Navigating Business and Security in the Era of a Permacrisis

In today’s world, preparing for future crises is not just important, but unavoidable. Security teams bear the responsibility of ensuring business preparedness for unforeseen threats while preventing employee burnout from the continual talk of potential crises. As security leaders, it’s crucial to equip organizational leaders with easily understandable data and information. Streamlining communication and avoiding jargon and lengthy explanations fosters a connection between security and business leaders. This partnership is indispensable for the company’s success.

Dave Komendat is the founder and President of DSKomendat Risk Management Services. He knows the importance of this partnership from his previous role where he was the Vice President and Chief Security Officer of The Boeing Company. Komendat was responsible for the company’s global security and fire protection policy and procedures, site security, executive protection, supply chain and aviation security, and structural and aircraft fire protection, among many other responsibilities. He also holds board leadership roles with several non-profit organizations whose missions are to protect people globally, including Hostage U.S. and The Security Foundation. 

Key topics of Komendat’s discussion with host Chuck Randolph include:

• Why no one rewards the identifier of risk and how to position security as a team that not only protects the organization in crisis but prevents it from happening in the first place.
• The importance of building trust and credibility with business leaders ahead of an event so you have their alignment in any gray areas when a decision is made.
• How being prepared for nontraditional threats matters and understand how they impact the business.
• Advice for security professionals early in their career

Follow Dave on LinkedIn or reach out to him on his website: https://komendat.com/

Key takeaways:

07:14 Dave Komendat: Whether it’s through complacency or we just figure “we’ve got it,” — we’ve just done this. We know how to do it again. We can replicate it immediately. The reality is you can’t because people leave, people retire, people take on different roles of leadership in the company. And all of those things that you thought you could easily start right back up again. Um, the reality is in many cases you start from zero.

07:41 Chuck: I just read Dan Heath’s book called Upstream and it’s really about solving problems before they happen. In a corporate setting or an organizational setting no one rewards the first identifiers or the people that get upstream of a problem. We do a poor job of collecting lessons learned and then creating a reusable or creating a reusable process. What are your thoughts about red teaming or scenario building?

08:54: Dave Komendat: It’s not a sexy thing to do ‚ it takes time, energy, and money. But the reality is those that are proactive in this space those that push themselves to say look, we’re going to take the steps necessary to bring these people together on a frequent basis to talk about different things that could happen to us. We’re going to exercise ourselves a little bit and then we’re going to capture the lessons from that exercise and we’re going to go make some changes now while we’re in an environment where there is calm. 

10:13: Dave Komendat: These things are going to happen to us. It’s not a matter of if but when, and those who are forward thinking and looking for that high surf in advance of entering the water are the ones who are best prepared to prevent it from even happening.