Influence

A collection of 36 posts

Influence

Why Your Content Strategy Isn't Building the Influence You Expected

Most security professionals want thought leadership results but are using punditry tactics. Here's why that strategy mismatch is the real reason your content isn't building influence.

Chief of Staff

A Wishlist Is Not a Recommendation

Security teams that hand business leaders undifferentiated wishlists are offloading prioritization to people less equipped to do it. This post breaks down why these lists fail, what a real recommendation requires, and how reactive security comms holds organizations back.

Organizational Communications

You’re Allowed to Ask for Help With This

CISOs navigating incidents, scrutiny, inherited dysfunction, or burnout are often better at absorbing hard experiences than asking for the right help. The framing you use determines the support you can receive -- and naming what you're actually experiencing is the critical first step.

Privacy Communication

The Privacy Professional's Influence Starter Kit

No one hands privacy professionals a roadmap for building business influence, but the research and frameworks exist. This starter kit offers curated resources on negotiation, persuasion, and coalition-building -- the skills that turn privacy expertise into business outcomes.

Influence

Why Security Communication Feels So Hard (And What to Do About It)

3:43 PMClaude responded: You've learned to speak the business language.You've learned to speak the business language, but your concerns still get deprioritized. The problem could be the structure of who gets heard. Muted group theory explains why, and what to do about it.

Influence

Messaging != Communication

Most security teams mistake messaging for communication strategy. The difference shows up when your polished deck doesn't move budget, your template doesn't preserve trust, and your awareness campaign doesn't change behavior. Words are not a strategy.

Chief of Staff

CISO as Super-Facilitator: Elevating Board and C-Suite Security Leadership

How do CISOs elevate board and executive security leadership instead of just reporting to them? Apply the 'super-facilitator' approach to transform your leadership team from audience into collaborators who drive organizational security strategy.

Influence

Beyond Translation: How CISOs Lead When the C-Suite Can’t Decide

When the C-suite stalls on security decisions, accountability rolls downhill while strategic direction never flows down. Learn four communication theory-based strategies that help CISOs lead effectively despite organizational ambiguity and competing priorities.

Influence

The CISO's Guide to Making the Business Case: How Security Investments Drive Brand Performance

The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer: brand trust now beats institutional trust by 13 points, and 84% of consumers rank trust alongside cost and quality. That's a CISO's business case for why security investment drives revenue.

Privacy Communication

Privacy Needs a Better Story

Privacy teams that lead with risk reduction and compliance are writing their own cost center narrative. Porter's value chain and communication framing theory offer a different approach: connect your work to operational efficiency, customer engagement, and competitive advantage.

Influence

Your Team's Communication Isn't Just What You Say – It's Who You Are: Understanding Constitutive Theory

Your communication constitutes your security program. The patterns your team uses shape culture, decision-making, and operational reality. Leaders who understand this build political capital faster and design programs that actually perform.

Influence

Why Effective Security Communication Starts with Strategy, Not Translations

Converting technical jargon into business language is just the first step and doesn't drive decisions alone. Effective security communication starts with the outcome you need and works backward through what your audience believes, assumes, and has experienced.

Incident Response

What Could Go Right?

"What could go wrong?" is a defensive posture that caps your influence. The security teams building real political capital ask a different question: what could go right? Reverse engineer that outcome, and incident response stops being damage control and starts being strategy.

Company Updates

Organizations Lack Sufficient Decision Frameworks to Expand Incident Response Options

The security leaders with the most options during an incident built them long before it happened using consistent, values-based decision frameworks as relationship tools. Communication strategy shapes how your organization decides, not just how it explains.

Mailbag

📬 Mailbag: What's the best approach for sharing vulnerability findings with developers to avoid inciting defensiveness?

Vulnerability findings land differently depending on how you deliver them. Security professionals who understand framing and loss aversion can create conditions where dev teams want to fix them. Same finding, with a completely different outcome.

Influence

Boost Your Team's Influence with Corporate Anthropology

Your organization has a culture and your security program either works with it or against it. Corporate anthropology gives you a framework for mapping that culture, building the right relationships, and crafting narratives that make security feel essential.

Incident Response

Decisive Under Fire

Why do decision frameworks outperform templates for managing security incident communications? Because they empower internal stakeholders with the right expertise to make critical communication decisions under pressure.

Chief of Staff

CISO Communication Playbook

Technical controls and human behavior are two sides of the same security coin. CISOs who master both domains build more resilient security programs that withstand evolving threats and organizational pressures alike.

Case Study

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY: Building CISO Resilience with Strategic Communications

Specialized communications coaching from Discernible helped CISO Amy Bogac navigate career transitions, strengthen reputation management skills, and build a stronger executive presence.

Chief of Staff

When Less Is More: The Argument Dilution Effect

CISOs facing skeptical boards can learn from this landmark example of the "argument dilution effect," where adding weaker points to strong ones doesn't strengthen your case — it fundamentally weakens it.

Influence

The Myth of Shared Responsibility

The uncomfortable truth is that "shared responsibility" is a myth that allows organizations to talk about security without making consequential changes to incentives and accountability structures.

Mailbag

📬 Mailbag: What are the elements of a successful post-mortem?

How do leading incident response teams transform post-mortems from technical reviews into engines of organizational change by focusing on cultural integration, behavioral psychology, and systemic patterns rather than just root cause analysis?

Incident Response

Empowering Business Leaders to be Savable Victims: Drawing Incident Response Insights from Rescue Scuba Diving

Discernible helps security and privacy organizations build communication capabilities and political capital before crises happen, shifting teams from reactive explainers to proactive influence-builders.

Mailbag

📬 Mailbag: How do you regain trust after an initial communications misstep?

Whether it's a poorly timed announcement, an ill-considered tweet, or a misinterpreted internal message, the key to recovery lies in how you handle the aftermath. Here are a few recommendations on how to navigate your way back from a communications misstep.

Influence

Building Trust Between Security and its Peers

Dr. Ryan K. Louie and Kim Burton join Discernible CEO Melanie Ensign for a discussion on how security teams can develop deeper trust with their partners in the business.