How can we help each other? Introduction What’s your preferred working situation - completely alone and self-driven? As half of a pair, as a leader or advisor in a group, or as a “cog” in a much larger hierarchy? For me I believe I’m much better at working in a pair, or in a small team, rather than purely on my own, be it co-writing something, or brainstorming with a customer on a project or solution. ...
Introduction This question was asked in the Generalist World Slack a little while ago: Quick Question - I often find myself feeling like I’m not doing enough. There are just SO many things I want to do that I feel like time is running out and I should get at it. I often end up in confusion, panic and anxiety. Does anyone else struggle with this? How do you calm yourself or redirect yourself to focus on ’top priorities'? ...
An intentionally browseable set of weeknotes for my previous week1. I worked: Cynefin, the sense-making framework, was covered in a personal introduction by Greg Brougham, which I was able to access as part of my membership of Liminal. While I’ve read or watched introductions to Cynefin before, to get a rough idea of the core concepts, this was more of a personal view. It covered the origin of the concept, and what appealed to Greg about it, some of which I understood, some of which I needed to read up on. But - as with much other systems thinking, and conceptual advances in general - I was struck by how much of the knowledge and theories were attached to their main creator, or to a single book or other piece of work. Personally I’m both aware of how much those concepts, and their authors, must owe to the team around them - and also I tend to be far more interested in the concepts than the people, so the strength of that link feels like unnecessary baggage. ...
I worked: I attended DSET - an online military training conference. It was good to see them go hybrid, although I found their chosen platform Hopin disappointing. The event was well handled by Ruddy Nice Limited, especially the issues such as intermittent connectivity and an emergency alarm in the middle of the very first session. Similarly I was at CPCF 6, the Cyber Physical Convergence Forum. I was particularly impressed by Helen Sutton of Dataminr and their presentation, and the emphasis on selling through demonstrating knowledge rather than hard marketing. And also impressed by the overall aim of the event to be hybrid, even with a relatively small space representing the physical side of the event. CTG Intelligence is worth keeping an eye on if you work in any part of security. ...
As fifty percent of my readership complained about the breathless bulleted format I’ve been using, which is a very fair point to make, I’m experimenting with different formatting this “week”, although I’ve much less material. Considering how I create these blogs I should be able to generate an index easily, so it’s trivial for people to see if there’s something of interest each time. ( A newsletter that does this really well is the tl;dr sec newsletter, the format actively encourages picking and choosing the sections relevant to you, I aspire to do the same. ) ...
A summary of what I’ve done over the last month or so. I attended: I went to a Sarah Le-Fevre event where Nick Kellet demonstrated some aspects of his new product, Deckible. It’s an interesting idea, putting card decks on your mobile device, especially the aspect of making card-decks as accessible to everyone in the same way that Spotify does for music. Using an app doesn’t replicate all of the functionality of a card, but there were good demonstrations of the audio and video capabilities. It was interesting to see what the technology is capable of, but I’m not sure these are card-decks now, but also I’m not sure they’re not. Also I was reminded of this tweet thread, and many recent conversations about interfaces and form factors. As per the military trainees in the picture below, while surrounded by laptops, sometimes you need a pen and a shared map to make sense of the environment: picture courtesy of Jim Dawson on Twitter I was in another meeting of the PlaySecure organisers. We decided on ticket prices and discounts and some other administrivia. Follow this for the conference details and we’re using Papercall for content submissions. Ostensibly the conference is about game-based methods to improve decision making in cyber security, but anything related to game-based methods for training or planning will be welcome… especially anything half-complete that would benefit from audience feedback, or something unusual that won’t fit in elsewhere. ...
By Nick Drage, a cybersecurity strategist, and Indy Neogy, a coach who specialises in how we deal with the future. This is a “personal blog” version, where I’ve added a couple of pictures. Indy’s publication on LinkedIn can be found here. Comments welcome anywhere. Cybersecurity Strategy in the New Era The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been shocking. As a hot conflict it inevitably makes us focus on physical threats. However, it has also necessitated discussions that produced a lot of useful articles about how to improve personal and organisational cybersecurity - in particular how to improve them in response to a raised level of cybercrime and cyberattack activity. ...