Lion Cipher Lab
Brief executives on a cyber threat
- GRC / Compliance
- Beginner
- ~45 min
- Free · no account required
Why it matters
Sooner or later the room you have to convince is not other engineers -- it is a manager, a director, or an executive who controls the budget, can order a system taken offline, or must decide whether to notify customers and regulators. These people are smart and busy, and they do not want your packet captures; they want to know how bad it is, what it will cost, what you need from them, and whether the company is legally on the hook. Most technically strong people lose that room anyway, because they lead with what happened instead of what to decide, and drown a five-minute answer in jargon.…
What you'll learn
- translating technical risk into business impact (money, downtime, reputation, compliance)
- leading with the decision you need from leadership
- cutting jargon for a non-technical audience
- building a one-page executive brief (the executive placemat)
- anticipating the questions executives ask
- knowing what to leave out of an executive brief
- tailoring the same finding to different audiences
Steps in this lab
- Who you are writing for, and why it is different
- Lead with the decision you need, not the story
- Translate technical risk into business impact
- The same finding, technical versus executive
- Cut the jargon, and keep cutting
- The one-page executive placemat
- Anticipate the questions executives ask
- What to leave out -- and your copyable template
- Why the translated version wins