OODA Network members are invited to participate in a monthly video call to discuss items of common concern to our membership. These highly collaborative sessions are great ways for our members to meet and interact with each other while talking about items of common interest. We also use these sessions to help better focus our research and reporting on member needs.

If you are a C-Suite leader we would love to have you in these sessions. Learn more about joining at OODA Membership

To encourage openness of discussion, these sessions take place with Chatham House rules, where participants are free to use the information in the meeting but are asked not to directly quote or identify other participants. But we did capture a gist of discussions for the benefit of members who could not attend in person.

We began the session with an overview of some of the top member only content produced over the last month, soliciting inputs on how to make this more relevant to the needs of members, and then moved into a moderated discussion on topics we should be focusing more on in the near term. One of the key items of interest was a question on what makes an agile organization. The pandemic clearly accelerated the need for agility to respond to conditions but there has always been a market advantage to those that can make agile decisions faster and then execute on them (it is not an accident that we gravitate towards the OODA construct).  As we examined the power of agility we briefly covered topics like corporate culture and leadership, which are clearly key. The discussion was of such strong interest we committed to diving deeper into ways to optimize agility in organizations in our future reporting.

Members also discussed lessons learned from ongoing cyber attacks. Many of us have been in the operational cybersecurity space for decades and those who have been in the arena know the importance of continually learning. This session helped bring focus to some enduring truths in cybersecurity and the need to do the basics but also the logic behind strategies for advanced defense including the use of advanced network monitoring, configuration of DMARC and use of advanced DNS solutions. The use of deception strategies and smart design for enterprise security were also discussed. With the deep background many of us have in red teaming and checking security in advance we know that is also key, even thought it was not a topic of discussion (perhaps because we all know how important this is, it has become fundamental to mitigating risk).

A good bit of time in our monthly meeting was spent discussing NASA and an algorithm for routing communications in space designed by long term friend, senior technologist and OODA network member Junaid Islam. We look forward to being able to share more on this groundbreaking work in the near term.

Space was also something our members asked us to focus more on in the future, something we commit to doing.

The next member only session will be 23 April 2021. Expert Level members will receive a calendar invite with login details.

About the Author

Bob Gourley

Bob Gourley is an experienced Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Board Qualified Technical Executive (QTE), author and entrepreneur with extensive past performance in enterprise IT, corporate cybersecurity and data analytics. CTO of OODA LLC, a unique team of international experts which provide board advisory and cybersecurity consulting services. OODA publishes OODALoop.com. Bob has been an advisor to dozens of successful high tech startups and has conducted enterprise cybersecurity assessments for businesses in multiple sectors of the economy. He was a career Naval Intelligence Officer and is the former CTO of the Defense Intelligence Agency.