Re-thinking The Human Factor with Bruce Hallas

In this episode we look through the eyes and experiences of an education and awareness manager from Brazil. We explore the consistent challenges, no matter where you are or what your culture is, when it comes to employee awareness, behaviour and culture.

Why we need to re-think the human factor in security, with Bruce Hallas

Bruce Hallas sits in the hot seat for a change as Alexia of Marmalade Box grills him, for this: Series 3, Episode 4 of the Re-Thinking the Human Factor Podcast. Having received a lot of emails asking us for more information about Bruce Hallas, the host of this podcast, Alexia agreed to put Bruce through some viewer lead questioning in the hopes of delving deeper into his background and expertise.

Having trained in accounting and law, Bruce started his work life in business development, outside the realms of tech, and found himself passionate about security awareness and human behaviour. Via a series of questioning, 7 years ago Bruce was lead to his groundbreaking research that lead to his book ‘Rethinking The Human Factor’. Apart from his work as a researcher and author, he also runs Marmalade Box, a company dedicated to helping organisations cultivate and design a positive security awareness by raising awareness and influencing behaviours.

Bruce is an expert in reducing risk and helping companies design security processes that reduce the guesswork from the human factor. We know you will enjoy listening to how and why Bruce is so passionate about his chosen occupation and how you can benefit from his vast understanding.

AS YOU LISTEN TO THE EPISODE, IF YOU FIND YOURSELF WANTING TO IMPLEMENT SOME OF THE INSIGHTS YOU’RE GAINING BUT YOU FEEL YOU NEED A LITTLE HELP, PLEASE DO GET IN TOUCH WITH ME AT:

[email protected]

JOIN BRUCE HALLAS AND ALEXIA AS THEY DISCUSS:

• The questions Bruce asked himself when he started his research journey.
• How understanding the human factor allows for better engagement.
• Breaking down the entire system within information security to better the process.
• The Analogies Project and how analogies help in shaping culture and behaviour.
• Who benefits the most from the Rethinking The Human Factor research?
• Designing with the human in mind.
• Does evidence point to the validity of the frame work created from the research done in Rethinking The Human Factor?
• The importance of establishing a cohesive vision as an anchor.
• How personal values influence culture.
• What can my organisation do to benefit from this?

RESOURCES AND TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

• Rethinking The Human Factor by Bruce Hallas
• Nudge by Richard H. Thaler
• The Power Of Analogy by Dieter Wanner

MORE ABOUT BRUCE HALLAS:

• LinkedIn
• Marmalade Box
• The Analogies Project

Please subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, and if you enjoyed this interview, please share with your friends and colleagues and leave a 5 star rating and review.

Thanks for listening and sharing.

Bruce & The Re-thinking the Human Factor Podcast Team

EPISODE 10 SUMMARY - RACHEL LAWES

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Joining Bruce Hallas on Episode 10 of the Re-thinking the Human Factor Podcast is Dr. Rachel Lawes, who comes to the show with a background in the field of semiotics. Don’t worry, if you’re not familiar with the term, you’re probably in good company.

However, upon learning more about Rachel and the field of semiotics prior to recording the interview, we knew she had something of interest, substance, and worth to bring to the conversation around Cyber Security Awareness, Behaviour, and Culture.

MORE ABOUT RACHEL

If you go to market research conferences, you’ve probably met her already. She’s one of the original founders of British commercial semiotics and she never stops being excited about what it can do. She uses semiotics and related methods, backed up by a comprehensive knowledge of social science, to rejuvenate brands, innovate products and services and steer comms. She delivers research, insights and strategic guidance to brand owners. She delivers training in advanced research methods for both client side and agency side users. She also supplies consultancy services to ad agencies, design agencies and large branding agencies.

From time to time she works with universities because she loves to teach. [1]

JOIN RACHEL LAWES AND BRUCE HALLAS AS THEY DISCUSS:

• What semiotics is.
• In reference to a challenge often put our way regarding the applicability of insights from without the security industry — whether the insights gained through semiotics be applied to both sides of the fence, so to speak, both externally AND internally, as in the case of within an organization.
• One fascinating consequence of digital culture — that written language has taken on a life of its own in a way that really haven’t seen in our life times.
  • It’s no longer really required that you follow the rules you learned in school. What’s more important is getting your message across, which might involve substantial use of abbreviations, emoji’s, etc. People communicate using language and text now more than they have done for a long long time.
• The work of semiotics is partly about observing what’s going on in a given audience to try to understand what it is they’re giving off, what the signs are you see in the audience which may be a reflection on how they would respond to you presenting something to them.
• How semiotics can help one engage more effectively and influence changes more effectively.
• Studying signs and symbols (semiotics) gives one an understanding of what is driving people’s behaviour from a cultural perspective. This is important because, as discussed with Gert Jan Hofstede in Episode 06 of the Re-thinking the Human Factor Podcast, culture forms everybody - there’s no escape from it.

FURTHER STUDY AND RESEARCH

• Semiotics
• Tone of Voice
• Episode 06 - A Chat With Gert Jan Hofstede About Culture and Security.

MORE ABOUT RACHEL LAWES:

• Website [1]

Please subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, and if you enjoyed this interview, please share with your friends and colleagues and leave a 5 star rating and review.

Thanks for listening and sharing.

Bruce & The Re-thinking the Human Factor Podcast Team

Kenda MacDonald joins us in the hot seat for Series 3, Episode 2 of the Re-Thinking the Human Factor Podcast. We are absolutely thrilled to have Kenda MacDonald on the show today. As I’m sure you’ll agree, she has the knack for pulling things together in a way that is easy for you, the listener, to understand and digest. We could have talked all day but we managed to stop ourselves..... just.

Formerly a forensic psychology major, Kenda MacDonald is now an award winning business owner, and the award winning author of ‘Hack The Buyer Brain’. Kenda is the founder and CEO of Automation Ninjas, and she sees her mission as helping forward thinking businesses get better quality leads that convert better, for happier customers that come back and spend more. The key to this is combining buyer psychology and marketing automation.

In our show today, we're going to dive into what we in the security awareness profession can glean from insights provided by marketers such as Kenda and their understanding of human behaviour and decision-making.

"It is incredibly important to know your target market and make sure they keep on coming back for more, and with so much data available to businesses these days, there really has never been a better time to do so."

JOIN KENDA MACDONALD AND BRUCE HALLAS AS THEY DISCUSS:

• The importance of making the time to tailor your customer journeys via understanding why and how your customers stay the long haul with you as a business provider — whilst remaining ethically tethered. And how this can be applied to marketing and implementing your security awareness.
• How does knowing human behaviour and conscious consumerism aid your business?
• • Prevent choice paralysis. Being able to cater directly to an individual and know whether to offer them ‘A’ or ‘B’ saves time and money for both you and your users.
  • How giving people conscious choices they will want to make, for the benefit of all, can help get things done.
• A happy, fulfilled customer is bringing you, the service provider, customer lifetime value via loyalty and advocacy. Building your ambassador network by learning from how it is done in marketing loyalty schemes.
• Customer Lifetime Value: The benefits of a lifetime customer versus a one off purchaser, and what we can learn from this.
• Time viewed as a lifetime value. Gaining value via full attention and usage of apps.
• It’s far more cost effective to spend time getting to truly know your audience, rather then thrashing about in the dark.
• Give people a positive experience with little friction and they will help to generate corporation and seed new awareness within the culture around them.
• The importance of data gathering when trying to shape human behaviour.
• Humans have developed to be social animals. They have group identities and labels whether they like to admit it or not. Like attracts like and stereotypes do exist.
• The Customer’s Journey can be applied when implementing security awareness-
• • The customer’s journey is everything a consumer has to do along a path to buy and utilise a product.
  • Avoid making the mistake of forgetting about the fact that purchasing something is only one part of a long journey as a consumer.
  • By utilising customers’ ‘moments of truth’ you gain more lifetime value from them.
• Understanding mental biases -
• • The brain creates a great deal of rule sets to help it make sense of the reality around it.
  • A cognitive bias is a systematic error in thinking that affects the decisions and judgments that people make. Some of these biases are related to memory.
  • The individual can develop a bias towards a product or service due to recent repetition of exposure to it. The brain likes availability and ease of use.
• Marketing security more effectively and driving behaviour using the Heroes Journey -
• • Craft content to make your user feel like a hero in their own story,
  • Validate with data to see if your users are looking for the content you are providing.
  • How gathering data helps you understand the wants and desires of your customers to aid you in bringing them their happily ever after.

RESOURCES AND TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

• Hack The Buyer Brain
• A Prescription For Cutting Costs
• The Availability Bias
• The Sunk Cost Fallacy

MORE ABOUT KENDA MACDONALD:

• LinkedIn
• https://www.automationninjas.com/

Plea...

The relationship between culture and security is an important one and one that is discussed a lot. Unfortunately, many people miss the point somewhat when exploring culture and security. The obvious place to start is the security culture within an organisation, but let’s not dismiss organisational culture too quickly. Better still, let’s also take a look at industry culture and national culture. So you see, when we start looking at culture and security, there’s more to it than we might initially assume. So we thought this would make an excellent podcast episode.

Today, Bruce is joined by Gert Jan Hofstede. Gert Jan is a population biologist and social scientist hailing from the Netherlands whose research and publications have provided many with deeper understanding in the areas of cultural evolution, societal change, cultural stability, and how those forces interact with and have influence upon one another. He is also known for his work in social simulation as well as for a number of books he has co-written with his father, Geert Hofstede. In this episode, Bruce and Gert Jan discuss a wide variety of organization and culture-related topics that have important implications for the Cyber Security industry.

“It is as if you were a fish and they asked you to describe the air... If you’ve always lived in one place in the world, then it’s very hard for you to see that behaviors from another place that seem strange, illegal, ridiculous... that those behaviors can make sense, but within a larger [cultural] system.”

Join Bruce and Gert Jan in this episode of Re-thinking the Human Factor as they explore:

• How awareness of cultural differences (or lack thereof) can be an opportunity for greater collaboration between groups, or greater friction, and how this awareness contributes to one’s ability to understand and effectively communicate cross-culturally
• The need for organizations to achieve a sense of mutual cultural understanding as the starting place for implementing organizational change rather than striving to achieve cultural homogenization as the means for implementing that change
• Different perceptions of what cultural differences mean to an organization (barrier to progress, a catalyst for a breakthrough, etc.), and the importance of realizing that these differences do exist so that one can begin to try and understand them as a means of navigating the challenges and growth potential afforded by these differences
• The importance that “cultural ambassadors” within an organization be, first and foremost, acceptable to the cultural audience whom they seek to address
• 4 helpful cultural metaphors to help with navigating cross-cultural organizational communication:
  • The Family (Asia and Africa)
  • The Machine (Germanic/Northern Italy type of region)
  • The Market (Anglo-Saxon, the UK and North America)
  • The Pyramid (the Mediterranean and Slavic countries)

MORE ABOUT GERT JAN HOFSTEDE, HIS BOOKS, AND HIS RESEARCH:

Associate Professor at the Information Technology Group at Wageningen University & Research // Population biologist and social scientist in information management and social simulation // Interested in the interplay of the contrasting forces of cultural evolution, societal change and cultural stability.

• Gertjanhofstede.com

Please subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, and if you enjoyed this interview, please share with your friends and colleagues and leave a 5 star rating and review.

Thanks for listening and sharing.

Bruce & The Re-thinking the Human Factor Podcast Team