5 Mental Models For CISOs To Sharpen Their Cybersecurity Strategy

Forbes

5 days ago

Dr. Aleksandr Yampolskiy, Co-Founder and CEO of SecurityScorecard, is a globally recognized cybersecurity innovator, leader and expert.
As a competitive chess player, I've learned that success comes from recognizing patterns quickly. You centralize your king in the endgame, but never during the opening. You don't spread your queen too thin by making her guard too many pieces at once.
The same principle guides the best chief information security officers (CISOs) I've interviewed at Fortune 1000 companies. They lean on mental models—simple frameworks that turn complex situations into clear decisions.
Here are five mental models I've found CISOs can immediately use to sharpen their decision making:
1. Pre-Mortem And Pre-Parade
Work backward from outcomes. In a pre-mortem, imagine your security strategy has failed spectacularly. Was it a breach? Budget cuts? A leadership shake-up?
Identify what specifically went wrong in these scenarios: Did patching cadence falter while you addressed other priorities? Did your boardroom lose confidence in your abilities? Why? Now proactively address those issues and inoculate yourself. Pre-mortems can help you and your teams find blind spots before reality does it for you.
Don't stop at imagining worst-case scenarios; imagine your wins, too. A pre-parade involves imagining great success—perhaps you've just been promoted, or your team successfully shortened the time it takes your organization to detect a cybersecurity incident.
Maybe you and your team are surpassing your vulnerability management goals. What did you do right? Which teams collaborated seamlessly, and what steps did it take to get there? Identify the key components of success and break it down into specific steps you need to take over the next 10, 30, 60 and 90 days to make that vision a reality.
2. 5x5x5 Experimentation
If you knew precisely what would work, you'd already be doing it. Good ideas and bad ideas can look very similar in the beginning, and you can't tell them apart until you test them.
The 5x5x5 framework by Mike Schrage is a fast, effective way to experiment without risk. It's radically simple and, if done right, it could have an immediate and profound effect on your team's direction.
Start by launching experiments that meet three requirements:
1. Five people
2. $5,000
3. Five days
Instead of overanalyzing or running 100 miles per hour in the wrong direction, test quickly and incrementally. If your IT team isn't fixing vulnerabilities fast enough, try five simple, testable solutions within a week. Offer small bonuses or alert management when tickets exceed the service level agreement (SLA). Focus on speed, learning and iteration—not perfection.
3. Local Maximum Versus Global Maximum
Excelling as a CISO means more than just working toward your local maximum (in this case, securing the organization). You must also ask how you can deliver a global maximum: broader business value.
Think like a CEO and do both. Can you create a security trust center to streamline your sales team and security contract reviews? You could make your security ratings a selling point for consumers, not just a metric. Could automating third-party risk reviews reduce costs?
Good CISOs protect business, but great CISOs grow it. If you're not tying security to revenue generation, customer trust or speed of execution, you're likely thinking too small.
4. Semaphore (Red/Yellow/Green)
Parallel key performance indicators (KPIs) and objective measures to the colors of traffic lights to understand your true progress on security metrics.
Too many teams live in the land of "all green," where everything is fine. But that's not visibility—that's denial. Encourage your teams to highlight areas for improvement that may fall in the yellow or red categories to stress-test your current approach. Quantify security decisions using clear metrics for every program, from access reviews to vulnerability management. Clearly identify costs, risk reduction and improvement over time.
Security ratings can serve as a useful barometer for benchmarking against your industry peers—and can help highlight when an "all green" assessment is masking risk.
5. Domino Effect Prevention
The domino effect prevention model suggests accidents result from interconnected events, each like a falling domino that sets off the next. Remove one domino, and you prevent the cascade before it even begins.
To make this framework work, be proactive and resilient. Deploy an enterprise secure browser to stop phishing at the source, implement supply chain detection and response (SCDR) to continuously monitor vendors for security risks and invest in endpoint protection solutions like CrowdStrike or SentinelOne. Focus on stopping threats before they trigger the chain reaction.
Don't Wait For Checkmate
Leadership in cybersecurity is about thinking clearly under pressure and planning to prevent a crisis before it hits. These models can help you cut through the noise and get razor-sharp on where you stand and where you need to be.
When I became CISO at Gilt Groupe, I ran a pre-mortem and asked myself a blunt question: What would get me fired? The answer was clear—a breach that compromised credit card data and cost us our PCI DSS compliance, threatening both our reputation and our ability to process payments.
That fear pushed us to redesign our entire architecture, isolating payment data in a hardened, bulletproof environment. We also implemented layered encryption so that no single person and no single point of failure could unlock access.
That kind of clarity—seeing the worst-case scenario and planning backward from it—forced us to confront the unimaginable and design for it. Without that mindset, we would've never built such a resilient architecture.
Just as elite chess players might recognize signs that an opponent is preparing an attack on their king and reposition their pieces in advance, cybersecurity leaders must proactively identify and eliminate blind spots before they spiral out of control. Stop reacting to what's in front of you and start seeing the board five moves ahead.
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