The Cyb3rSyn Kaleidoscope - Episode 9

I’ll touch upon a few different topics in today’s Cyb3rSyn Kaleidoscope… Let’s dive in.

In one of my coaching calls, an executive was talking about how the engineering leader that reports to him already had a great pulse with the customers and brutally prioritizes work for his team and how all the problems started after he forced fitted a product manager into the org.

I told him that if he follows the mainstream advice on building software without paying attention to the people right in front of him, he's likely to run into issues.

This conversation reminded me of an old saying in Tamil,”ஆடுற மாட்டை ஆடிக் கறக்கணும், பாடுற மாட்டைப் பாடிக் கறக்கணும்"

It translates to: “You have to milk the dancing cow by dancing along, and milk the singing cow by singing along.”

Even for milking a cow (which is now mostly an automated industrial activity in the West), you need to interact and understand the cow on a personal basis.

If you have leaders who implement frameworks, copy popular operating models and “best” practices for organizational design and management while ignoring the people in front of them, it is very likely that they’ll face trouble and remain ineffective.

Context is king!

Look at the people in front of you. Focus on their emotions, capabilities and aspirations. Act and adapt accordingly.

Ignore the mainstream on how to “design” an organization.

Mainstream cybersecurity has devolved into complete nonsense...

🤯 Naming and shaming employees for falling for phishing attacks

☣️ Scanning the production infrastructure and blaming developers for the "millions" of vulnerabilities that the vendor tool returns

🚦 Traffic light (Red-Yellow-Green) "risk" dashboards for executives

📝 Increasing the number of paper pushers and "referees" (vs players) in the name of "Governance, Risk and Compliance"

✋🏾 Chasing hyper-specialization thereby increasing organizational silos and discouraging practitioners to develop into well-rounded generalists

I can go on for several pages... But, the current state of affairs speaks for itself!

What allowed me to fight against this entropy during my career as a cybersecurity practitioner was not a new way to think, but an old way to think - reading old books and more importantly experimenting with them.

I'll be discussing some of these ideas in the my talk, "𝐒𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐬 𝐏𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐂𝐲𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐞𝐜𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐟𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐬" at the Systems Thinking Systems Practice Conference at the University of Hull.

If you are interested in theory-based practice (instead of "best" practice, which is basically copying what others are doing - a mimetic race to the bottom in Silicon Valley), consider attending the conference.

The conference includes case studies, interactive workshops, training sessions, poster sessions, along with an awesome line up of keynote and panel speakers.

Details + Tickets (very few still remain) are here.

Cyb3rSyn Labs Podcast explores multidisciplinary insights that help improve the effectiveness of Tech. Practitioners, Executives and Entrepreneurs.

In this section, I’d like to highlight one video from the public channel and another one from the Tech. Leaders Salon series from the private Cyb3rSyn community channel.

Please watch the videos and share your feedback….

In this episode, Karthik Suresh introduces "Rich Notes" as a collaborative consulting method where a practitioner takes real-time, visual notes on a shared screen to capture a multi-perspective view of a problem situation. This approach moves away from traditional, objective modeling to a constructive process that prioritizes how stakeholders define their own reality and pain points.

The discussion emphasizes that understanding human history and behavior is more vital for solving modern organizational problems than focusing solely on technology.

Listen to what people say…

For February, the group discussion centered around "The Question Concerning Technology" by Martin Heidegger - a philosophical exploration of technology, power, purpose, and human agency. A much needed perspective for Tech. Executives in the age of AI…

We meet over zoom during the last Saturday of every month of this year. If you’d like to join the series from this month, please use the 25% OFF Coupon Code: MARTLS2026

Here is the Feb video for premium-tier subscribers (Cyb3rSyn Community members can also access this and join the conversation there from the Event Recordings space).