Past Tense – the Art of Being Dead

First Rule and Past Tense are basic mental frameworks to help us understand life via two sides of the same coin – mortality. On the one hand is a biological imperative to perpetuate life as we know it. The other holds recognition of needs beyond the self, when we are taken out of the equation. Together these two offer useful perspective on decision-making. Past Tense is a periodic exercise uncovering existing connections sans us.

Operational Resilience and the First Rule

The First Rule and Past Tense are basic mental frameworks to help us understand life via two sides of the same coin - mortality. On the one hand is a biological imperative to perpetuate life as we know it. The other holds recognition of needs beyond the self, when we are taken out of the equation. Together these two offer useful perspective on decision-making. First Rule is the default consideration for operational resilience.

On Cypartan’s Dilemma

In our dynamic cyber threat landscape, info/ cybersec personnel engage everyday with enemies who seek to harm those we wish to protect. Few in number against staggering odds, outmanned and outgunned with limited resources, we must be right one-hundred percent of the time, whilst the enemy needs only to be right once. This is the Cypartan Dilemma.

Changing Culture – Feedback Chains

In internal and external messaging, especially used in creating/ adjusting/ retaining culture, there are a few tools we can use. Trouble often is we are one voice in a babbling multitude, without enough signal to clear the noise threshold. For people to pay attention to the signal, it helps to have it broadcast from multiple places - either concurrently or complementarily. We term these feedback chains - that can be put to great use. -scl

On Internal Mapping (3)

Dataset layers are the foundational pieces of building the organisation's map, as without them the map can't be complete. Preferably driven by automated ingests, there are layers likely manually curated - giving greater visibility to broader operations. In tracing the often-understood, rarely-captured components of an organisation - their processes and interdependencies - we need people able to follow paths from start to finish adding the layer to the mix.