RSI Security hosted our latest Executive Development Series webinar, Meaning of Cybersecurity in the World, on January 17, 2025. Our founder, John Shin, began with a brief recalibration exercise emphasizing the importance of engagement and level-headedness. To catch up on prior EDS sessions, check out our recaps for Modules One, Two, Three, and Four.
Shin also established the main focus of Module Five: the real meaning that cybersecurity has in the world and the ways that cybersecurity leadership can influence all other matters of business.
Purpose, Goals, and Shifting Perspectives
Shin opened up by unpacking a piece of wisdom from an influential book, The One Thing. In it, the authors illustrate how an Olympic rowing team failed to achieve victory for over 70 years, until a coach re-centered the team’s development around a central question. Namely, team members were trained to apply the same question to all decisions and exercises they undertook, whether individually or collectively: “will this make our boat go faster?”
They started to succeed when they were asking—and answering—the right question.
In a similar vein, Shin had audience members think about the goals that they have entering 2025. As attendees shared their personal, family, and professional goals, one trend was that many revolved around growth. Participants wanted to reach new heights in their operations, add on new capacities, work more effectively and efficiently, and be better versions of themselves.
Shin then asked audience members to look at some images of architectural wonders from across the world, including La Sagrada Familia, the Porta Sancta of St. Peter’s Basilica, and an ancient Buddhist temple from northern India. What he drew attention to was how, in the older designs, the threshold was extremely important. It emphasized the difference between visitors’ frame of mind outside and inside—which modern design, minimizing obstruction, can diminish.
But crossing the threshold is a key part of meaning-making and strong leadership.
Being open to shifts in perspective opens leaders up to the kinds of intentional practice, reflection, and capacity building that make security and other operations work at their best.
Minutes and Moments: Timelines and the Timeless
Shin brought up Carl Sagan’s concept of a cosmic calendar, or an attempt to scale down the history of the universe into one calendar year. In this conceptualization, the average American lifespan of around 79 years works out to a fraction of a millisecond—the blink of an eye.
On one level, this kind of thinking could be used to diminish the value of human life and experience, as we look infinitesimal when compared to the cosmos. But taken differently, this thought experiment can illustrate the vastness of our backstory. Each and every person is the sum total of all decisions and actions that their parents and ancestors made, for better or for worse. Shin noted that, if we were each a piece of software, we would be the latest and best version of it to ever be released. We’re not insignificant insomuch as we are iterative.
Shin then returned to images of architecture, this time presenting four photos of pyramids.
Reflecting on these four non-Egyptian pyramids (one each in Mexico, Japan, China, and Las Vegas), Shin noted that cultures all around the world developed this similar structure. He asked the audience what this could mean, and what the pyramids mean to them. Answers varied, but once again, the common thread among them revolved around growth and upward development.
Shin noted that, while pyramids are about impressive upward growth, they’re also about two main ways time interacts with human progression. The bottom of the pyramid symbolizes a timeline, or concrete time that needs to be in place and used effectively to support growth. But the top part of the pyramid represents timelessness. What we should be striving for, and what we need the minutes to do effectively, is the pursuit of lofty, timeless moments of actualization.
Ultimately, timelessness aligns with the horizontal growth covered in prior Modules.
Self-Actualization and Realizing Your Potential
Moving into the next activity, Shin shared a quotation from the Roman philosopher Seneca:
“The greatest empire is within you.”
What this means for the purposes of cybersecurity and business leaders is that realizing change in the workplace and the world starts with finding it within yourself and your organization. Seeing yourself through a prism of multiple time dimensions allows you to realize the kind of holistic, sustainable growth that starts with horizontal growth but emphasizes vertical capacity building.
Shin also shared the following quotation, attributed to Australian visionary Kerwin Rae:
“Make your vision so clear that your fears become irrelevant.”
With these concepts in mind, Shin gave audience members a heads-up that they would be thinking hard about their professional goals and creating a clear vision for their organizations.
But first, he illustrated clarity of vision by sharing an excerpt from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. In the excerpt, King emphasizes the birth of an open and equal society from a prejudiced, closed-minded one. In particular, his dream was that the American people would “hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope”—armed with the faith that such a Herculean task was possible. Change, big and small, comes from actualizing our potential.
Shin asked attendees to take a few minutes to think about the vision for their organization over the course of the next few years. When sharing out what parts of their visions were clearest for them, there was consensus around creating and fostering a supportive, accessible culture.
Making Meaning with Values, Vision, and Purpose
Ultimately, making meaning is the way that leaders create change at their organizations and realize the potential of their teams and themselves. Meaning comprises three key elements:
- Values – Moral or ethical principles or the way that things should be
- Vision – An understanding of what the future will ideally look like
- Purpose – The base reason behind a particular action or approach
Leaders need to inject these qualities into the meaning they make because, if they don’t, then they and their organizations will have nothing to anchor themselves. Incorporating shared values, vision, and purpose marks the difference between visualizing and visioning.
This distinction is critical. Shin explained that visualization is a practice of looking at what has already happened and recalling it, creating a version of the future that is entirely based in the past. There is of course value in this practice, but its intrinsic ties to the past also limit what visualization can do. Visioning, on the other hand, incorporates timelessness in the form of possibilities that have not occurred yet. It is a form of creative thinking that is built upon history (like a pyramid’s foundation) but strives to reach previously impossible or unimagined heights.
To create meaning, leaders can’t just be visualizing. Visioning needs to be part of it.
One audience member likened meaning to knowing what your “why” is, which deepens purpose and accountability. In turn, meaning also provides a practical benefit in helping you achieve what you want to do. And, in response, Shin recalled an aphorism from Friedrich Nietzche:
“He who has a ‘why’ for which to live can bear any how.”
When you’re creating an effective culture around cybersecurity and IT, being able to communicate effectively and show up for others requires a fully realized meaning.
Leveraging Security Leadership for a Better World
Moving into the final exercise, Shin asked audience members to reflect on how these three components apply to their goals. He also expounded on purpose itself breaking down into the gifts each person has, the passions they pursue, and the contributions they are looking to make.
With these sub-components in mind, Shin asked audience members to take some time and create a first draft of what their purpose is and how they will apply it to their goals. This time, there was some consensus again, but it had less to do with growth and more to do with being helpful to others. At base, an effective leader is helpful to every stakeholder they impact.
Shin then brought up the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve and how retention of information drops off dramatically in as little as 20 minutes. He reminded the audience of the Mastery Cycle from prior Modules, asking them to apply the thinking from today’s session to their informed practice.
And, wrapping up, he asked the audience to reflect on their biggest takeaways. Balancing the “why” with questions of “what” and “how” was one highlight, along with the concept of chasing timelessness. One member appreciated the insight of meaning being tied to vision and values.
To learn more about this session or prior Modules, don’t hesitate to get in touch today!
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