This is the 52nd Tuesday post, closing in on a year of writing. Reflection is standard practice for such a marker, and the term is uncovery.

Why this term? So many bits of life are mislabelled; attributed to discovery as something new (or at least new to us). We often look to explore the edges of the map, thinking newness is found in the fog on the horizon.

Clausewitz was half right. We are often wrong.

Often the newness is not in the object itself, but in the connection – seeing conduits between unrelated or indirectly related knowns close to us. The fact that link-analysis is not called entity-analysis shows where the possibility lies: in the links between, not in the entities themselves. As we uncover more connections between entities, new ones emerge. We aren’t learning for the first time, rather we are realising things we were practically standing atop.

A few things uncovered over the past year.

1. We start somewhere sharing our messages both in our actions and inactions.
2. Inclusion’s desire to bring everyone in will mature to both good and difficult conversations as we develop equitable shares for everyone brought in.
3. Cyber security in private sector needs elements of war given more than lip service. We need enemies, especially as they mature.
4. Organisations are now linked in ecosystems which are still not well-understood, with limited responsibility past their boundaries. Optimisation of both processes and supply-chains require us to re-evaluate where our border ends.
5. We bend/break/build with fire.
6. Trust begets possible – especially implementing ZeroTrust.
7. Crisis is threaded through the various scales found in the digital environment, recognising what scale was worked with illustrates why we’ve different results entirely.
8. Everyone has value, teams require care and feeding, Cassandra will be missed, paths accumulate over time, we all have wonderful worlds.

In the next year, the posts will follow a fortnightly cadence looking in depth at a few themes:

1. The cyber ecosystems as business possible, not mission impossible.
2. The cyber spectrum – interpreting past traditional concepts of risk/threat and how we now navigate.
3. Cultural readjustments – absences, shifts, approaches, what is required in the crisis tides.
4. Scale considerations – how interpretation of complexity and prioritisation may lead down different dependent paths, based on the level set.
5. Messaging and ways forward – what senders send as a message is not what receivers often receive, and how to communicate to all stakeholders so as not to be misunderstood.
6. All too human – examining human elements and their impacts.
7. Cyber’s Cassandra and how to exercise I&W in today’s environment.

We will uncover more as the year goes on, the only constant is change. Our connections helps us find the bigger picture, hazy as it may be. Greatly appreciate your coming this far with me.

Let’s see what we uncover next.

-scl