A New Champion Emerges

It's the end of an era in women's football ... and the dawn of a new one. This article first appeared on the Duha One substack , and can be read in its entirety there.

Leadership Moment: Championship Football

For the first time since 2018, the Boston Renegades are not the champions of the Women’s Football Alliance. Falling short 30-27 to the St. Louis Slam, the Renegades will start 2025 in a new position: trying to get back on top.

It’s easy to denigrate sports teams when they don’t win a championship — after all, professional athletes, coaches, and team owners publicly call seasons “failures” — but we should remember that while the goal of a season is win, teams should have much bigger goals: inspiring a city and fanbases, developing players and creating opportunities, and entertaining fans.

Boston fans got used to the Renegades winning it all. It wasn’t good for the sport, as women’s tackle football has too few fans already, and a single dominant team doesn’t draw in a lot of fans. Now that there’s a new queen of the hill, we get to see how players, teams, and fans respond.

One Minute Pro Tip: Emergent Behavior Drivers

When you see an organization or individual make choices you don’t agree with, it’s easy (and lazy) to explain their outcomes as if those had been their goals from the beginning, rather than being an emergent property of a wide variety of incentives. Perhaps a management team talks about safety, but tends to deprioritize any given safety feature in favor of immediate revenue. Is their goal an unsafe system? Of course not.

But the advocates for safety features will notice the celebration of their peers who deliver revenue features, and start to advocate a little less for safety, as they (rightly) perceive that their promotion chances are greater if they champion features that the company actually implements. Tactically, it’s the right decision … but the emergent behavior of the organization becomes highly unsafe.

Appearances

Recent

Jul 22, OpEd, SC Magazine: Fallout from the CrowdStrike outage: Time to regulate EDR software

Jul 24, OpEd, CSO Online: CrowdStrike meltdown highlights IT’s weakest link: Too much administration

Upcoming

Aug 7, BlackHat: Book signing: Code Resilience in the Age of ASPM , Cycode’s Book & Breakfast

Aug 21: Security Leadership Happy Hour w/ Grip Security (Tewksbury, MA)

Sep 12: ASPM Book Roadshow (Boston, MA)

Sep 24: HOU.SEC.CON

Bonus Leadership Moment: Evolving Social Contracts

We drove out to Canton, OH, for the WFA Championship. On both the drive and the game, I observed people who didn’t necessarily understand the social contracts as well as some might hope. Before digging into those, a reminder: social contracts, like evolution, don’t exist (no, I’m not denying evolution). Evolution is a description of an emergent property of life in an uncertain world: since genetic fitness has a causal relationship with survival, species will evolve towards being more fit (“survival of the fittest”); but evolution is an outcome, it isn’t an active player. Species don’t evolve to be more fit; rather, more fit genetic material is more likely to propagate, and thus species evolve.

Similarly with social contracts:

This article continues on the Duha One Substack ...