Interestingly enough, I was listing to a podcast yesterday on how to train your brain regarding habits with Tara Swart, a neuroscientist and senior lecturer from MIT and Nir Eyal, a behavioral designer. I really enjoy all this psychology and neuroscience stuff, as you might’ve noticed, because it’s one of the best ways I’ve discovered to really figure out what holds us back from making the changes we would like to make.
And if you can harness what you’re already wired to do, then you can dramatically increase your effectiveness in whatever it is you’re trying to do in your job every day.
One of the points on the podcast was how there’s a potential myth that you can make anything a habit, and this may be what might’ve tripped your BS detector when you hear me talking about the 14 practices of The Agile Security System™ and how the objective is to make them habits to keep you safe when you’re building security architecture.
As defined on the podcast, habits are “impulses to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought.” The reason they brought this up is that people often talk about making stuff like writing…or going to the gym…or eating better…and other stuff like that a habit. These are things that generally take heavy, conscious thought, so they’re actually routines, not habits.
However, the thing about habits you can harness is that you tackle small, almost minor things, then these are more than fair game.
Now, I won’t lie to you that there’s a mix of sizes of the practices in the system, but from personal experience, I do know that these aren’t big things – they’re not routines – they’re the little things you need to do that will make a big difference when you’re thinking about the practice of security architecture.
And they’re very focused.
So when I’m talking about making security architecture a habit, what I actually mean is that if you follow the principles and the practices of The Agile Security System as you go about the task of doing your job, the things that make or break the effectiveness, alignment and overall value of the work you do are going to be done the right way—every time.
But only if you do the work, practice and really internalize them.
However, if you do, your security architecture will be the result of your habits, and you won’t be able to help yourself from building a security architecture when you’re trying to analyze and solve problems related to security.
So, by taking the big thing, breaking it up, and focusing on the most critical elements of what you need to get right, all the individual habits work together so that effective security architecture is just something you always find yourself doing.
If you’d like to get up to speed with the habits of effective security architecture by learning directly from me – and be able to ask me any question you have about how to make it work in practical terms – then you might be interested in joining the next cohort of our flagship, online course, Building Effective Security Architectures.
Over 7 weeks, we’ll be working together – along with several of your fellow security architects and peers from various parts of the world – to go through what it takes to build security architecture, including:
- how to better connect with your security customers,
- a crash course in what drives “the business” that makes it so hard for us to demonstrate our value
- a deep dive on SABSA’s domain theory
- and how you can create valid architectures from virtually anything you read or hear.
Because I’ve been asked to make it more accessible to individuals (which is just a happy bonus for people with access to still-unused 2019 training budgets), you can join the upcoming February cohort right now at a hefty 60% discount and save over $2,500 from when the regular enrollment opens.
But to get the discount, you have to decide this is right for you before the deadline at 11:59pm US/Eastern on the 13th of December.
A word of caution, though. This isn’t your typical, go-at-your-own-pace, walk-in-the-park online training trifle.
It’s hard work, and it’s a significant investment of your time.
So, if you’re considering it, I urge you to read the sales page carefully—especially the part towards the bottom about why you shouldn’t take the course.
I don’t want you to waste your time and money if you’re not ready to do the work required to take you from where you are now to having the core skills to develop security architectures you can use to drive security decisions after only a few hours’ work—instead of days, weeks…or even months that some of our customers have taken before we helped them.
As always, it’s up to you. If you’re ready, this is the best time to make sure you get one of the 20 slots in the cohort. Here’s the link:
Stay safe,
ast
—
Andrew S. Townley
Archistry Chief Executive
