The Alliance is a cybersecurity-focused charitable organization run by industry leading executives. The organization was created to facilitate a sense of community — if the various industry groups and participants in the industry were able to come together to solve their biggest challenges, they would develop the trust necessary to create an invaluable community of information-sharing and leadership development.  

First, they were having trouble recruiting a highly specialized group who understand their mission and unique vision. Second, those within the organization who handled the security problems were having trouble communicating their value to those who handle the finances of the organization (i.e. C-suite). At their core, these were leadership issues.

We saw the need for strategic foresight as a framework to explore their problems and find out the areas that are the most ripe for change in security. Strategic foresight provides a framework for thinking about possible futures in an effort to make better decisions in the present moment. It is a way we can expose the agency and ability to make change. To uncover this, we led a Futures Timeline exercise where we create scenarios to help generate strategies that prepare us not only for the futures that we prefer, but also futures we might not prefer.

For SAA this took the form of questioning various futures in the realm of security and changes in this industry with regulation, innovation, disintermediation and truth.