The Story of Discernible

Confronting Crisis Heroism

Our company logo features a hammerhead shark because that’s how I see specialized security communications: a tangible domain advantage developed through a long, painstaking evolution. That’s the story of Discernible.

The earliest motivation for Discernible grew from the realization that both the infosec and communication professions suffer from a self-inflicted hero complex that often conflicts with the obligation to protect people and keep them safe. When we glorify firefighting instead of fire prevention, we end up with a lot more fires, but unfortunately in my experience, crises lead to more job promotions than strategic crisis avoidance.

Moreover, I’m often disheartened by the prevalent apathy and inability of traditional communications approaches to help prevent security or privacy incidents by investing proper attention to how security teams communicate among themselves, other organizations at the company, and industry peers. Too often, an incoherent and reactive media statement is considered good enough by PR teams, especially those incentivized by crisis. They rarely have the interest or time to dig deep with security organizations and provide proactive counsel that could actually eliminate the need for a public statement.

At the same time, security and privacy teams struggle to articulate their business value beyond incident response and compliance, which costs them influence inside and outside their companies. As a result, the world is now filled with too many hollow promises of security and privacy commitments from corporate and government organizations, while simultaneously denying a voice to the experts responsible for this work.

I found tremendous success bringing these disciplines together in every position I held as a consultant and in-house advisor. By improving the way teams communicate with each other and their leadership, we built political clout for risk-focused teams, navigated change management challenges, and reduced the number of times PR needed to draft a public apology.

Whenever I engaged with a new member of any security team, they would inevitably tell me how shocked they were at what we were able to accomplish together because they’d never had this kind of dedicated support from a communications advisor before. It was obvious that very few communications teams were providing this level of support to the organizations inside their own company whose ongoing success was so critical to the operations, reputation, and stability of their business. They were simply waiting for something bad to happen so they could ship a statement and get promoted.

So I started Discernible to give more security and privacy teams a communications ally who isn’t eager for a crisis.