Sunday, June 29, 2008

SPREAD OUT!

If you’ve ever seen rec-level youth soccer led by volunteer coaches I’m sure you’re familiar with this scene: a knot of kids surrounding the ball in a swarm, kicking furiously with parents cheering on. Eventually one or both of the coaches shouts “spread out!!” Usually it’s at the same moment that the ball escapes the swarm, spurring a mad dash to form a new swarm…

After a few years of this, as a youth coach I finally promised myself I’d never use that phrase again. Besides the fact that it never works, there are a couple of other issues with it:

  • It’s an instruction without accountability: no player can accomplish it on her own.

  • You can do exactly what is asked without having any impact on helping your team win. In fact, during one of my games it went the other way -- I’ve seen our defense part like the red sea and open shooting lanes for the other team. Ouch!

  • Instead, I prefer a different phrase that’s just as short and to the point:

    GET OPEN!

    Sure, it’s still an instruction delivered to the whole team, but it enables accountability in a positive sense. You can identify and praise the kids who do it, and follow up with those that didn’t hear/understand what to do. And when kids recognize and respond, it helps the team get more shots and who knows … even score on occasion. As an added bonus I started counting the number of passes made by the team during each quarter. (Hawthorne was right … measurement motivates!)

    Connecting this back to information security, the key takeaway is that it’s possible even with distributed virtual teams to develop a capacity to adjust to unforeseen obstacles without building in excessive communication and coordination overhead. But efficient teams aren’t necessarily the result of teams with a high level of security domain knowledge (CISSP, GIAC, etc.) Sure, those skills are as critical as the soccer equivalent of dribbling and shooting -- but good things really start to happen when security processes collectively orient themselves around meaningful measures.

    Clear goals – decomposed into individually achievable contributions – measured with simple, easy to gather data - and reported internally / externally to both team members and stakeholders are the key to preventing knots and swarms.

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