Organizational "Joints" + Extreme Weather + Tipping Points & More
Profiles in Preparedness #23
"Look for the joints and links, the things that connect the people in a group or connect one group to another. Division is weakness, and the joints are the weakest part of any structure."
— Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War
Throughout history, militaries have often sought to attack the places where teams, people, and systems connect. By targeting the "joints" of an organization, you can isolate one component from its support, undermine its source of collective strength, and dismantle it from within.
While many organizations today aren’t in the business of attacking others, the businesses, nonprofit organizations, and local governments that make up our communities do spend considerable time, money, and effort protecting themselves: their people, resources, and operations.
In an article I posted this week, I showed why the most fragile joints are where information is supposed to flow between departments, teams, and decision-makers. This is a vulnerability no leader can afford.
Read the article and see how it shaped the creation of our Watch Office emails.
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This Week‘s Reads
Here are a few things we read, listened to, and watch this week that caught my attention and were worth passing along.
Article/Survey | U.S. Adults Impacted By Extreme Weather. This was a rough week of storms in the mid-west, with about 14 million people under a tornado watch on Wednesday. In survey results published this week, Gallup shared that 37% of U.S. adults have been personally affected by extreme weather events in the past two years (up from 33% in 2022 and 2023). There were increases in each region of the country, except for Eastern residents, with the biggest increase occurring in the West (43%, up from 30% in 2023) and increases in the South (where 49% of respondents said they had been affected). The survey is broken down by the type of weather experienced and is worth consideration. When people perceive a risk, they are more likely to prepare for or address it, so note what people are saying wherever you live.
Article/Podcast | Gen. Paul Nakasone says China is now our biggest cyber threat. The former head of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command and current board member at Open AI sat down for a wide-ranging interview about China, AI, and cybersecurity that I think is worth the read/listen. Here are a few condensed quotes:
"China has separated themselves from other countries....I think there are more breaches [in utilities] that we haven't found yet."
"Adversaries can exploit vulnerabilities within 5 days. And it takes businesses 6 months to find an intrusion in their network and 2 months to take that malware off their network."
"Volt Typhoon....It's not espionage. There is no intelligence to gather from [critical infrastructure]... This is a capability that allows China to wreak havoc. Salt Typhoon is all about intelligence to be able to target specific people."
Article | Heathrow Airport Closure: A Breakdown of a Potential Network Collapse. Marco Felsberger breaks down how the substation fire that shut down Heathrow led to impacts across the globe. More than 1,350 flights were canceled or rerouted, affecting airports from Sydney to Miami. Hotel prices around Heathrow surged to five times their normal rates. The cargo backlog increased to almost 7,000 tonnes by midnight, and some warehouses ran out of space due to staffing shortages. Companies were forced to resort to premium trucking or chartered aircraft (an expensive alternative). In an interconnected system, knowing your critical nodes is, well, critical since resilience can not be ensured by one person, company, organization, or government agency alone. As a bonus, here is a Bloomberg article about the shortage of electrical transformers and the more than year-long backlog to get a new one, which can make this Heathrow Airport incident a growing problem regardless of where you live.
Book | Revenge of the Tipping Point. I finished listening to Malcolm Gladwell's new book this week and really enjoyed it. Using concepts from his first book (The Tipping Point) he looks at the underside of how those concepts have played out in the 20+ years since its publication. The opioid epidemic, suicide clusters, medicare fraud, white flight, the spread of COVID-19, DEI programs, and others. In today's politicized world, not everyone will agree with his analysis (on both sides), but for anyone looking at social change and how it happens, this book provides a lot of food for thought.
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