Introducing Discernible Experience: The Power of Persistent Practice

Join industry peers for weekly bite-sized drills that prepare your communication skills for any incident.

Security teams juggle a variety of daily challenges: coordinating with external researchers, triaging product vulnerabilities, mitigating insider threats, and managing regulatory requirements. Each scenario needs a reliable communication strategy for effective stakeholder management and cross-functional alignment every day of the week. When you’re experiencing an active or potential incident, the stakes are even higher, and cracks in your communication flows can impact your team’s ability to respond quickly and effectively — or worse, ineffective communication can be the thing that turns a potential incident into an actual crisis. 

Today, we're launching Discernible Experience, a subscription-based service that runs weekly simulation drills in a dedicated Slack channel where security professionals from different organizations learn and practice together. This collaborative environment creates a unique opportunity to gain diverse perspectives and approaches you wouldn't encounter in traditional internal training. These drills, informed by two decades of frontline incident response experience across various organizations, provide unparalleled exposure to realistic communication challenges and critical decision-making scenarios while building a network of peers facing similar challenges. 

Discernible Experience is designed for seasoned incident responders who want to maintain peak communication performance and rising professionals eager to accelerate their expertise beyond what organic incidents provide.

From Reactive to Ready

Weekly security drills transform incident response from a conscious effort into an instinctive reaction. Just as experienced technical responders can execute complex protocols without conscious thought, regular practice embeds communication workflows deep into your team's muscle memory. This frees up critical mental bandwidth during actual incidents. So, instead of spending precious cognitive resources remembering who to contact or which protocol to follow, your mind stays clear to analyze emerging threats, spot subtle anomalies, and adapt to the unique challenges each incident presents. When communication becomes second nature, creative problem-solving becomes possible.

Discernible’s weekly drills cover an initial 12 categories of security and privacy incidents, focusing on universal communication challenges and unique ones introduced by the nuance of a particular situation:

• Bug bounty / external researcher escalation 
• Web3 / smart contract attacks
• Ransomware  
• Insider threats   
• Product development / SDLC 
• Third-party incidents
• Open source vulnerabilities 
• Outages
• Rumors / Industry drama 
• Media inquiries
• Privacy violations 
• Network compromise

The most effective security teams communicate clearly and boldly when it matters most – and this takes practice. When communications articulate technical complexities, align stakeholders, and ensure accurate public communication, they elevate the entire organization's security posture, reputation, and customer satisfaction.

These critical skills need constant refinement and exercise. Our concise 60-minute weekly scenarios fit into demanding schedules to help you strengthen your skills in:

• Strategic communication planning in high-stakes scenarios
• Rapid assessment and prioritization of stakeholder communication needs
• Precise message crafting and delivery under tight deadlines
• Orchestrating seamless cross-functional coordination and information flow

Removing Friction, Maximizing Impact

We designed Discernible Experience to make it quick and easy for you to participate without working longer hours: 

• No new software: Scenarios are conducted inside Slack, eliminating the need for additional vendors or new third-party app approvals from IT. 
• Practical time commitment: Our drills can fit your busy schedule without overwhelming it. They provide focused, high-impact learning opportunities without disrupting your core work responsibilities.
• No purchase order or vendor contract required: Security and privacy practitioners can participate independently, enabling personal skill development and providing a low-friction pathway to bolster expertise, regardless of team-wide training initiatives.

Subscription Benefits

Benefits and costs are per person. 

Discernible Experience ($50/month)

• Weekly 60-minute security communication drills in Slack
• Access to an expanding library of detailed scenarios and postmortem reports

Discernible Experience Pro ($100/month)

• All membership benefits above
• The option to request scenarios for future weekly scenarios that focus on your interests or challenges
• Exclusive access to live, in-depth, 30-minute post-mortem sessions with Discernible CEO Melanie Ensign after each drill, providing expert-level analysis
• Three guest passes per year to share a unique learning experience with colleagues 

Beyond Traditional Tabletops

Traditional tabletop exercises have limitations. They often demand significant preparation and disrupt regular workflows. While valuable for validating high-level response plans, they lack the frequency and adaptability needed for continuous skill development in communication. 

Additionally, organizations often focus their tabletop exercises on catastrophic scenarios, creating a critical gap in organizational preparedness. The time and resources required to orchestrate a full-scale TTX means teams rarely practice handling the more frequent, seemingly minor incidents that can spiral into crises without proper management. Individual practitioners get little opportunity to sharpen their skills at catching early warning signs, like a newly discovered product vulnerability, or containing small incidents before they escalate. This leaves teams underprepared for the day-to-day vigilance and quick action that often prevents disasters from happening in the first place.

Discernible Experience complements, not replaces, comprehensive tabletop exercises (which we continue to offer separately). This new service delivers frequent, focused practice for honing communication strategies and skills at the individual level. Our meticulously designed scenarios reflect the most relevant security and privacy threats and communication challenges, enabling practitioners to build and strengthen muscle memory for incident communication. The goal is to free up a team’s cognitive resources so they can focus on intricate technical problems during real-world events.

This approach also fosters cross-organizational learning, allowing security and privacy professionals to share insights and best practices with peers from other organizations who also subscribe to Discernible Experience. As a result, participants benefit from diverse perspectives and experiences not available through internal-only training.