Welcome back to The CP Journal, where we break down what it takes to get left of bang.
Communities—or customers, or team members, or investors—don’t really care whether we have learned how to see threats and hazards coming. They only truly care whether we’re able to do something about them.
While you can’t act on a threat you don’t see, and recognition without action has limited value, it is the gap between them that is becoming increasingly important. Today, how leaders and organizations compress the gap between identifying a potential issue and addressing it has become a baseline expectation.
That reality has been the focus of my attention over the past few months, and while I wasn’t able to protect my writing time enough this week to produce a new essay, we have kept up with our reading on a variety of threats and hazards to support our clients and projects.
So we wanted to share a few of the longer-form articles we’ve read and thought about through this lens of recognition and action.
No single agency or organization can completely control or prevent every threat highlighted below. The more useful question is: What can you do about it? Can you reduce the likelihood of it occurring? Can you meaningfully reduce the consequences if it does? Do you have the capabilities needed to respond to and recover from the incident?
Each of these articles gave us something to think about through those questions. I hope they give you the same opportunity to reflect on what recognizing a threat or hazard should lead you to do next.
A Few Things We Read This Week
Here are some long-form articles and stories we read that can shape how you’re getting left of bang.
What Happened to Al-Qaeda?
As we come up on the 25th anniversary of 9/11 in a few weeks, I appreciated this retrospective on a difficult question: Did al-Qaeda actually succeed in what it set out to accomplish?
The article considers competing interpretations of bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s strategy—whether they successfully provoked the United States into costly wars and long-term strategic overreaction, or whether many of these outcomes attributed to their strategy were far less deliberate than they appear in hindsight.
September 11th is the event that put me on the path I’m on today, so I tend to spend more time reflecting on it than most other incidents. But beyond that personal connection, it fundamentally changed our country—in good ways and bad ones. Twenty-five years later, there is value in asking not only what happened, but what we learned from it and how those lessons should shape what we do next.
Read the article on The Atlantic.
What if America Went Completely Dark?
This New York Times article looks at the vulnerability of the U.S. electrical grid—and what a coordinated attack could mean for our ability to keep the power on and recover when it goes out.
It starts with the 2013 attack on the Metcalf electrical substation in California, where two shooters damaged 17 transformers in an incident investigators later concluded was far more sophisticated than random vandalism, and was an incredible “near miss” for a larger crisis.
What makes the threat particularly relevant today, though, is how much harder recovery has become. Large power transformers are difficult to manufacture and replace, and lead times that were once less than a year can now stretch to several years. At the same time, electricity demand is increasing, putting even greater pressure on the infrastructure we rely on.
The article also looks at efforts to improve grid security, including NERC’s GridEx biennial exercises. I first became familiar with many of these vulnerabilities through leading the development of two iterations of GridEx, so this is an issue I’ve followed closely since. And while the industry has made progress protecting against some threats, technologies like drones continue to change the problem.
For me, that’s what makes this worth reading: readiness includes understanding whether we can absorb the consequences of an incident, and how quickly we can restore what was lost.
Read the article in The New York Times.
If a prolonged power outage is a scenario your organization needs to be ready for, our Prolonged Power Outage Readiness Workshop can help your team identify the capabilities you’ll need, the gaps that could slow your response, and the actions you can take now to improve readiness.
What is Ebola and why is the outbreak in DRC causing so much concern?
The current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo offers a stark example of why recognition is the lynchpin that an effective response rests on.
Health officials now know through genetic sequencing that the outbreak began in February. But the earliest known suspected victim wasn’t didn’t develop symptoms until April 24th, and authorities weren’t alerted to the outbreak until May 5th. By that point, 50 people had already died.
That delay gave the virus months to spread before the response could begin catching up. And once recognized, responders were already confronting a difficult operating environment that included conflict, misinformation, mistrust of health workers, and a strain of Ebola without an approved vaccine or treatment.
It’s an extreme example, but the lesson applies much more broadly: the longer the gap between a threat emerging and an organization recognizing it, the fewer options you may have when it is finally time to act.
Read the article in The Guardian.
Related: If the challenge is recognizing threats early enough to act, it also matters how we interpret what we’re seeing. In Left of Bang Briefing #73: The War Over How You Interpret Reality, I looked at how attention, perception, and interpretation can be shaped—and why maintaining ownership of the assessment process is essential to getting left of bang.
Allison Nixon and Her Work Unmasking Cybercriminals
As cyberattacks become more frequent and more consequential, organizations need people playing defense—but they also need people willing to go on offense.
This profile of Allison Nixon, Chief Research Officer at cyber investigations firm Unit 221B, looks at that offensive side of the equation. Her work focuses on identifying cybercrime trends before they become major problems, unmasking cybercriminals, and finding emerging actors before they are fully on law enforcement’s radar.
The article also explores how attackers select targets, why targeting security professionals and investigators can itself be a warning sign, how the justice system can act as a deterrent, and what other indicators may help identify escalating risk.
It’s a fascinating look at what it means to recognize a threat early—and what can be done with that recognition.
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next week.
—Patrick