I once worked with someone who had spent time at Bridgewater, and what stuck with me was a habit they carried: the Red Test.

Could the team speak clearly about what was Red, Yellow, or Green?

You could swap in words — On Track, At Risk, Off Track — but colors carried more weight. A single slide turning Red changed the air in the room before anyone said a word.

The point wasn’t the labeling. It was what happened after.

I remember one planning meeting where a project manager marked her workstream Red. She didn’t hedge. She didn’t soften it with caveats. Just Red. The room went still for a second, as if we’d all been waiting for someone to say it out loud. Then came the test:

Would the team reward her for surfacing it early?

Would someone own the fix, and would she get the space to stop her regular work until it was solved?

That moment told us more about the team’s health than any quarterly metric.

Reds aren’t meant to be hidden or walked around carefully. A healthy team drags them into the light, assigns them clearly, and clears the calendar until they’re resolved.

Most of the time, that’s the difference between teams that survive and teams that unravel. Not the number of Reds, but what happens next.

Like this? Subscribe via email here.