The Washington Post reviews Jen Easterly’s first year as head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency – and one of her main focuses is “cutting out the nerdspeak.” Quoting the article.
“Every engagement that I have, I am incredibly deliberate about the messaging and the communications behind that,” she told me in a Monday interview. “People who are technical and in cyber, I think, are not as deliberate as they should be about being good storytellers.”
Maybe that means using a song by ’70s rock band Boston to sell consumers on a key security technology. Like with CISA’s“More Than a Password” campaign to convince people to adopt multi-factor authentication, which involves verifying a sign-on with a second device such as a code sent via text message. But the phrase “multi-factor authentication” makes “eyes glaze over,” Easterly said.
Or maybe — even though the word is in the name of her agency — it means reevaluating whether to call “cybersecurity” something else altogether. She cites the push from tech investors Ron and Cyndi Gula, who have advocated instead for calling it “data care” in job postings to evoke the concept of health care, and thereby make it more relatable to women and communities of color who might be turned off by the term ”cybersecurity” and its evocation of war or law enforcement.
As someone who thinks a lot about language, Easterly’s message resonated. My IT Security is a tax editorial from the weekend is precisely this – a different positioning.
I’ve repeated numerous different ones over the course of this podcast. This is rampant in our industry – overly complicated phrases and abstraction away from simple ideas. And most importantly, I want to highlight the value of storytelling.
Are you communicating a compelling story to your customers here? The industry as a whole is not – and frankly, most of the language FROM the industry is hot garbage. There’s space to be a whole lot better, and the bar isn’t that high.