The History of The Great Conversation

"What a wonderful world"

Louis Armstrong

Our world can be complex and turbulent. Risks abound. 

But around us, are people attempting to make sense out of it, learning from each other, and creating powerful new approaches that create value for all of us; personally and professionally. 

The Great Conversation™ in Security was conceived and, later launched more than a decade ago, in response to 9/11. There were serious questions regarding our ability, as a country, and, by extension, our place of work, to leverage our people, performing roles in everyday processes using the tools we have provided them, to adequately address the serious nature of the risks that we were facing.

We needed wisdom. The notion that history, ideally, was a sequence of conversations and innovations that would ultimately supply us with that much-needed wisdom, was a foundation we built on. We then needed the ecosystem to weigh in. We needed the transparent sharing of the good, the bad and the ugly stories from the leaders who were attempting to protect the assets and lives of their organizations. We needed the service and product vendors to listen to these stories and begin to respond to the learnings. We needed products to be developed, not in response to feature requests, but in response to the unspoken needs that become visible through truly understanding the people, performing roles in their core processes.  That is what truly determined the performance measures of a risk, resilience and security program. We needed consultants who would reach out to collaborate with integrators. This would mean that integrators would want to know the 'why' behind the technology. And consultants would want to leverage integrator insights on the performance metrics of their deployments. Our industry had a fractured ecosystem. It was time to heal it.

We also knew that leadership and change management would be key disciplines in this journey. So we looked for the students of leadership to speak to us, motivate us and inspire us. We looked to practice leaders of change to enable us. And we looked to technology gurus to disrupt our old notions of how security should work. 

So welcome to this Great Conversation. We try to touch base with the best and the brightest throughout the year so we can produce in two-days, a congress of minds that shape the next evolution of security. Your voice is needed. Your work must be shared. You can change your world. Join us. 

Ron Worman, The Sage Group