What Other Industries Know About Risk
Every industry thinks their problems are unique. They're not.
Professional myopia is a real problem in tech. It's what happens when you spend so much time in your field that you forget to look outside it. You start thinking your challenges are special. But they're usually just variations on universal problems.
Consider how the oil and gas industry handles risk. They use something called LOPA - Layer of Protection Analysis. It's surprisingly similar to how we think about security in tech. But they've been doing it longer. And their failures have immediate, physical consequences.
The really interesting thing is how different industries converge on similar solutions. Look at aviation's approach to near-misses. Or how nuclear power plans for failure cascades. These aren't just analogies for cybersecurity - they are tested approaches we could learn from.
The best cybersecurity folks I know read outside their field. They study risk management in finance. They look at safety systems in manufacturing. They understand that fundamentals don't change, just contexts.
This matters more than people think. When you're solving problems at scale, you can't afford to reinvent solutions that other industries have already perfected. That's just ego getting in the way of efficacy.
The next big advances in cybersecurity won't come from security startups. They'll come from people who understand how bridge builders think about structural integrity. Or how epidemiologists model virus spread. The insights are there if you're willing to look.
The hard part isn't finding these insights. It's convincing security teams to look for them in the first place.