they don’t look at it, oh, it’s reading a book called What Got You Here won’t Get You There.
I think Marshall Goldsmith. And, but he even said in that, that a hundred percent of his clients get amazing results, just totally changed. And then he realized it was, one of his clients actually said to him, I think I figured out why you have a hundred percent success rate. And he said, why is that? He said, you, you don’t work with idiots.
He said through experience exactly who you’re gonna work with. You’ve already worked out [00:13:00] the profile. I’ll only work with these people. I won’t work with these other people that are going to be a drain on his time, aren’t gonna listen. So by selecting the right people, then he knows who he should work with.
And I think podiatrists can do the same thing with patients, or if you’re gonna ma do a marketing campaign to patients. Who is the person that you really want back in your clinic? They’re the ones that you market to. There’s a group of patients you don’t like, don’t market to them.
David Frees: Oh, I see that all the time too.
Marketing that is very successful at bringing in the type of client, patient or customer that they don’t want.
Tends to amplify. Like where you’re strong and where you’re weak, which is a really good reason to do these red team, blue team, and maybe purple team exercises.
Tyson Franklin: So before we get onto the red team, blue team and purple team, you said earlier on when somebody is coming to work at a practice and they’re going to be looking at it and they’re gonna be doing their own evaluation, whether this is a [00:14:00] place that they wanna work based on a number of things, has the clinic evolved?
But I think it also applies as someone selling their business. The person that’s looking at the business is going to be evaluating, looking at the strengths, the weaknesses, the threats. Is this business worth buying or am I better to just go and open up my own business in town and destroy them
David Frees: and destroying them?
Yeah. Yeah. That’s the thing, the red team blue team concept gets you both of these things. It helps you to understand how to do the marketing better and how to take advantages of opportunities, but it also helps you to defend against threats that you might not ever have seen coming. So here you are, to your point, sitting there thinking I’m premium dollar when I sell my practice.
And people coming in evaluating it will pay you premium dollar if you’ve positioned it well and you’ve shown steady growth and you show all of these, the things that they use to evaluate the health of a [00:15:00] practice. But if you haven’t done those things, they may just decide we could take you out.
We don’t have to pay for it. We can get
Tyson Franklin: all of your patients for free. Pretty much it’s at the last marketing masterclass I did, I mentioned to ’em when I graduated, we would do a plaster cast of somebody’s foot. We’d send it off to a lab, used to take two weeks to get the orthotic back. Now a lot of people are doing scans and sending it off to the lab that way.
Yep. Most of ’em are still making their patients wait one to two weeks to get their orthotics back. Yeah. When I had my clinic, when I sold it nine years ago, we were making ’em the same day, guaranteed 24 hours. And it’s surprising how many people are not doing that, and it’s such an opportunity there.
But if I was looking at someone’s practice to buy it, that would be the first thing I’m looking at is how long does it take to get a pair of orthotics made in this place.
David Frees: Very interesting. Think about [00:16:00] that. That’s one of the KPIs you would now use now to decide if you wanna buy a practice or not.
Tyson Franklin: Yeah, because if they’re making people wait two weeks, I’m thinking I can set up a clinic down the road and I would go straight to, I can make them the same day within 24 hours and not have to go and spend a million dollars to buy the practice.
I know what I’d probably do
And that’s why people gotta keep improving.
David Frees: Yeah. That’s a vulnerability that, I’ll bet you all of those practices don’t realize that they have.
Tyson Franklin: So now let’s get into the red, blue purple.
David Frees: So the way this works is often people will just call it red deeming. And what happens is that you could do it on your own, but it’s better to do it with people from your company.
You set up a group. Who is given permission? Like you, you have to be careful about this because sometimes red teaming can reveal under performance or problems that could be laid [00:17:00] on somebody’s doorstep. So when you pick the red team, you have to say sometimes. As we do it arbitrarily, like the red team, you just have some cards and there’ll be blue team cards.
The red team could, whoever picking cards. Okay, arbitrarily you’ve been selected for the red team. That means you have everyone’s permission to speak totally freely and to identify problems. And this is not about blame, this is just helping to identify problems we might not otherwise be aware of. But the, what the red team is designed to do is to think about if we were to attack this business or this practice, if we were a competitor or coming into this market, what would we do to totally destroy this business or this practice?
And specifically, how would we go about it? What would we attack first, second, third, in what order and why? So this is working the danger side of things. The blue team is a couple of other [00:18:00] people and they’ve been selected to try to identify. Vulnerabilities that they have and how they would defend them.
You don’t want them to be working together at first because you don’t want them to hear what each other are saying. Because part of the beauty of this is when you bring those red and blue together in purple, that the blue team will often hear things that the red team is thinking about doing or might try to do that they were prepared for, but they might also hear things that they were totally unprepared for.
And the red team might hear about defenses that they had set up that they would, that would they had never considered, and that might have rendered their plans totally moot. Yeah. So the. Process and we’re oversimplifying it a little bit, but not for is Red Team is how do you destroy the practice? Blue Team is how do we defend the practice from likely risks and the opportunities that which we should seize to move it forward.
And then when we bring those two teams together, they can [00:19:00] identify systems that aren’t working. They can identify problems at the front desk. They can identify delayed delivery of the product. There’s a couple of other tools that I use in conjunction with Red Team, blue Team. I’ll often have them separately prepare before they go into their whole idea of exactly what to attack or how to defend and how to build.
I will have them do a SWOT analysis and or a, what’s working, what’s not analysis. And the SWOT analysis. I think you, everybody probably knows how it works, but it, the strengths and weaknesses are the internal stuff. Where are we strong, where are we weak? The opportunities and threats are the external things, what’s going on in the outside world that could be threatening us.
But all of those can be very helpful to a red team that’s looking to review vulnerabilities. And
Tyson Franklin: what you said to me before we pressed record was you said the red team and the blue team are both taking their roles [00:20:00] on, and they’re doing it at the same time, but not in front of each other.
They’re separate areas. The red team’s trying to attack the blue team’s trying to defend, but they don’t even know what they’re defending yet. But they’re trying to think about what they may need to defend and the red team’s attacking with, without knowing the defenders that the blue team are thinking about actually putting up.
David Frees: And then when you bring them together, you get this amazing synergy.
Tyson Franklin: Yeah.
David Frees: This is still, doesn’t mean that you don’t do the after action report, like where something goes wrong or you try something new. You still on a go forward basis wanna go back and say, did that work? Because in the Red Team Blue team model.
We’re coming up with hypotheses about these things. It’s what we think might happen, but in the real world, stuff happens. And so when it happens, we want to go and look at it. Did that happen the way we thought it did? Did the system respond? Did the system break? Do we need a new employee that does this?
Do we need to retrain employees around this thing? So all of the things [00:21:00] we’ve talked about on the call have their place here, but this red team, blue team, getting them back together again, it’s super powerful because we teach something in business Black Ops, and you’re familiar with it. I learned it from Charlie Munger, which is inversion thinking.
Yeah. So Charlie Munger said. Most people when they get a, get wealthy they make lists of all the ways that people get wealthy, but he said, you also should be inverting that and saying, what are the things that I could be doing that would just forever keep me from being wealthy? Or if I became wealthy, would destroy my wealth so that I still wasn’t wealthy?
Because when you identify those things, you can then avoid them, or at least make much better effort at avoiding or mitigating them so that it’s easier to get wealthy and it’s easier to stay wealthy because you use inversion thinking. That’s what the Red Team Blue team forces us to do.
Tyson Franklin: Inversion thinking is fantastic because it’s, even if you’re thinking, oh, I wanna get fitter, I wanna be healthier. Yeah. And you’re not, quite sure what to do. You [00:22:00] go, what could I do to be unhealthy and less fit? Sit on my bum. Well, Let’s eat chips all day.
Let’s eat chocolate burgers every night. Just eat poorly, drink heaps. They’re all things you shouldn’t be doing. So I think sometimes the inversion thing really helps clarify what you should be doing. ’cause it takes away things you shouldn’t be doing
David Frees: and it gives you an edge in almost any realm where you apply it because most people aren’t doing it.
So the thing is most people aren’t even thinking about what they should be doing. Of the few who are thinking about what they should be doing, most of them never do anything about it. Of those few that do something about it, none of them are thinking about the aver inversion thinking, which would get them there faster and keep them there longer.
So it is the thing that gets you, like you, we always talk about Pareto’s principle in 80 20 you’ll be doing the 20% of the things that get you 80% of the results. But at the other end of 80 20, you want to be avoiding the [00:23:00] 20% of the things that cause 80% of the destruction too. And when you work both ends of the Pareto’s principle, it’s very powerful.
Tyson Franklin: And in my clinic. We used to have, my disaster folder and my disaster folder was something that all the staff members had access to that no matter what went wrong in the clinic, go to the disaster folder, the answer will be there.
Everything from plumbing to electrical to computers, to a staff member having a, an accident on the way into work. Someone ringing in sick at the last minute. And I said, and it doesn’t matter how good your disaster folder is, something else will come up, but you haven’t, you think it’s complete.
And just when you think it’s complete, COVID will happen that wouldn’t have been in anybody’s folder before. And what happens if we have a worldwide pandemic? How will we react to that? And that even though it was a bad thing, a lot of good [00:24:00] ideas have actually come off the back end of that. ’cause it made people think.
David Frees: And there, that’s a perfect example. The red team is coming up with all these bad things, but we’re thinking about them before they happen. And so lots of good things, which is that we think about ways to mitigate problems. We think about ways to avoid problems. We think about ways to deal with problems when they occur, despite our best efforts.
Tyson Franklin: Yeah. And you can learn from that sort of stuff, mainly because I remember when they had different things have happened over the last couple of decades, and every time they do the stock market plummets. And then shortly after that comes back up again. Soon as COVID hit and I saw the stock market just plummet, I went, I’m buying shares.
Because I had learned from all the other times that it had happened. It is going to go straight back up again in a short period of time. And it did.
Finally, I got the timing right on something.
David Frees: I just had a similar experience, which is [00:25:00] we know if you watch cryptocurrency, we know Bitcoin has, it’s very volatile.
It’s become a little less volatile as it’s gotten more acceptance. And so the dips are likely to become less severe, but there’s a period of time. So when Bitcoin drops precipitously, now I buy it. And because I look at it this way, if the recovery time is really long, my grandchildren will thank me for buying it.
If it comes back quickly, I’ll be happy because I’m buying it down here. And a lot of times that happens, I buy it here and two weeks later it’s a, back to where it was again. Or sometimes in two days. So this is not investment advice. Neither you nor I no invest in cryptocurrency or the stock market.
This observation has to do with the fact that we learn from observing things that go on in the past, and we can learn from this red [00:26:00] team and blue team, and we could create plans that are more likely to be successful. One of the other things that, that, this is very helpful with, that we’ve talked about in business Black Ops, is that companies that do very well over time recognize just there’s time value of money.
The sooner you make the money the better because you can invest it.
Tyson Franklin: But
David Frees: the time value of intentional change and detecting when things break, that’s very valuable. So a company that, that detects when something breaks, fixes it right away. So there might be a little downtick, they fix it and then their performance keeps going up.
But companies that ignore the breakage or don’t have a way of seeing the breakage, it just continues to happen and cascade and it gets harder and harder to fix and they’ve gotta put more resources on it and they don’t get to keep that money as profit and it slows growth down very substantially.
So again, red Team Blue team helps with that. ’cause you’re constantly, when you’re red teaming and blue teaming, you’re looking at how are our systems [00:27:00] adaptable? What if there is an attack? This could apply to a literal attack. There are small practices in the world that have fallen victim to ransomware attacks.
Oh yeah. Where. And do you have in Australia, do you have something like hipaa like we have in America, patient confidentiality regulations?
Tyson Franklin: Yeah. It’s not called that, but there are rules around how we’ve gotta protect and store patient details on our computers.
David Frees: Yes. And so that’s something that, you may or may not be successfully doing in your practice.
So if I were gonna try to destroy your practice, that might be a vulnerability that I would go for. And so we’re talking about this as though it’s applying just to business issues, but there is a sort of real world battle aspect of this too. How do I defend against a data attack or a regulatory, a regulator coming in and saying that I didn’t comply with these type of , patient confidentiality regulations.
‘Cause those things could be very damaging [00:28:00] to a practice.
Tyson Franklin: Yeah. Even if you don’t have your own business and you’re an employee. Podiatry is your career. It’s not just a job a patient could make a false claim against. You see a lawyer make a false claim, that is a threat, that’s an attack that you, if you don’t think about it.
And I used to say that the stuff that worked for me, that these are the things you need to think about because every patient’s in front of you potentially could get pear shaped. So you must always be aware of it. Even if it is a false claim, you know how to handle it.
You don’t Yes. Drop your lolly bag and get all upset and start to panic. And then it affects the next day, the next week, the next month of your life.
David Frees: Yeah. And you may have procedures that help to make sure that you’ve documented how you handle patients and that it is false. You, whereas if you have no procedures in place and you’re not putting it in your certain things in your notes, it makes you more vulnerable to that sort of an assertion.[00:29:00]
So red team and blue teaming is not just going after, are we doing good marketing or not? It’s going after all of these ways that that a competitor could attack you, A patient could damage you, something could happen that would destroy you. That’s what the red team’s designed to do. And the blue team’s designed to think about that too.
But how you defend it against those things and what policies you put in place and how you modify the system to make it more, less vulnerable to those kinds of attacks.
Tyson Franklin: And you gotta understand the businesses that do this, and even people doing it in your own personal life. You do it at home. How, I think how much calmer your life is when you’ve gone through this process, you’ve gone through what all the threats possibly could be, all the ways to actually defend it.
And I think it’s a good feeling at the end. Once, once you get the purple team together and I’ll point out to people in case you haven’t done art, when you mixed red and blue, you get purple.
David Frees: That’s a very good point. I’m glad you [00:30:00] did.
Tyson Franklin: Some people sitting there go, why is it a purple team? Why is it not a green team?
Why is it not a yellow team? Because you, if you did art at school, you’d know blue and red mate purple.
David Frees: I still like personally having the red team and the blue team work separately and come back to form that team because they’ll learn. Yeah, I like
Tyson Franklin: the idea of that. I think that’s a lot better idea, having them both going off doing their separate things without knowing what the other person’s gonna say.
Then coming together, and I reckon, especially I’m looking forward to doing this with a, a few Podiatry clinics is, I reckon they’ll be surprised with what each of them come up with.
David Frees: I think so too. The other thing is if you are a very small practice you can use AI to augment this. So you can describe your practice in some detail, and then you can ask AI to play the red team and to play the blue team and to then play the [00:31:00] purple team and bring those things together and interact with them.
But if you have a practice with a reasonable number of podiatrists and staff the more perspectives the better, because you’re only gonna think of a certain number of risks. Because of cognitive bias and normalcy bias. There are all these things that make us not want to think about those things.
And when we turn our attention to them, we’ll think of more of them than if we were just lightly moving on with our lives. But having multiple people doing that from multiple perspectives reveals multiple risks or multiple ways of mitigating risk that we would never have thought of on our own.
Tyson Franklin: Yeah, and this came up in a conversation I had with someone recently, and we were talking about car parking, how important car parking is to their business.
There’s only a limited amount of car parks. I said, what would happen if the council made a change to the roads at the front, but you could not park there? And they went, oh, that would just, that would cripple us and go, okay, if it does happen, what’s your plan? What’s your backup? What are you gonna do? [00:32:00] I said, you, you have to think about it now.
Don’t think about it when it happens. And I think that’s the mistake a lot of people do. They wait until something bad happens. And then they panic and they, and it’s hard to make good decisions when you’re in panic mode.
David Frees: Yeah. You can say oh, there’s a car, there’s a parking spot. Or a lot with a bunch of spots in it. Two minutes down the road, I would have a valet bringing people back and forth so they wouldn’t have to wait. You’re making a good decision by thinking about it in advance. You could identify the resources you would need, you could find out if you could rent those spots.
Whereas if it just happens to your point, you’re in a terrible position and you’re frightened and not make a good decisions.
Tyson Franklin: We used to, I said this, we had a, a, a picture one day you drive up to your clinic and as you’re driving towards your clinic, smoke in the distance and you go, oh, there must be a fire somewhere.
And as you get closer, you start to see flames. When you get really close you notice it’s your clinic that’s on [00:33:00] fire and it’s just burnt down. What do you do? You had a whole pile of patients booked in that day, that week, that month. What do you do? And I’d already thought about it and I already had it all mapped out that if the place burnt down within 24 hours, we’d be up and running again.
We’d pick, we knew where we were gonna go. I’d already spoken to people and said, would I be able to use a room in the back of your c your business here? Could we do that? I knew where we were gonna get computers from. I’d already spoken to other podiatrists I knew and said, if something ever happened, could I borrow this equipment from you?
Would you send it to me? And they went, yep, not a problem. So we already had it all mapped out, and not that’s going to happen very often, but if it did happen, are you ready for it? Yeah. If a car came through the front of your building, are you ready for it? And i’ve seen a few Podiatry cleaning sets happen to.
David Frees: Oh, that’s funny. Yeah. Not for
Tyson Franklin: not, no, not for them. [00:34:00] But obviously there was a there was a business member on the Gold Coast and this car went through the front and then they did this whole big marketing campaign about maybe we should include a drive-through service. And they did. They re they had to rebuild the building ’cause it got destroyed.
It was a truck that came through and they redesigned this building and they added a drive through area for cars. It was something they hadn’t thought about beforehand.
David Frees: That reminds me of another use of this, and you and I have talked about this before. If you red team, what happens if somebody co just off the cuff, a one off gives us a bad review. But what if we get several bad reviews Oh, from somebody that’s trying to harm us? Thinking about that in advance helps. And there are even ways to turn bad reviews into really good marketing. That was a bad situation that they turned into really good marketing.
And the example I’ve shared with you before is there’s a ski resort in [00:35:00] America that’s very difficult. It’s known for very difficult triple black diamond trails. And they took a one star Google review and put it up on a giant billboard and it said the guy that wrote the review said, this mountain is impossible.
I could not ski it. It’s not for beginners or even good skiers. It’s just for experts. One star. And they said in big letters said, yeah, we’re not for everybody. And so they took the words of the complete and said. Yeah. Like we don’t wanna discourage people like this guy from coming. We wanna encourage expert skiers that are willing to pay this huge premium to be at this truly unusual facility.
Tyson Franklin: Yeah. I’ve seen a few onestar reviews used in reverse on the person that has actually written the one snow review and when they’re done they are. It’s brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.
David Frees: The basic process [00:36:00] sees that I think that practices might find helpful.
Tyson Franklin: Yeah. And
David Frees: it’s, you good? If they could find somebody to facilitate, I don’t know if that’s the sort of thing that you do or not, but I’ve just found practices often struggle with how to do this on their own. So finding somebody that can help and that knows ways of inoculating people so that if it does turn up somebody that’s like underperforming a little bit, or a system that’s somebody created that’s not working, that this is not about the blame.
There are things to do. In advance. And there are exercises that you can teach both the red team and the blue team. And then there’s is when you bring them together to get the most juice from the squeeze and give that practice the most actionable items. One of the other things that I would encourage anybody thinking about doing this to do would be to map out all the essential business functions of their practice.
There’s marketing, there’s sales, there’s delivery, there’s it, there’s regulatory, there’s all of these, there’s finance, there are all [00:37:00] of these aspects of the business, and there are roots to do damage to a business or where it could, or systems could fail in each and every one of these. But since you, to your point, you don’t have unlimited resources.
Yeah, we would. Really when we come back to put the red team and the blue team together, we’d be looking for what are the most likely ones or what are the ones that, even if they’re improbable, could be very devastating. And how do we at least take some measures to mitigate against those.
Tyson Franklin: So if somebody was thinking about doing this themself, like I said, I’m gone to clinics and I’ve done this with groups of people with Podiatry clinics.
If somebody was thinking about just doing it themselves, should the business owner be on the blue team or the red team if they were gonna do it themself?
David Frees: That’s a great, it’s a great question. I personally, if they do it themselves, they should probably be on the blue team because they’re gonna be surprised.
They’re gonna [00:38:00] think they know every way in and everything that could go wrong, and they’re gonna be surprised by how much. The other thing is, I think the presence of the owner or the leader of the practice is going to suppress the most diabolical suggestions of the red team. They just don’t wanna do it in front of that leader.
But by the time they get, this is the other reason, like having a facilitator helps with that. And by the time you bring the two of them together, that facilitator can coax out some of the more diabolical ones.
Tyson Franklin: So basically you’re trying to be as mean as possible when you are trying to attack the other business.
You’re not trying to be nice. You are like the worst of the worst. Yeah, trying to actually do harm, burn it to the ground. Yep. Why don’t we assassinate
David Frees: the owner?
Tyson Franklin: Assassinate the owner. Oh, that, that is extreme, isn’t it? But these are things I’m sure there’s some employees that have thought about that, but Oh yeah,
David Frees: I’m sure they [00:39:00] have. Being deliberately provocative there, but you do want them to not focus everything on illegal activities that can destroy the business.
Yeah. But there are illegal activities that could destroy the business or the practice. So we also don’t want to ignore those. Like the red team, various ways to get them to thinking about this are, what are the things that could naturally go wrong that would make this vulnerable, that we could take over?
What are the things that we could do to enhance that? What are their systems or whatever that we could attack? How could we steal their customers from them? How could we hire a key doctor away from that practice? These are all that red team will come up with if properly coached and, spurred into action, but that’s hard for the owner to do. You do want the owner or the managers of the practice to be involved in this so that they can make it clear that this is not about like punishment or retribution. Yeah. This is a. This is helpful to the practice to identify this [00:40:00] so that people will be more free and that doesn’t come instantaneously.
I’ve seen practices where this just wouldn’t work because there’s not a culture where you’re taught to speak up. But if you’re a practice where you have repeatedly shown people in public, if staff needs things like that, I value what you say, then this is going to be much, much easier. And if you’re starting the process of doing that, this is another way where you could publicly say, I value it and give reward for thinking out of the box about these things.
Then it encourages people to speak up.
Tyson Franklin: And I think also, having the facilitator who I think has got a lot of experience in, say in Podiatry for example, I’ve seen a lot over 36 or so years. I’ve seen a lot of mistakes be made by podiatrists, seen a lot of businesses get destroyed by, different conflicts and different reasons.
And an example I [00:41:00] did say, we were saying that, yeah, it’s not that you’re gonna do anything illegal, but I have seen, I know of ano one Podiatry setting up another Podiatry to have done something that he shouldn’t have done and got him booted out of the Podiatry profession because of it. And the whole thing was set up by another person and it was illegal.
What they did was very illegal. And you just sit there shaking your head, going, no one would’ve thought of that. No one would’ve even considered that somebody could do that. But somebody did. Somebody did. And when I heard it I was just shaking my head. I couldn’t believe that one Podiatry would do that to another Podiatry, but they did.
David Frees: And these are the sorts of things that are easy to overlook because they sound insane.
Even the first example I gave, but why don’t we just burn down the practice? That sounds insane and silly on the face of it, but there are arsonists that like lighting buildings on fire. That’s true. They are form illegal [00:42:00] acts and that’s not a crazy thing for a red team to raise. And it’s a danger that a blue team might identify to say.
It may not be a competitor, but somebody could, there could be a fire occurring like through electrical short or through somebody performing an illegal action. Let’s let’s plan, let’s have a fire recovery plan like your disaster book that you were talking about.
Tyson Franklin: Yeah. And that’s what the Disaster Follower was all about, was as everything happens, and I think when people do, the Blue Team Red team, they come together, have the purple team, is to try and document this and have it somewhere so that everybody has access to it.
So when things do happen, they know what to do next. And it’s not just always on the business owner.
David Frees: When people come together too, Tyson, it’s, that’s the time when prioritization matters. Because when you look at all of the risks, this even happens. If you do the simpler version of this, like a SWOT analysis, it can be [00:43:00] overwhelming to see the threats and weaknesses.
But what you wanna do is identify what are the most likely threats will occur, or those that are so dangerous, they could be super destructive, even if they’re less likely. And how do we fix those? And on the opportunities. What are the two or three that if we got them to work would radically alter the practice in a positive way?
We’re not gonna try to take advantage of 72 opportunities we’ve identified. What we want to do is identify 72 and then whittle that down to six, and then figure out what the first one or two are that we’re gonna do. A lot of times when you eliminate risks or you seize opportunities, other risks disappear, or the need to chase other opportunities disappears because you’ve got a level of success.
Tyson Franklin: So yeah, I think that’s the important part that you said then too, about going through everything you’ve come up with and then picking what are the main ones you need to work on first that are probably gonna be the most [00:44:00] damaging to your business.
How much time should they should be allowed for people to do this? If they were gonna do it themselves?
David Frees: If they were going to do it themselves or with a facilitator?
If they had
Tyson Franklin: a facilitator what amount of time would you allow Yeah. For them this go away and think about this.
David Frees: Yeah. This is one of those things where more time isn’t always better.
Tyson Franklin: Yeah.
David Frees: So putting time constraints on it. So I’ve done this exercise in as short as a half an hour. Yeah.
They’re separate. Then an hour to 90 minutes with some breaks in there when they come back. I think an hour probably at the outside is going to get you a lot more nuance on both sides. And then you’re gonna do an hour. Together. I like a little bit more time together. ’cause that’s where the magic really happens.
Tyson Franklin: Yeah.
David Frees: And your foster sense of teamwork and cooperation and everything. So I’d rather have [00:45:00] 30 or 40 minutes in the breakout of the red team and the blue team and then but you if you’re gonna have that short of time, you need somebody that could go to both teams and check in and make sure that they’re operating the way that they need to be operating and doing the exercise.
Or you, at the very least, you need them some guide, give them some guidance through exercises that’s gonna get them. And for me, if I had to do an exercise, I would get them while they’re together before they split up to identify all the essential business functions of the business. And then I would get them to split up.
I would get them to do a like 10 or 15 minute SWOT analysis or what’s working and what’s not, where they’re actually examining the business and seeing what the strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats are. But this is separate now, and then go into full red team blue team mode. Okay, know what we know now, how would we destroy this?
What might happen to destroy it? That’s the instruction I give to the red team is what might naturally happen that would destroy or weaken this, and how else [00:46:00] could we either accelerate that or do damage to it? What are the things that we could do proactively? But I have them working on both, like figuring out what they see in the marketplace that could be destructive to the practice.
And then over on the other side, we have them doing the exact opposite. What are the essential business functions? Where are the vulnerabilities? How would we defend against them? I put about half the time, three quarters of the time to that and half to a quarter of the time to identifying opportunities that we could seize that.
Because when you seize opportunities, it gives you resources to bolster. You’re less, if you make some money and you use that rationally, you’re less likely to be harmed. Yeah. Like you have higher profit margins and you don’t just take all the money and go on vacation. You take that money and periodically sit down with the team and figure out what’s going on, spend some money to put a new virus protection in the computer system or whatever it might be.
You’re less [00:47:00] li likely to be vulnerable to these kinds of attacks.
Tyson Franklin: Yeah. And it makes sense too, having that facilitator. ’cause that was, that’s my plan on how I’ll be doing it with the Podiatry clinics. Is, I think having that facilitator and helping to prompt them along. ’cause if they’ve never done this before Yeah they need that.
Have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? Then going over the other team and giving them a little bit of a prompt. But I think once they get through it, the first time they come together as a purple team. They all learn from it. The business owner walks away extremely happy. How often would you say they should go back and do this again?
David Frees: Yeah, so I do a SWOT analysis, which serves some of the same functions and what’s working, what’s not. Four step analysis. I have a process that I do, I try to do that at least once a year each. Yeah. So twice a year I’m getting at this. And if I were to red team, if I was using red team rather than that methodology I would probably do it at least [00:48:00] once a year.
Q4, early Q4, so that whatever surfaces we could start working on those and make those initiatives for the end of Q4 and the start of the following year. So that you’re positioning yourself well from the start.
Tyson Franklin: Yeah. When I had my clinic, I think it’s one of those things I probably thought about it too much and it was, I used to say to Christine, people that know Christine as my wife, and I would say to Christine all the time and go, I always say expect the worst ’cause then when it doesn’t happen, life is a joy.
It is absolutely fantastic. And it’s, some people say, oh, that sounds negative, but I actually look at that as a positive that you think, what are the worst things that could happen if you’ve mitigated that? If it doesn’t happen, then everything is a bonus.
David Frees: Yep. I’m a little bit of a catastrophizer myself.
I’m a. Easily run negative scenarios, but it [00:49:00] is to your point, it, as long as you can control that, it does help you to anticipate problems that you can mitigate in advance then.
Tyson Franklin: Yeah. And ’cause I think, some people just look at life through rose colored glasses and they just think everything’s always going to be fantastic.
And I dunno if it was because, in my younger days I faced a lot of adversity in different areas and that sort of made me realize that life can sometimes be really tough and really unfair. And that’s just the way that it is. So I’ve always thought about if this happens, what will I do? If this happens, what will I do?
So I’m always being prepared
David Frees: and so I uh, to answer your question, I would consider doing either what’s working, what’s not. Analysis or SWAT or using Red Team Blue Team Purple Team exercises at least twice a year. Yeah. Once toward the end of once midyear to see like where are we, did we do what we [00:50:00] were supposed to do?
What should we be doing to close out the year to meet our goals and fix our systems and things like that.
Tyson Franklin: Okay. And if you’ve got the same team members that are on board, would the next time you do it, would you mix up the team? Or do you keep the red team the same members and the blue team the same or mix ’em up?
David Frees: Yeah. When I’ve done this, I’ve had blue cards and red cards and they’ve got a pick and it’s arbitrary so that, they could end up on the same team whatsoever but people, like if a person is slightly negative. View of the world.
Tyson Franklin: Yeah,
David Frees: it could be very useful to the red team,
here’s my role now I’ve gotta fulfill that. So you could tell them and tell that team you role is to be very negative and very destructive here. That is your job. You’ve been assigned it, you didn’t pick it. You may not want to do it, you may not like it, but that’s your job here and it’s gonna be super helpful to everyone’s success in the end.
So I like to do it arbitrarily because [00:51:00] it lets the person psychologically a little bit off the hook. It gives them less of a constraint if they’re on the red team.
Tyson Franklin: Okay.
It’s just fate. Except the business owner. The business owners on the blue team.
David Frees: I probably would put the business owner on the blue team, but if we can avoid having the business owner on one of the teams, it’s better ’cause they’ll learn a lot.
Tyson Franklin: Oh. So if there’s enough team members, let the team do this and the business owner sits back and just watches.
David Frees: Yeah. I thought you were asking earlier if I had to put ’em on one team, where would I put ’em?
Tyson Franklin: Yeah, I was, that’s what I was talking about before. If you had to put them somewhere, you would put ’em on the blue team. I would. And, but in general, if there’s enough team members there, don’t put them on a team.
Let them sit back. I think their presence and enjoy the carnage.
David Frees: The presence is, their presence is gonna have potentially stifling effect. Correct.
Tyson Franklin: But if there’s not a lot of team members, you would throw ’em in the blue team? I would.
David Frees: And that’s how I would put it to the red team.[00:52:00]
I would say we’re putting the boss or whoever on the blue team to defend their own practice. Yeah. What they’ll find is that they’re gonna try to defend stuff that’s not really where they’re most vulnerable to attack.
Tyson Franklin: And that’s where everyone’s minds are probably opened up because they’re thinking, this is where I think I’m vulnerable.
This is where I think they’re gonna try and attack us. And they put all the time and energy into that and the red team may not have even considered that. And they’ve gone completely different angle. And when they come together, they just go, wow, you, geez, you guys are mean. Yeah. But that’s their job. Yeah.
That’s red team. And I think that’s the part of the beginning too that really needs to be clarified to the red team. Your job is to be mean. You do not hold back, just be mean.
David Frees: Order to play two roles. Think of yourself probably as somebody that wants to do [00:53:00] damage to this practice and could, and just to determine what could go wrong without, with, or without you.
Yeah. And then the other thing is you affirmatively do to do harm to this practice so that you could buy or acquire it or get their patients.
Tyson Franklin: I love this. This topic is absolutely fantastic. There’s
David Frees: no right set instructions, there’s only ways of thinking about it and prompting deep thought I would depending on the practice and the size, I would think about the instructions to the red team and the blue team a little bit differently.
But generally, I think you’re talking about relatively small practices that maybe have four this or 10 people. And so that’s why I’m suggesting the, this way of looking at it. But I think you might depending on the size of your practice or if you’re facilitating the size of the practice you’re working with, you might think about different ways of describing the job.
Essentially what the job of these two are. Attack, destroy, [00:54:00] seek vulnerabilities, even if you are not going to.
Tyson Franklin: And
David Frees: the other is to defend threats and identify opportunities that can be seized. I can think of other ways of instructing, red team, blue team analysis, but if that’s what you’re looking to do, which is give the business owner and the team an eye-opening experience to things they didn’t think about and vulnerabilities they may be exposed to.
And then when you bring ’em together, the idea is which of these is most likely to happen or is reasonably likely to happen, but with devastating effects? And what, if anything, should we do about it? And then on the other side, which of these opportunities that surface that we didn’t even know about, should we seize, fix this system, bring in, enact this marketing?
Like marketing can be a defense against an attack and simultaneously way of seizing an opportunity.
Like you, if you say, oh, this is our perfect kind of patient and they’re being taken away by [00:55:00] this online supplier of this thing. Yeah. Then you might have a marketing campaign that tells people, like affluent people you want custom, you don’t want what, like online, you don’t want that like men’s warehouse kind of suit.
You want like a bespoke suit, so you look fantastic. That’s what we provide, not that. So now you’ve got this marketing campaign that is both defensive. It’s helping you to eliminate a immediately post threat, but it’s offensive in trying to capture more market share too, of the type that you want.
Tyson Franklin: No, that makes perfect sense.
So is it, is there more to this topic you’d like to talk about?
David Frees: I think there’s some things like what goes on Yeah. In each of these and how we apply these other I would love to give more ideas to prac to practice on.
Yeah that’d
Tyson Franklin: be fantastic.
Okay, Dave, I want to get you back on so that we can take this to a whole other level. So [00:56:00] anyone who’s watched this episode, if you’re watching on YouTube or you’re listening to the podcast, Dave will be back. I hope you will be back, won’t you, Dave?
Unless something terrible happens. Oh geez. Oh, don’t, no, nothing terrible is gonna happen. You haven’t got some red team trying to attack you. I do. That’s the problem is, everybody’s got energy,
David Frees: yeah,
Tyson Franklin: that’s true. As long as
David Frees: I’m ahead, as long as I’m a step ahead and be back on.
Tyson Franklin: Yeah, you have lived.
Okay, Dave, I wanna thank you for coming on the podcast. I look forward to having you come back and I’ll be talking again very soon. Yeah. Looking forward to it. Thank you so much and I hope this was useful. Oh, very useful. So thank you very much. Take care.