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.