Two Tribes, One Fire
A long simmering tension exists between Security Awareness and Business Resilience. When the two finally work as one, prevention strengthens recovery and recovery strengthens behaviour. This is where modern cyber culture grows up.
Behaviour ● Culture ● Human Risk
If you've ever sat in a meeting where Security Awareness and Business Resilience glare at each other like rival clans negotiating access to the last drinkable water source, you'll know the quiet absurdity of the modern enterprise. Both factions genuinely believe they're the ones holding back the apocalypse, and to be fair, they're not wrong. They're simply describing the same threats using different dialects. One talks about passwords, phishing, and the eternal optimism of MFA. The other talks about continuity, impact assessments, and the recovery time objectives as if reciting scripture.
It’s the corporate equivalent of the left hand constructing a fire escape while the right installs smoke alarms. Sensible pursuits individually, but wildly more useful if the two hands occasionally shook. Yet ask anyone to summon a neat, marketable term for this fusion and you’ll find yourself wading through the verbal debris of business-speak: resilience synergies, holistic harmonies, readiness matrices. It starts to sound like something a marketing graduate would invent the morning after their first expense-account night out, still tasting tequila and regret.
So let’s abandon jargon. This isn’t synergy, or fusion, or integrated-whatever. It’s the pragmatic art of preparing people to expect the unexpected. The humble ability for humans and systems to anticipate, withstand, and recover from cyber incidents without descending into organisational farce. And that ability lives in the overlap between these two tribes.
Most organisations invest heavily in the technical paraphernalia: the firewalls, the encryption, and the software with names that sound like B-list Marvel heroes. But what often goes missing is the cultural glue that makes the technology actually work. This is where Security Awareness and Business Resilience stop being parallel paths and become essential companions.
Security Awareness, in its most honest form, is the saintly practice of helping people avoid self-inflicted disaster. It is the department begging adults not to click suspicious links or reuse the password they’ve already given to seven other systems. They’re behavioural economists in IT clothing, quietly noting that the biggest vulnerability isn’t the cloud but Janette from Accounts who uses her dog’s name as a root password because the firm doesn’t provide a password manager. Yet even the best awareness programme eventually trusts employees to know what to do before something goes wrong. Knowing what to do during or after is another discipline entirely.
Enter Business Resilience: the calm after the click. The department that assumes something catastrophic will happen and builds a framework robust enough to survive it. When ransomware hits and everything locks up tighter than a Victorian moral code, these are the people preventing the business collapsing into finger-pointing and spreadsheets crying for mercy. Their world is about impact, continuity, normalising recovery. Not if an incident occurs, but when.
When these teams ignore each other, it’s as if the company runs two emergency drills: one for the fire and another for the sprinklers, never quite realising both events involve the same bloody flames. But when they collaborate, a strange kind of corporate alchemy begins to form. Cyber awareness stops being merely preventative. Continuity stops being merely reactive. You get training that doesn’t just tell people “Don’t click this link” but follows up with “Here’s what happens next if you do, and here’s how you recover without causing a Greek tragedy in the IT department.”
Simulations become richer. You can measure not just avoidance but calmness. Not just who steers clear of threats, but who keeps their head when one slips through. Organisations shift from avoiding failure to absorbing and adapting. The psychology here is entirely human. Confidence beats fear every time. And while it’s too simple to claim that people who trust their organisation’s ability to handle cyber incidents automatically behave more securely, the evidence points towards a truth: employees who understand the why of security behave differently from those endlessly lectured on the what. They report earlier. They cost less. They spot oddities. They involve security in projects before the first line of code is committed. They become an asset, not a liability.
To anchor this properly, imagine a set of seven pillars. You could borrow them from the endless frameworks floating around the cyber industry, though the industry does love a pillar. Let’s take the spirit of those frameworks and translate them into something human.
-
Design for clarity, not compliance. Rules should make sense to real people, not imaginary perfect employees who file everything alphabetically.
-
Train for behaviour, not perfection. The goal isn’t to prevent every click. It’s to make reporting simple, recovery realistic, and shame obsolete.
-
Embed realism into exercises. Irrelevant training dies instantly. Context is how memory attaches meaning.
-
Communicate like marketers, not auditors. Security lands far better when it feels emotional, visual, and story-driven.
-
Reward curiosity. A curious employee who says, “That looks odd” is worth ten policy documents.
-
Plan for recovery as part of prevention. Knowing what unfolds after a breach reinforces what should happen before one.
-
Make security everyone’s story. Celebrate the colleague who handed in a suspicious USB. It builds a culture where speaking up feels natural, not risky.
Peter Drucker once said culture eats strategy for breakfast. He wasn’t wrong. To which we might add: behaviour eats policy for lunch. Awareness and resilience are psychological twins. One creates habits to avoid crises. The other creates confidence to withstand them.
Think less like auditors and more like advertisers. Frame security not as an obligation but a quiet kind of empowerment. In a world where cyberattacks loom like bad weather, the real test isn’t whether you get knocked down but how the organisation moves once it’s hit. As Vince Lombardi put it, “It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up.” Or, if you prefer your wisdom with bruised knuckles, Rocky gets straight to the heart of it: “It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward… that’s how winning is done.” You get the point.
Keywords