Red Test

@mpspradlin|June 21, 2023 (548 days ago)

I used to work with someone who worked at Bridgewater, and my favorite lesson from that relationship was the Red Test.

The simple idea behind the Red Test is: how good is your team at speaking to what’s Red, Yellow, or Green. Other ways of speaking work too (e.g., "On Track", "At Risk", "Off Track"), but I've always appreciated the simplicty of a color scale, since it cuts out arguable language debates.

The issue/thing is red/yellow/green. There's clarity from the beginning of the debate.

The central concept of the Red Test is to make sure it’s “safe” to bring forth the red items, and that your immediate colleagues and team members are active in surfacing them.

Two questions are useful at giving your team a Red Test score:

• Does the team surface the Red proactively?
• Are issues that are “Red” assigned, and does the owner have the organization’s permission to set their normal/current work aside to solve the Red issue?

The most important thing is whether your team can bring forth the red items easily and as soon as humanly possible, and whether the organization can clear the decks to solve those items.