Turning Theory into Practice
In Episode 380, I first spoke with Dave Frees about the concept of the Red, Blue and Purple Team Strategy; a powerful way to future-proof your business by testing vulnerabilities and strengthening your team’s creativity.
In this follow-up episode, we take it one step further. I recently ran a team-building and creativity day at a podiatry clinic, applying the Red, Blue, and Purple Team process in real time. What unfolded was eye-opening, not just for the clinic, but for me as well.
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From SWOT to Strategy on Steroids
We started the day with a simple SWOT analysis, but the magic happened when we combined it with the Red and Blue Team exercise.
The Red Team’s job was to find weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and potential threats to the business. The Blue Team focused on defending those vulnerabilities, strengthening existing systems, and creating new safeguards.
When both teams came together as the Purple Team, the results were incredible. The ideas that surfaced weren’t just creative, they were practical, strategic, and forward-thinking. It took the SWOT analysis concept and injected it with strategic steroids.
One of the most significant lightbulb moments came when someone on the Red Team suggested ways a business’s reputation could be attacked, through rumours, reviews, or social media misinformation. It was confronting, but it got everyone thinking about reputation protection and proactive communication.
Creating a Culture of Creativity and Resilience
Dave highlighted that this type of exercise isn’t just a bit of fun; it’s training for the brain. It primes your team’s creative function, develops problem-solving muscles, and builds resilience.
Too many podiatry clinics fall into the trap of “set and forget.” They build a system that works, but when the world changes around them, they’re caught flat-footed.
The clinics that thrive are the ones that can think creatively on demand, respond to challenges, and continually innovate.
By practising Red, Blue, and Purple Team thinking, you’re teaching your team how to anticipate problems, adapt quickly, and work collaboratively, precisely what a modern podiatry clinic needs.
Bringing AI into the Mix
Dave and I also explored how AI can amplify this process. Imagine running your Red Team exercise, gathering all the ideas, and then asking AI:
“What are we missing? What other threats or opportunities should we consider?”
Tools like GPT-5 or Claude (not available in Australia yet) can take your brainstorming further, helping you identify blind spots or simulate how a patient, referrer, or competitor might react in different scenarios.
But as Dave wisely pointed out, humans must go first.
Let your team think independently, then use AI to challenge, deepen, and refine their thinking. That combination of human intuition and machine insight is where the real power lies.
Resilience, Reputation, and Readiness
We also discussed the importance of resilience, both personal and professional.
Every practice will face challenges: a patient complaint, a poor review, or a staff member leaving unexpectedly. When you’ve already discussed and rehearsed these scenarios, you don’t panic; you execute the plan.
That’s what I love about Dave’s Red Team framework. It’s not about fear or negativity, it’s about preparedness and calm control. When things go wrong, your systems, mindset, and people are ready.
As I often tell my coaching clients, when your emotions are high, your intelligence is low. The more you anticipate, the less reactive you become.
Future-Proofing Starts with Thinking Differently
At its core, this episode is about awareness, staying alert, creative, and ready for whatever the future throws at you. Whether it’s technology shifts, staffing changes, or unexpected crises, the practices that think strategically and train their teams to adapt will always be one step ahead.
So if you want to build a clinic that lasts, one that can weather challenges and capitalise on new opportunities, try introducing the Red, Blue, and Purple Team approach into your next team meeting.
You might be surprised at what your team comes up with, and how much more confident and connected they feel afterwards.
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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT (Unedited)
Tyson E Franklin: [00:00:00] Okay. It is fantastic to have Dave Frees back. Now, you may recognize that name Dave was on recently, episode 380 and it was titled Red Team, blue Team, purple Team, future Proofing Your Podiatry Business. What we’re gonna talk about today, we’re gonna take this another, we’re gonna go a little bit deeper with this because it’s a great subject and so Dave, great to have you back again.
Dave Frees: It’s always awesome to be here. I’ve been looking forward to it.
Tyson E Franklin: So what I wanted to run through today is I, I wanna explain that I went to somebody’s Podiatry clinic, spent the day with their team. We did a team building and creativity day. Fantastic day. We ran through a whole pile of things.
It was. It was just a really fun day. But as part of the creativity and the team building, we applied the red team, blue team and purple team. So we split the team, split the clinic numbers into two, had the blue team go off and try and think of things that the red team, so as we’ll just rephrase, the red team is trying to come up with [00:01:00] ways to harm the business and the blue team is trying to come up with defenses.
That’s just a, a very quick summary.
Dave Frees: Right. Or, uh, if we wanna state it less diabolically, the red team’s trying to, the vulnerabilities and the blue team is trying to think of ways to strengthen the strengths and fix or mitigate the weaknesses.
Tyson E Franklin: Yeah, that’s a, that’s a nice way of putting
Dave Frees: it. I the diabolical, uh, responses.
So,
Tyson E Franklin: yeah. So got, got them to split up into two teams and. They had a lot of fun doing it and I said to the blue team, just think, you dunno what the red team is going to come up with. There’ll be some probably some common things that you think that they’ll do. So come up with how you would defend that or what you would do to mitigate it or lessen the chance of damaging the clinic.
And then I said to the red team, now remember the blue team is gonna be trying to come up with defensive, so what else can you come up with? And I was rotating between the two teams, so I had a rough idea what they were both doing, but I must admit , some of the people in the red [00:02:00] team, the people who you think were the sweetest with the biggest smiles were the most diabolical.
Dave Frees: Oh yeah. I find that to be that, to be true in the world generally.
Tyson E Franklin: But some of the things that came out when we brought the two teams together and I, I’d have the red team say, this is what we do to you. And the blue team went, ha, this was our defense towards that. And I go, oh, nice. And it was backwards and forwards the blue team and the red team, they were battling each other. Yeah. And then when we brought ’em into as a purple team, just to discuss the whole thing, there were a number of things that the red team came up with that the blue team went, oh. Never thought about that. And also, but something that, especially when it came around to starting rumors and damaging reputation of individuals or clinics, and they were like, oh, I never thought about that. And which, so that was something that when they came together and thought, okay, how could we fix this? I think that really opened up everybody’s eyes.
Dave Frees: So that’s a really good example. [00:03:00] We, as the operators of professional practice, I represent I operate a professional practice, not a podiatric one, but as operators of professional practices, we like to hope and think that stuff’s not gonna go on.
Yeah. Uh.
But this is a really great exercise for doing just that, making us aware of things that we hadn’t thought consciously could happen, but which could be very damaging. And identifying vulnerabilities we hadn’t thought about, as well as us thinking about what if the world changes, what if we’re vulnerable in a way that we suddenly didn’t expect, whether it’s triggered by a red team or not.
And so it gets people normalizing this process and, creating a cycle. Of going through it again and again and again, which makes them way better in their capability of reacting to changing and volatile times and to threats that do actually arise. They’re not caught flatfooted. So this whole thing in case doctors are listening and wondering like, well, this sounds like a fantastic fun exercise for team building.
It’s way more than it does much, much more. So carry on. [00:04:00]
Tyson E Franklin: Yeah, ’cause we started doing the SWOT analysis at the beginning of the day, and this was like taking the SWOT analysis and injecting it with steroids. Exactly. I. Different level. I like that
Dave Frees: you do that. I do the same thing.
I do it in the same order. I do an exercise, a four step exercise called What’s Working or what’s not, or I do the swot ’cause it gets everybody thinking about what those strengths and weaknesses are. So it primes the pump and you’ve got strengths and weaknesses, which are internal to the practice, and then the external opportunities and threats.
What’s outside in the world that you don’t necessarily control but that you need to be aware of. So that really primes the pump for both teams. And then when you bring them together for purple, it’s also creating this collaborative environment. So you feel like if you’re on the destructive side, you’re doing it for a good purpose, as much fun as you might have dive.
Yeah.
Tyson E Franklin: One of the things we did too with the SWOT analysis, had them do the SWOT analysis, strength, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. Had them, gave ’em a few minutes to write down a couple of things in each quadrant. Then I said, okay, now what I want you to do is pass your [00:05:00] sheet to the person, to your left.
Mm-hmm. Read what the other person’s got there. Now add to it. Don’t write it, you’ve already written. Just look what they’ve written down. Does it prompt any ideas? And then you continue on. Then gave ’em another few minutes. Pass it to the person on the left. So all of a sudden you were getting.
You’d see what somebody else ran. You go, oh, never even thought about that. But then that would spark off something else. So that was like really priming it before we went into the red team, blue team, and then mm-hmm. Purple team afterwards.
Dave Frees: So much fun. And you also priming something that I think is super powerful, which is you’re priming the creative function.
So a lot of Podiatry practices or professional practices, they’re not creative at all. They build a system, they think they’ve cracked the code. Yeah. The system stays in place. Wherever the world changes around ’em, it turns into a pile of like a of steaming pile of dung. That doesn’t work anymore.
Practices there. Then there are the other practices that occasionally somebody has a brilliant idea and [00:06:00] they do something and it helps for a while. But what you wanna be is the practice that can be creative in functional, valuable ways, like on demand. And what you were doing with that exercise is training that function into the, to the practice and the recognition that they could be way, way, way, way, way more creative than they thought they could be all the time in a cycle.
Both on the offense side and the defense side.
Tyson E Franklin: The good part about doing all this one, one, I got everybody in the team thinking. Mm-hmm. Uh, had about six or seven exercises we did, throughout the day. And it was a simple thing. Even that’s why we left the red team, blue team, pebble team pretty much was the second last activity of the day.
The last activity was just wrapping it up with what were your biggest ideas and for couple of steps to get it started. Even one of the other things we did was had them, if all of a sudden you had $10,000 and you had to spend it on something that would help grow the business in some way, or the team or the [00:07:00] environment where we just spend it, whether it’s on decor, marketing and did the same thing, split ’em into two teams and then once they went through it all, I had them, they had to present what they’d come up with to the other team and all and try and sell it like they’re on Shark Tank.
Oh, that’s brilliant. It was really funny. ‘Cause then they had to sell the other team at this idea was great and they came up with completely different ideas. One was all about taking the team away to a conference and spending the money that way. And the other team was all about bringing things into the clinic, making the whole environment of the clinic better.
So, it was good. And I think they both sold each other on both ideas.
Dave Frees: That’s fantastic. I love that for so many reasons. But I think you did something that was quite brilliant. You sequenced that in the right way. ’cause if you put the red team, blue team exercise too early. You don’t get the full advantage of it.
Yeah. You let them get the full [00:08:00] advantage of all this other exploration and then by making people sell their ideas, ’cause they’ve now developed a bias for whichever team they’re on. You blunt that bias by bringing them together in the purple team, which shows them like, Hey, we think this way, then we think this way.
Then we come together and figure it out. And then you had them selling each other, which is the same process. Like, Hey, we both have good ideas. How do we make this work? And that reminds me of something that I think is very powerful. I often have people do a paradox resolution exercise. Like for example, I recently wrote down, that, and I wear it on a, I wear two, two, things here.
One says. Standing still is falling behind. And the other says Sepro tus, which is always prepared. So I was thinking to myself, well, standing still is falling behind ’cause everything changes around you. And if you’re not paying attention, you’re losing ground. You’re not staying where you thought you were.
But at the same time, I also wrote down, I need to stand still and be quiet and have quiet time in order to [00:09:00] advance, in order to get better ideas, in order to be more creative. So how do we reconcile those two things that seem. Like polar opposites. Mm. Uh, Jocko, you, you were at a conference with me and with Jocko once, and you know, Jocko has, discipline is freedom, which is it.
Yeah. Right. Discipline gives us an enormous amount of freedom. And I love reconciling dichotomy because it makes you play in that area and to realize what’s true about both and what are the gradation and nuances in between, and that’s what the purple team part does. It makes. People realize that the red team wasn’t totally right and the blue team wasn’t totally right, but they both have great ideas and they’ve gotta play in that area where what do we actually do?
How do we prioritize the great ideas? , Which ones can we actually implement? Which versus which ones are impossible right now? If they’re impossible right now, how do we get the resources to do them? If you want both to go away to the conference and to have a barista, like how do you get the resources to do both?
And so that is. Fabulous. This red team, blue Team purple team [00:10:00] stimulates a whole bunch of great strengths in a business or a professional practice, and you hit them all in that process. You did with them.
Tyson E Franklin: Yeah. Well, what was interesting when they were talking about, oh, the Podiatry could go away to this particular conference, and I said, well, that’s great.
I said, but what do you do with your admin team at the same time? I said, how that’s not motivating for them. And they went, oh yeah. What about if we sent them off to a retreat for the weekend while we were away at the conference? I tell you, the admin team was like, yeah, we’re sold. Yeah, you’ve sold us on that.
But when you were talking about the standing still, you’re falling behind. That’s the second part of the Red Queen hypothesis. Yes, correct. Yeah. And then the other part you were talking about
Dave Frees: when you’re smarter than you look.
Tyson E Franklin: Thank you Dave much. I, I do, I I, I fool people all the time. And, And the other part when you’re talking about Jocko, uh, and that sort of relates to when he was saying, slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
Dave Frees: Slow. Smooth. Smooth is fast. [00:11:00] They seem like they’re the polar opposites of one another. But the that little special forces of saying kind of condenses, it gets you thinking about it. Oh, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. So slow is fast.
Tyson E Franklin: Yeah. And he gave the example ‘ when they used to deploy at a helicopters, everyone would try and get out as fast they could and they would pretty much fall over the top of each other and they get injured getting out.
Yeah. But then they realized if they just went out very smooth and very slow and very organized. We’re doing it slower, but they’re all actually getting out faster. And sometimes even our Podiatry clinics, we try and do too much too fast and we need to, stop, assess and then work out what’s the next best thing to do.
Dave Frees: Exactly, and that’s counterintuitive, but it’s the team and the doc in the practice who get used to dealing in that gray area and reconciling these seemingly different. Contradictory [00:12:00] things that gives a practice an enormous benefit. It might not be obvious immediately, but think about it. If you as a doc get that and your team gets that and you, you can attack and you can defend, and you can come together and decide how it’s gonna be implemented and how you’re gonna do it.
And if you don’t have enough resources, how do you get the resources if you’re good at that? Nothing is going to destroy your practice and you’re going to future proof it, as we were saying. Mm-hmm. Whereas other practices that aren’t practicing and rehearsing these things, they’re in the standing, still is falling behind or just plain old falling behind mode.
Tyson E Franklin: Yeah. And it, I think we mentioned on the last episode when I, and I’ve done podcasts and I’ve spoke about before I, I’d have my disaster folder. Yeah. Where I’d think about, think of all the things that could possibly go wrong in the practice and have a folder set up and ready. So when something happens, when you are lying on a beach in Bali, you’re not getting a phone call or emails going, oh, the power’s not working.
What should we do? They should [00:13:00] automatically go, we know exactly what to do. ’cause it’s all in the disaster folder
Dave Frees: and there’s a magical power. Now, I’m glad you mentioned that too, because when you did that, you had to go through everything. And rely on your ability to think of all of the things that could go wrong, which you and I are, are fortunately very good at, we can, come up with disasters.
That could happen all the time. We’re good at creating these scenarios. But, as you build a team, it’s good to get the team to come together and say, Hey, these other things could go wrong in my section. Stuff we weren’t even thinking about. But now we have the magical power of AI too, which has gotten so good at things like this so we can, yeah.
Put in all the disaster planning we’ve done so far, and say to AI, can you make suggestions about other things we might not have thought of that go wrong with this type of practice or any other type of business? And what are, can you make suggestions about ways to mitigate them or plans to deal with them?
And so you could produce an even more well thought out and nuanced plan and you can produce summaries, executive summaries of each [00:14:00] section. That could be super helpful when you’re in Bali and you don’t want to be thinking about it. And so, one of the things that I was thinking about after our last meeting was how powerful, ’cause you asked me a couple of times, what about somebody that’s got a small practice that doesn’t have a big team?
Yeah.
And you know, AI, and we can talk about lots of ways that these red team, blue Team purple teams can be used and lots of ways that AI. Can be deployed. I’ll give you a quick example. In a practice, I’ll go through and say, what are the essential business functions of this practice? And of those where is there a bottleneck now?
Where is there a known problem? Where are there opportunities you’re not exploiting? And then we, red team, blue team and purple team that, right? So we’re starting from a position and those are typically flushed out, as you said, with a SWOT analysis or something, but thinking about your business as what are all of these.
Essential business functions. What’s our marketing look like? What’s our sales look like? What does our finance and bookkeeping look like? What does, what are our KPIs look like? [00:15:00] What are our standard operating procedures look like? And then there’s medical versions too. What are our practices to prevent, surgical infection look like?
What if there’s a reaction to a Medicaid? They’re all of these things, but we can use and. AI, even when it’s just a few of us to start to help us rank those and prioritize those. Where would we get the biggest bang for the buck to , come up with synthetic responses of patients to particular things like if we don’t have a bunch of patients there, we, ’cause AI knows from the billions of reviews, of Podiatry practices that are out there, what people are thinking and doing and saying when certain things happen.
So you can say to it. What might the patient say if X, Y, and Z happened? And we responded this way. So there’s the magic of the red team, blue team. There’s the magic of bringing them together in the purple team. There’s the magic of knowing what the key of functions in your business or practice are.
And then there’s the magic of the meta level, strategic level and tactical level stuff where you could use red team blue team on all that. And then [00:16:00] finally. I’ve started using AI in all of these to help each of the teams. So I now show each of the teams how to use AI and it’s just magical. It’s revved that process up even more.
It’s like on mega steroids now.
Tyson E Franklin: When and when you are talking AI, what programs are you particularly using?
Dave Frees: Good question. So if I’m doing research, I’ve got some very specific research site, but perplexity would be a good place to start because perplexity is a research tool. Okay. If I’m asking it questions, I’m gonna use either Claude or GPT five, and I’m gonna prompt it to try to in GPT five, especially to eliminate some of the,
of the hallucination that takes place. , In other words, if you ask it to look at all the patient reviews of podiatric practices in your state with your kind of demographics or whatever , you want to tell it, I want you to use only that data and I want you to pay careful attention to it.
I want you to fact check it so it [00:17:00] doesn’t just think that it’s supposed to make you feel happy with its responses.
Tyson E Franklin: When I do the podcast. I’ll take the transcript, put it into, chat GTP five. It helps do the show notes for me. Yeah, and it was pulling, it was pulling out some quotes and I’m looking at these quotes and I’m going, I don’t recall.
Like I listened to the podcast. I edited the podcast. I don’t recall, Dave saying that. So then I would ask, I go, are these real quotes? Are these ones you’ve made up? Oh, I made ’em up. I like its
Dave Frees: honesty at least. Yeah.
Tyson E Franklin: It just went, oh, you want ones specifically from the people. I mean, yes.
Dave Frees: So you should have to ask, but you do have to prompt it that way now, right at the moment.
Yeah,
Tyson E Franklin: , So as I was going through, I had to realize that, yeah, it was pulling quotes out, but it was quotes that it was just making up based on the content that they thought, oh, this would be a great quote and. Lucky I picked up the first time that it did it, and then [00:18:00] after that I said, no, must be word for word what was said by the guest or by myself.
And then since then, never had a problem with it. But yeah, it’s little things like that. You’ve gotta be careful, you’ve gotta check your work.
Dave Frees: Yep. No question about it. But Claude and , GPT five are my go-to for Claude, what I’m using. It’s, it’s really best for longer. Uh, now, like chat, GPT will write things in little chunks.
So if you’re writing a short, , SOP for one of your teams, , fine check your work. But Claude, if you’re writing, , a series of chapters, uh, for your manual, your disaster manual with executive summaries, it’s gonna be able to handle a bigger, longer, more robust prompt to keep going. But those are the two I’m using for those kind of thinking, writing tasks and the reasoning tasks.
But to your point. All my prompts still to in both of them emphasize like if I’m having one of those two large language models, do research. I tell it, I only want you to pick [00:19:00] studies that you judge to be , valid on these criteria to fact check yourself, uh, to give me the answer regardless of whether you think it’s gonna make me happy or not, , and that way.
Uh, like you, my experience is that I’m getting more accurate information from them. Yeah. And I, my experience is I get more accuracy from Claude without like, really, you know, I don’t have to reprimand it as much as I do chat GPT.
Tyson E Franklin: Yeah. I’m not sure anyone listen to this if we can still, ’cause previously I look, we couldn’t use Claude in Australia, so I dunno if that’s still the case.
Oh, I’ll double check that. Yeah.
Dave Frees: It’s a very powerful tool, for writing and for more detailed writing, and it’s pretty easy. It’s got, uh, a gigantic memory back, the GPT five does too, so it’s pretty easy to prompt it and give it lots of background information and show it documents so that when you ask it questions, it’s going to.
Go out and get other information, but rely predominantly on your instructions in these prompts and or the information that [00:20:00] you’re giving it to consider. It’s very good at that.
Tyson E Franklin: Yeah. The AI’s changed so much in a positive way and that’s why I like it when I see people using it the right way.
And then you see other people, they go write me a blog article and go, yeah, you can do more than that.
Dave Frees: Yeah. I mean like in this red team, blue Team purple team. Everything that you surface, that the team surface can be reexamined through that lens too. And so every threat and every opportunity you could flesh more nuance out in it or surface ideas that you hadn’t considered.
And then either ways to carry it out if it’s an opportunity or ways to mitigate it, if it’s a threat and how to do it, and the procedures you need and the steps to take when it’s great at helping you to figure that out. I like to have humans do it first.
Yeah.
And then say what we considered so far. What else do you see in there that we should be thinking about?
Other threats, other opportunities, other steps that we should be taking, ways to improve it, that sort of thing.
Tyson E Franklin: And that’s the thing, you can go into AI and you can say, Hey, we’ve just [00:21:00] done this exercise, red team, blue team, this is what we came up with, red team, this is what we came up with, blue team, we came together.
These are some of the other thoughts. What are we missing? And I, I know straight away, because it knows exactly what Red Team Blue Team’s all about. It’s going to give you a lot more information. And like you said, once you find something else and you put it in there, you can just keep digging deeper on that problem and trying to find solutions so it doesn’t actually become a problem.
Dave Frees: Yeah, I agree. So a fabulous tool and a major force multiplier. , To any of the, aspects of this Red Team, blue Team Purple Team sequencing that we’re talking about. Because what we haven’t made too explicit yet is all of the Red Team, blue Team Purple team stuff is all to get us to a place where we are starting to do things differently and better and more efficiently or crutching down a timeline.
It’s not just for the sake of having the fun of doing it, that’s fantastic, but it’s to come up with [00:22:00] ideas. What can we do better? What do we need to change of these things that we could change, which are the ones that are in, help us to get clarity about what we’re doing, which are the things that are most in alignment with that?
Who should go first? Who’s best qualified to do this? And so it’s not the exercise. The exercise is in service of protecting ourself from attack or vulnerability or doing new things better. And, the AI could be very good at helping us to that last mile, which is, what are we gonna do about this exercise that we did today?
Tyson E Franklin: Yeah. And like you said, it’s better to have humans doing it first. Yes. Put the information in and then use AI to dig deeper. And even if you are, like, if you were , a solo practitioner and you might have one admin staff, , even as a solo practitioner, you could still sit there and go, okay, what are some of the threats?
And be the red team, also be the blue team, put that into AI and then start working with ai.
Dave Frees: Yeah, because we get a cognitive bias. The thing is, if we ask AI [00:23:00] first, then we tend to think the through the lens that the AI gave us. Whereas if we do it first, AI is better at looking at it from multiple perspectives.
In fact, I’ll sometimes even prompt it to look at it from the perspective of this , from the perspective of a competitor, from the perspective of these various teams within my organization, from perspectives I haven’t considered, analyze this thing that we’ve come up with either this vulnerability, this good idea, or how we’re gonna implement it.
And so that’s why it’s really important that the humans go first because the humans could do things that the AI can’t and vice versa. And the AI’s good at looking at enormous amounts of data that we don’t have available to us, but we gotta do the. Fundamental deep strategic thinking first, and then let AI help us to refine it or else AI puts us in a little box as to how we think.
Tyson E Franklin: Yeah. And that was one of the things when I said one of the threats when they had the red team was to try and damage the reputation of mm-hmm. Somebody who’s already working in the business. It wasn’t [00:24:00] necessarily just the business owner, it could be an employee.
And so therefore you could put into cha, this is how we were gonna damage someone’s reputation.
Now, how, what would you do if your reputation was being challenged to fix your reputation? And AI will come up with a lot of things that you will not even think about.
Dave Frees: And, uh, you may find it, you may, may not have encountered this, but. , I think if you put into to chat GPT, Hey, we were thinking about damaging somebody’s reputation this way, it might say, I can’t help you with that.
But if you say this is an exercise and the end goal is to figure out how we protect ourselves from people trying to do this, it then will help you. Yeah.
Because
it’s generally programmed not to try to help you to do nefarious or illegal things, but if you clarify that you’re doing it for good, not for evil, it will probably help you then.
Tyson E Franklin: And even with the reputation, that’s why I think it’s for [00:25:00] everybody. Even if nobody is damaging your reputation, from the time you start working, you should always be trying to build your reputation that, yeah, that you’re an honest person, that people can trust you. , You are reliable. , You constantly keep working on your reputation, so you, if it’s ever challenged.
You’ve got all this history behind you that is going to probably protect no matter what somebody says about you, your reputation , will protect you.
Dave Frees: Yeah, and I think it’s valuable that way because it gets you focused on how is it that I legitimately and ethically and truthfully build trust and reputation with people.
Because to your point, if people have 27 experiences with you, even if it’s on online information, you’re giving them the last six appointments where they came to see you and they were treated with dignity and respect. If they see a bad review. That says you are a dirt ball. They’re gonna go, that’s a crazy person because all of the go its conflicts with that.
So it, the red team, blue tea [00:26:00] purple team exercise is good ’cause it surfaces something that you might never have thought that would happen. What if somebody does attack my reputation and it gets you focused on doing the right thing, but it also got you focused on this idea that you had never considered.
That a patient might try to do that, a competitor might try to do that. Somebody on your team that you fired might try to do that. Hmm. Somebody that’s certainly angry and you don’t even know is a problem, might try to do that. And when you realize that’s out there and that you’d never thought of it before, you can have one of two reactions.
You can weep in the fetal position ’cause everything is terrifying. Or you could go okay. I need to be even more focused. To your point, Tyson, on how do I build and reinforce my reputation online, on social media, on the platforms where I communicate with people in the letters they sent without them, how they’re billed, how I resolve a patient billing dispute, or a patient that’s dissatisfied with some aspect of the service they got.
Whatever it might be, you’re now thinking about it and building a much more bullet-proof, [00:27:00] future-proof practice.
Tyson E Franklin: Yeah, and I think all that, those four things that you mentioned. I’ve had every one of those attacks on me through my career at various times, whether it was , a patient, a competitor, an ex-employee.
So these things just happen. I think people have gotta be prepared for it. But if you build your reputation up and you’re constantly working on it and maintaining it, when these things flare up, you don’t crawl in the fetal position and go, my life is over. You just know that.
Yeah, , you almost become bulletproof to it because you’ve put all the hard yards in beforehand.
Dave Frees: And this gets me to one other thing I wanted to make sure we talked about, which is resiliency. So, in my model where I have up at the top, I have meta level force multipliers. These are the mindset things.
These are the how do we think about thinking? And one of the top things that leaders that are super successful in any. Walk of life in any profession do is that they [00:28:00] are resilient, they are creative, they are aware of their strengths and weaknesses. They’re aware of the, of their environment and the circumstances.
Now they’re changing, but resiliency is important. And so this process that we’re talking about helps us to strengthen our resiliency. ’cause one part of resiliency is being prepared for things that we weren’t expecting. But another part of resiliency is mentally rehearsing things that we could reasonably foresee.
And building within us the stamina to withstand them and thrive in the face of them. And so I like to think of red team, blue Team, purple team, all in service of these , these high level mindsets. And so when I do Red Team Blue Team. Purple team with business black ops people. I’m doing okay.
How do we do red team blue team, purple team on the well red team and blue team on our mindsets. How do we strengthen our mindsets? Okay, where are we weak in our, so we can be attacked? Then I do it at the strategic level. Are we 80 20 in this? Are we focusing on doing the 20% of the things that give us [00:29:00] 80% of the results?
Like billing. We get the billing system has to be right. And so one of the things you could do with AI or a red team is say to AI or a red team that examines it, does an audit of this is what are the last 30 denials we got for one reason or another. What do they have in common? What system should we build to make sure that doesn’t happen?
Because getting paid the most in the shortest period of time and getting paid for cash for people that want cash services, these are all things that we may not be paying the most attention to. So we may not be paying attention to the right stuff. So I have the red team attack things at the strategic level.
Where are we weak? Where are there opportunities? I have the blue team say, where are we strong? Or we could shore it up already. And where else might we, the red team be thinking about attacking us at the strategic level? Do we have good KPIs? Are we measuring the right thing? Hmm. Uh, we do. We have regular staff meetings where we review things that went wrong.
Do we do a red team, blue team, purple team [00:30:00] exercise twice a year? Do we do SWOT? They’re all of these things that I have them do at the strategic level and then at the tactical level. What are the things that we’re doing every day? Is there a patient intake form that’s ambiguous that people are complaining about?
And so Red t Blue Team, purple team. I run through my framework too, which is cool way to think about it.
Tyson E Franklin: Tell you paperwork. I had to get an MRI done on my ankle, and so I see the specialist writes out the referral. He emails me a copy of the referral. And then sends a copy of the referral to the x-ray place.
Dave Frees: Mm-hmm.
Tyson E Franklin: So then I contact the x-ray place and they said to me, oh, can you email us a, a copy of the referral? I went, uh, yeah. Okay, but shouldn’t you already have it? And they went, oh, we do, but we need you to send it to us as well and go. Okay. So I, I emailed it to them.
And then I can a text message the day before the MRI Oh, can you make sure you bring in a printed copy? I’m going. Everything
Dave Frees: you’re saying is insane. Of
Tyson E Franklin: [00:31:00] course. Yeah. And, I went, okay . you what? I said I’m not gonna take a copy uggies. I’m not gonna take a copy in with me and let’s see what happens.
I turn up and I said I forgot to bring that copy in. They went, oh no, it’s unnecessary. Insane. So they must have old systems in place that they’re still doing, but, and no one’s questioned the way that they’re right strategically putting it together and it was really annoying.
Dave Frees: Yeah. And so that’s the, beauty of having this framework of how to use the red team, blue Team, purple team idea to work through it based on where there’s already a problem.
Work through it based on these three levels, um, now you’re always gonna find more things in your practice than you can fix. You don’t have the time, the money, the resources. So another amazing skill is figuring out which one of these. If we fix it might fix all the others. Yeah. Which one of these is gets us the biggest bang for the buck?
Which one of [00:32:00] these fixes the problem that takes away our attention? For most of the time. And that’s a separate skill. And that’s where the purple team, I use the purple team a lot like. How do we get to implementation ready? Which of these are we gonna do? And I always point out to them ’cause they think, oh, there’s not a lot of vulnerabilities.
Oh, there’s only a few strengths, we’re good at everything, blah, blah. And then they surface all these vulnerabilities that they start to panic because they could be destroyed 72 ways they’d ever thought about now. But the truth is. That there’s probably three of those that matter the most, or there’s some, if it’s not a vulnerability, there’s something that we’re doing well or not doing so well, but that we could easily improve.
There could be hundreds of those, but there’s probably only two or three that really matter. And so the, I like to use that and I like to use AI by the way, after the humans do the prioritization first and to show their work and explain why. And then we say, this is what we, the solutions we had, these are the ones we picked.
This is why, , how do you agree with us or disagree with [00:33:00] us? Explain your reasoning. And sometimes you get insights there that we just go, wow. And I always do something Tyson that a lot of people don’t know to do. I say to the AI, what other questions do you need to ask me in order to do this thing I’m asking you to do in the best possible way with the best possible results?
Yeah. And it will ask you questions and it blows you away.
Tyson E Franklin: Oh, I’m always surprised when I prompt it that way, ask me what should I be asking? And when it tells me, I go. Never even thought about that. It just, it’s expand your mind.
Dave Frees: It’s good.
Tyson E Franklin: But the other part, going back a step when you said about the mindset level, is that the threats to your mindset and I think not that the average person in the street is mentally weak.
No, they are, but yeah. Okay. I wasn’t gonna say that, but it’s like, I think because we don’t think about our mindset enough and trying to build resilience. When life throws crap at us, it’s very easy [00:34:00] just to go to pieces. And that’s why whenever I, part of my training, when I have a new graduate come and work with me, and I had this model set up that it’s like the CIA training model.
I could take ’em from where they are three months. I could have ’em functioning like someone had been out for three or five years and did it time and time again. But one of the things I would teach ’em was about the mindset. I would say to ’em, you will get a patient complaint.
It’s going to happen. Yeah. At some stage in your career, it might be the first week, first year, 10 years, you will get a patient, come back in the clinic and they will complain, expect it. This is how you deal with it. I say, you will get a patient, go to the registration board and put in a written complaint.
You will get a letter from the registration board. Don’t go to pieces. What happens? Just expect it’s going to happen. If you’ve done the right thing and you’ve documented everything, dotted all your i’s, crossed your T’s, you’re never gonna have a problem If you’ve done everything right.
It’s when you start cutting corners, not doing your [00:35:00] notes and doing dumb shit, I said, then you could have a problem. So I would mentally get them prepared for adversity. It’s going to happen. Yes.
Dave Frees: Yes.
Tyson E Franklin: And what had happened when it did happen, they go, Hey, look, I got a complaint. Congratulations.
Dave Frees: Yeah. , The stoics do this, they would, periodically wear like scratchy, rough, horrible clothing, even if they were rich and go and sleep in the street.
And the question they would ask themselves is, is this the thing ISO feared? , Meaning. They, they now, they’re pretending and acting like they’ve lost everything and experiencing the discomfort of what it would be like, , to live in the street in terrible, itchy clothing. And they go, eh, this is really not as bad.
Like, I can’t terrorize myself over this anymore. And that’s what you were doing. You were getting them prepared. So when they saw it, they were like, this, despite my best efforts, this is likely to happen. It’s, you going to, and they’re ready for it. Cultivating resilience and cultivating the ability to get clarity [00:36:00] about what you want and cultivating the ability to align what you’re doing with that.
So many doctors I see, and I’m sure you see this in Podiatry too, just go from one thing to the other. They’re just constantly read a book. They change course they. Tell their team to do this. They haven’t thought out, what do I really want this to look like? What do I want this to feel like?
How often do I wanna be here? How often do I want somebody else to be doing these things so that I could be on vacation in Bali and let them go through the disaster manual? And if that’s what I want, who do I have to hire to be able to have that? And what’s, the training look like that’s different?
That’s getting clarity and then alignment of what you actually do to achieve it. And red team blue team and especially with the AI magnifier can really help practice us with that.
Tyson E Franklin: Yeah. And I even think when it, yeah, even at, on a tactical level mm-hmm. I’ll say to people, when you buy a piece of equipment you think is going to change your practice could be a 3D printer.
’cause that’s quite popular these days. [00:37:00] If you get a 3D printer and that’s how you’re now gonna make your orthotics. Have you thought about what will happen the day it stops working? Yeah. Yeah. Think about it before you’ve even bought it. When we buy it, that’s good enough. When we’re gonna get it, at some point it may stop working.
It could be the first week, first year or a couple of years. It, it could break. If that is your whole process and getting your orthotics made and how you promote yourself, what’s your backup plan? If things go pear-shaped, think about it now because it’s going to happen. And when it does happen, you go, oh, we’re already prepared for this.
You are on the beach in Bali and, you’re not getting phone calls about the 3D printer. And,
Dave Frees: And the answers may be things like, the red team blue team will flush this out and the purple team will, will bring it all together. It may be answers like we keep our relationship with whoever was producing our, , rapid turnaround orthotics as a third party, and we just do more of it in-house and we have a reason to do one or the other.
It may be that you have a backup 3D printer. Yeah. It may be that you pay a little more for [00:38:00] rapid response to service it. There are a hundred ways that you could solve that problem. Not everyone’s gonna be right for every practice. One may be stellar for one practice and the worst idea ever for another practice, but that’s why this process is so powerful
Tyson E Franklin: and that’s why it’s important to think about it beforehand.
Don’t wait until things happen before you go, oh, now what do we do? Because this, ’cause they, it all blends on the mindset, the strategic level and the tactical level. They all fit in together, which is why you’re thinking in all three.
Dave Frees: When you strengthen the mindset, you make better strategic decisions and things bother you less when they go wrong, which they are going to.
Yeah. And then strategy, if you’re picking the right strategies, it makes you way better at tactical enactment, like you’re using the right strategy, so you’re way more likely to do the right thing more often.
Tyson E Franklin: Yeah, it’s funny isn’t it? When your emotions are high?
Intelligence is low.
Dave Frees: Yeah. And that’s, to your point, if you rehearse them [00:39:00] so that things that would traumatize another practice are just like, Hey, I knew this was gonna happen. You still have, you have resilience, you have emotional bandwidth. You can think more clearly than somebody that’s running around screaming, oh, I’ve got a complaint.
I’ve got a complaint. Ah,
Tyson E Franklin: yeah. And, but I go to Muay Thai every morning, 6:00 AM , and I mentally prepare myself that every day I could get hurt. Sure. Just part of it. But I always think if I’m gonna get hurt, I’m not gonna hurt my upper body and lower body at the same time.
So if I get a lower limb injury, what can I still do? Upper body. So I can still go to the class each day. If it’s an upper body injury, what can I still do? Lower that so I can keep going each day. And there’s been times where I’ve, I’ve injured a wrist, I already know what I’m gonna do.
When that injury happens. When this happens, this is what I’m gonna do. And we talk about it in the gym all the time, which is why if somebody does have a mild injury, if they don’t turn up, we go, you are weak. We’ve had this [00:40:00] conversation. By the way, there’s always something you can do.
Dave Frees: I just tend to conversation with my brother, not about weak minded fools like you, you were talking about, but um.
But I, Rob said to me, the more I think about things, the more I take the time to think, the more I realize most people don’t think, and he’s exactly the fact, and that’s why I said not maliciously, but 90% of people wandering around will. None of what we’ve talked about here. 90% of practices will never consider any of the things we’ve talked about.
10% of them might read a book about it or think about it, or listen to this podcast of that. 10% of them. So just the tiniest number will ever do anything about it. But they will be so much more powerful and adaptive and their practice will be so much more of what they want it to be, that the, it’ll be like night and day, just people just don’t think, and they don’t plan.
And they don’t prepare. And those that do and that better yet [00:41:00] do it thoughtfully and strategically. And with the idea of building resiliency and clarity and alignment and self-awareness, like you had this self-awareness, I you’re talking to a guy as that sustained a serious spinal cord injury training.
Yeah. Where I was paralyzed. So same thing like, uh. Yet. And when I was paralyzed, by the way, I instructed my own potential rescuers, so I remained calm. So a couple things went through my mind. I said oh, is my will signed? ’cause I know I’m paralyzed and I know that things aren’t good. And I was like, yeah, check, do I have enough life insurance for Robin and the kids check I’m all good.
And then I was like, oh my, what if my penis doesn’t work? So that was the.
But then people were gonna move me and I said, don’t move me. I have a serious spinal cord injury. Yeah. I’m concerned
Tyson E Franklin: about my penis. That’s it. Was I
Dave Frees: saying right there? I was keeping that to myself. When the EMTs arrived, they were like, rarely does the spinal cord injury [00:42:00] victim instruct their.
Potential rescuers not to move them, and they just thought that it was hilarious that I had the presence of mind to do it. But that’s what we’re talking about here. Hmm. I had many times before that considered, what if I, I did lots of very dangerous things in my life, and so I was constantly thinking.
What if one of these dangerous things goes wrong and I’m shot and killed? What if I sustain a spinal cord injury? All of these things. , And so some people listen to this might go, man, that guy is a psychopath. Who thinks these things? It is that, no, I didn’t think of them because I was afraid of them.
I thought of them ’cause they could happen and I don’t want to be afraid of ’em. So I just wanted to be prepared for them.
Tyson E Franklin: Yeah, I remember when I used to. I’d be driving my car and I used to drive just with my left hand for a week. And then I’d drive just with my right hand and I would constantly just keep rotating.
’cause I’m thinking what happens if I lost an arm? What would I do? And just people think that’s crazy, but
Dave Frees: You were a happier [00:43:00] person. Have that you could do one or the other.
Tyson E Franklin: And then I was playing rugby league at the time and I dislocated my shoulder. There you go. And did my shoulder and AC joint, popped it back in, and ac joint was buggered.
I had to get to the hospital and I said, oh, it’s all right. I can drive myself. I know how to do it. And I just drove with one hand ’cause I had prepared for that. And you weren’t crying or freaked out? Oh no. I was crying a little bit.
Bloody hurt. I had a few, I had a couple of tears in my eyes, but I didn’t, but you didn’t have to worry about your penis. No, it was good. I hadn’t actually practiced
pee pee
Tyson E Franklin: ing with the other hand though. That would’ve been very handy.
Dave Frees: I feel like it’s fairly straightforward. You’d think so.
Yeah. I’m I’m not here to judge.
Tyson E Franklin: So, so anyway, women listening to this, you have no idea. It’s not the same both hands,
Dave Frees: but I mean, I feel like the message speaks to everybody.
Tyson E Franklin: Remember, CIA Andy, when he was a business Black Ops event and he was talking, what did he refer to [00:44:00] people? A lot of the bobbleheads.
He said, you see them walking down the street and they’re just looking at their phone. They’re not really paying a lot of attention on what’s going on around them. Mm-hmm. And that’s why they sometimes get themselves into danger or get in predicament or get hit by cars.
Dave Frees: Mm-hmm.
Tyson E Franklin: It’s because they’re just not paying attention
Dave Frees: or they’re not aware that their spouse needs their attention or their kids do.
I this is a shocking, horrible thing, but. But people generally didn’t pay enough attention, um, before. But they’re certainly, to your point, not paying any more attention to their environment, their relationships.
They’re, the important things in their lives. And, that’s what, that’s why I’m saying the red team, blue Team, purple team exercise, any of these things that you’re teaching people to do, if they are actually in the small minority of people that both learn them and do them, they will be so rewarded for it.
And by the way, in an environment like where a business environment we’re in [00:45:00] now, where regulatory stuff is training changing all the time, the laws are changing all the time. The demands and the expectation of the patient are changing all the time. What the effects of AI on practices are changing all the time.
How we need to do things are changing all the time. Being agile and having resiliency and being creative and willing to change and cycling through these things and keeping an eye on it. Oh my God, that makes your practice invulnerable to these things that are gonna crush everybody else.
Tyson E Franklin: And when you’re talking about awareness too, life and in general.
And you’ll hear people where a partner may leave and they go, oh, I didn’t see it coming. There probably were signs there, you just weren’t looking for ’em. But I’ve said to podiatrists that I do coaching with, whenever a team member resigns and leaves unexpectedly after they leave, sit back and think about what were all the warning signs, and I’ll guarantee there would’ve been warning signs.
And the next time it happens. Sit down and go, okay, what were the warning signs? You’ll probably find they were the same. So [00:46:00] therefore, when you’ve got your team there, you are now aware when you start to see these things happen, you can go and talk to them beforehand and say, Hey, I’ve noticed this
are you thinking about leaving or do you have concerns? And sometimes if you can talk about it earlier, they won’t leave. Yes. Yes. Because they might only be leaving because they haven’t had a pay rise in two years and they’re getting offered more money somewhere else.
Dave Frees: And by, the way, when we think about this, sometimes in hindsight, we’re very happy that the person left because it now gives us the ability to hire somebody that’s up.
Much better fit with the new team, the new way of thinking, the new environment we’re working in. But to your point, there are sometimes you have a superstar and you don’t want them to leave. And by raising that awareness, that’s that, awareness of the surroundings, situational awareness, self-awareness.
These are high level, mindsets that real performers cultivate.
Tyson E Franklin: On that note, Dave, this has been absolutely fantastic. I [00:47:00] think this has been great to, like we said in episode 380, we went red team, blue team Purple team. We dug into that and what it was, but I think this episode has been great where I’ve had the opportunity to apply it, had other people using it, seen it in action.
Uh, we’ll be doing more of them. I’ve got other, I’ve got more planned. And, but then reviewing it all again and having more practical information. This has been absolutely fantastic. So thank you very much for coming back on.
Dave Frees: I love being here and I love having these conversations with you. They give me such clarity and great ideas.
I really appreciate it.
Tyson E Franklin: No, it’s fun. Okay, I will talk to you again very soon, Dave. Be
Dave Frees: well.