This is written by Brian Lindholm, Managing Principal and founder of FedSavvy Strategies. With over 500 Black Hats executed, he may have an opinion on this topic.
Is this title too subtle? Sorry, but I am not sorry about being so direct. Why? Because this is a topic that I often get quite an ear full of people who have some form of skepticism and even PTSD from Black Hat reviews that sucked.
By the way, you’re likely right that it did suck. Did you wonder WHY it was such a total train wreck?
Why is this so difficult? The concept is simple. The entire point of this type of capture activity is to understand what your competitors can do so you can be better prepared to win. How hard can that possibly be? Just like anything else we do, it’s all about execution, and this is where many fail. Badly. Think of a train wreck involving a toxic chemical dump in the middle of a town bad.
Sorry, am I being too subtle again?
What is so frustrating about doing this correctly?
This is surprisingly simple in how people fail to execute a Black Hat review.
First things first. Don’t think of a Black Hat as a garden variety color team review such as red, pink, green, or whatever. No, no, no! You are NOT reviewing what others have done. I take exception to the very notion of a review. You are generating insights through what should be a structured analytical exercise. Stop seeing this as mostly an intelligence collection exercise. That’s wrong. A Black Hat is really a structured analytical exercise that leverages an entire intelligence process (modeling–> collection –> analysis –> reporting). A review implies you’re just doing a review and critique session. That’s ridiculous to achieve the objective of a Black Hat.
This frustration is exacerbated more when business leaders reflect on a Black Hat as “it just told me what I already know.” Guess what! If you’re using this as a rough intelligence collection exercise with a series of broadly defined MS Power Point slides, you better believe it will be utter rubbish.
Re-imagine what this is because otherwise you will continue to get meaningless “Master of the Obvious (MOTO)” output.
What mistakes are being made that hold this process back?
This is pretty simple to illustrate common mistakes that lead to your Black Hat to suck.
You rely heavily on former employees of that targeted competitor
Many have the misguided belief that if I surround myself with former employees of a competitor (assuming there are no legal issues here because you don’t need that trouble) that they can spell out the tactics and tradecraft used by a competitor to win.
Oy.
It may be true that a former employee can give you nuanced understanding of a competitor. But did they last work at that business when fire was just discovered? Uh oh. Perhaps their actual knowledge of the business is pretty narrow. Guess what…that is very often the case. It gets better when the opportunity you are pursuing is something they know such little about that they don’t intuitively know how to apply that knowledge to the Black Hat exercise in a meaningful way.
Populating your Black Hat with mostly or entirely former employees of competitors is going to yield a deeply flawed understanding of what the competitor can do in a specific situation.
You give participants meager levels of information to prepare or don’t emphasize preparation
I don’t care how smart someone thinks they are. If you expect them to walk into a room and sprinkle fairy dust everywhere to make magic happen, you are out of your mind. Anyone who is going to engage in real analytical thinking needs fuel to operate and that is information on the customer, the opportunity and the competitors. Many people don’t like putting in the extra hours to do their homework. They already have a day job. However, if your preparation is garbage, your output is going to be garbage.
You don’t treat the Black Hat like a structured analytical exercise
There are styles of executing these that many try because they’re easy. This may involve a simple facilitation done in some sort of Socratic method. The implication here is that “put smart people into a room and magic happens.” There might be some loose agenda, but the hope here is that conversation will achieve the objective of understanding competitors.
No. This is the equivalent of kindergarten with a lower probability of eating paste and crayons. It is always possible that the stars will align and magic does happen. I will tell you from firsthand experience that output is often superficial because there is precious little insight since it’s more of a freewheeling discussion that a tangent train on a journey to Nowhereville.
Better yet, give some groups of people (let’s say a bunch of ex-employees of a competitor) a slide deck to fill out with very basic questions to answer or worse yet a template to fill out. Oh, that sounds like fun. It’s a lot like going to the DMV, but in Power Point! Has anything really insightful ever happened at the DMV? No. Filling out forms is not a path to insight.
Black Hat sessions are analytical sessions so if you don’t treat them as such, they are an utter waste of time.
Your Black Hat won’t suck if you do these things
These exercises can and do work. Treat these like an analytical exercise and NOT some sort of review. YOU are putting in the work to understand your competitors.
- Generate and share intelligence gathered on competitors from several sources (peers, open source, databases, your own previous work, etc.) to educate all participants.
- Select and engage participants who provide knowledge of competitors, the customer and the technical challenges of the targeted contract.
- Generate questions and a structured session to address those questions for participants to address.
- Form opposing capture teams for each competitor so those teams can focus on a single competitor to really understand.
- Eliminate “participants” if they’re going to float in and out of a Black Hat session. Why? Yes, we’re all busy. Like anything in life, if you cannot commit, don’t bother. I’ve had people float in and out of my sessions before and they very rarely add any value because they are not mentally present.
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