Tension, Desire, Fear

We're going about cybersecurity all wrong.

I just read a blog post by the ever-inspiring Seth Godin, and this part made me think about what's missing from cybersecurity:

Alas, awareness is not action.
Everyone reading this is aware that Peru is a country. But that doesn’t mean you’ve visited recently, or have plans to go soon.
Everyone reading this is aware that turnips are a root vegetable. But knowing they exist doesn’t mean you’re going to have them for dinner.
Awareness is important, but it is insufficient.
Action comes from tension, desire and fear. Action is the hard part.

By now, everyone in your organization has gotten the cybersecurity memo.  Everyone from the CEO to the person who maintains the grounds knows security is important, and want to do the right thing. It's condescending, maybe even counter-productive to treat our colleagues as though they've never heard about security.  Take it to the next level by building the right combination of tension, desire, and fear to inspire our organizations to execute on security.

Most of us security people have the fear part down pat: if you don't do all the security things I tell you to, something really bad is going to happen.  The problem is that we've probably been saying that for years, and nothing bad happened.  The wolf never came, and even if it did, the bite didn't hurt that badly, so everybody stopped listening to to the Little Security Boy.  We need to employ other strategies to inspire our leadership and colleagues to action.

One way to create tension is to make it easier to do the right thing than it is to keep doing the same, wrong thing.   Try breaking the problem down into the smallest possible components.  Analyze the work you want done.  What is the logical first step?  What would this process look like if it were easy?  Identify the easy parts, the cheap parts, the fast parts. Once we've done a few small things, we can build on our success.  Remember that it took years for things get to where they are now, so it's naive to think we can fix them overnight.  What we can do is do something.  We must do something. Today.  Tomorrow.  Every day.  Start the ball rolling - if we can keep it rolling, pretty soon it will gain its own momentum.  First we create the tension by making the work seem easy.

When we think of security, the term desire doesn't exactly jump out. Desire is a positive emotion, and we all have plenty of it.  We desire to do a good job, to be recognized, to do the right thing. We desire less stress, less distraction, more wins.  Everybody knows things could be better, security-wise - they want them to be better.  But they don't know where to start until you create the tension by getting the ball rolling.  Making progress - any progress, even if all we've done is stop the bleeding - starts a virtuous cycle in which the team starts to want to do more. Let's celebrate the work that's been done, no matter how tiny, and try not to remind the team about the mountain of work that still needs to be done.  By focusing on the success, we create the desire to build on that success.

Let's stop talking to people as though they've never heard about cybersecurity.  Let's stop playing the fear card, and build tension to fuel the desire to start moving our organization toward a more secure place.