Nicola Whiting MBE, CSO Titania Ltd is an experienced Chief Strategy and Operations Officer specializing in cyber security software tools for 'every information security professional’. She was recently awarded the Member of the British Empire in the UK for her services to business and diversity. She’s also a mentor on the UK CYber Diversity Group Board and talks to us today about the value of diversity to both cyber security businesses and people. She will have you thinking differently about cyber security and the people who work there.
Nicola Whiting MBE, CSO Titania Ltd is an experienced Chief Strategy and Operations Officer specializing in cyber security software tools for 'every information security professional’. She was recently awarded the Member of the British Empire in the UK for her services to business and diversity. She’s also a mentor on the UK CYber Diversity Group Board and talks to us today about the value of diversity to both cyber security businesses and people. She will have you thinking differently about cyber security and the people who work there.
Welcome to the stellar labs podcast. Future learning today at Stellar labs, our mission is to bust the technology skills crunch with effective, measurable engage in training. We consult on design and deliver the technical and people skills and competencies you need in business. In these podcasts you'll hear from industry experts and practitioners from the worlds of technology and training. They'll share their experience, insights and inspiration and their visions for the future with you. Keep listening to start your future learning here today. Hello and welcome back to the stellar labs podcast. I'm Stella Collins and today I'm talking to Nicola Whiting, MBE, who is chief strategy officer at Titanium, a cyber security and penetration testing company who are experts in their field. Welcome Nicola.
Speaker 2:Hi, and thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:It's a pleasure to have you and one of the other things that I didn't mention was that Nicola is also on our cyber security advisory board at Stellar labs and we are really delighted to have her here because she is such an expert in her field. Nicola, I'd just really like to know if you could tell us a little bit first about how you got an MBE this year. That is an amazing achievement.
Speaker 2:Wow. It was a really big surprise as well. I suddenly had this letter from the palace and it was quite overwhelming. So the MBE was for services to international trade and diversity. So internation trade wise, part of our core values, is go giving and giving back. And so I've been mentoring for a number of years in multiple cyber accelerators. A lot of businesses when they start out, they have really fantastic ideas, but they can't babel fish them into things that the average person can understand. So a lot of my time is spent helping businesses do that and sometimes even helping businesses understand why they should do that. C ause if you're very, very technical, I've even had people say to me, well if they don't understand it, they're not my audience. And that is quite shocking to me that people would have that view. And I had to explain how LinkedIn worked and how people's social networks worked, which we re a n autistic person to be explaining to a non-autistic person how so cial n etworks work was kind of slightly ironic. But so basically I explained that if that person doesn't understand what you do, they can't leverage the 25 0 p eople or so that they possibly know that might be interested in your technology. And so they finally got it and they were like, Oh, that's really cool. Maybe I should learn to babel fi sh. And then the other side for diversity, I actually got personally rewarded in terms of diversity. I've always been a strong proponent that gro up th inking is your enemy as a business. And it's the doth of kind of innovation and resilience. And the answer to group think is diversity because the more diversity of thought we have, the less group thinking and th e more innovation and the more resilience and actually the better our bottom line is. And so I've been talking about this for a long time and because of that, we've at titanium got quite a diverse team and I was then asked to speak at an event at Shrivenham where there were a lot of autistic people. It was the first time I met so many autistic people in the same room, and suddenly all the things they were saying were like,"Oh, that's me. I'm sensitive to light and I have a social energy that runs out" and"Oh, sensitive to smell, I'm tha t too. An d I didn't realize", and all these other things. And so I got diagnosed and I've been spending quite a lot of time for a number of years working with diversity generally, but particularly from my first pers on exp erience of neur odiversity. Okay and it was for that work that you were given the MBE.
:Yeah. That's amazing. So congratulations on that. I think that's hugely important. I know you have been helping to promote diversity in cyber security. And that was a conversation we started a few weeks ago and I was fascinated by what you're doing to do that and why you think in cybersecurity it's so important. So, I've been doing a number of workshops for people like Crest and other government groups and there were a lot of talks both nationally and internationally. So there's two reasons. There's the business reason: I touched on earlier with innovation and resilience. So if you think about it, in cyber security we only have two goals. One is creating new stuff to enable people to do better and greater things. And the other one is defending that stuff. And the reality is that we spend a lot of time in the defense, and what attackers might be like and to quote some Sun Tzu, who was, you know, an older writer than Jesus and still popular. So that's always gotta be good, that the art of war is still current. But he said,"to defeat your enemy, you've got to know them". And I'm paraphrasing there. And the reality is our enemies and our attackers don't come in one flavor. So if we're going to be able to think like an attacker, then diversity has to be built into all of our organizational abilities. And then in terms of innovation, if people are group thinking, they're only thinking one way, well they're going to really limit the options that they have on the table. And we've seen businesses go down because they didn't think about what the future might bring or they were closed minded in terms of where they were looking and so it's a real threat to growth, not having diversity. And yet we talk about diversity more as a social exercise. So for all those reasons, I got into sort of spreading the word and then because of what Titania does in terms of resilience and networks and things like that, I realized that that was going to go the way of AI and started looking into that. And because my area of interest is also diversity. I looked what was happening with AI and there are so many failed projects that have happened because diversity wasn't baked into the teams. So for example, the first Apple watch didn't work for women because they forgot about periods and the fact affects our body clock and all our temperatures and things like that and that was an expensive, costly development mistake. Amazon spent four years trying to do AI driven recruitment. And what they found was that it discriminated against women because it looked at the AI learns from data and 11 years of data said that they predominantly hired men. So it started actually discriminating and like physically removing women from their candidate pool. We've got things like predictive policing in the UK so these are all things that are going to determine the future of our society. And a lot of it has almost discrimination by design, unintentionally built in. And so there is some really big ethical questions around what we want our society to look like in future and AI and diversity. So yeah, there's a massive ball of stuff there that I've been helping raise awareness of and suggesting solutions that might mitigate some of this stuff.
Speaker 1:That was really interesting. I read a very good book recently and I'm sure you've probably read it too called"invisible women", which is all about the lack of data around women in particular. But I'm quite sure that relates probably to many other diverse groups too.
Speaker 2:It's pretty horrendous when you think about some of the things that we have in everyday life. I mean, did you know women are statistically more likely to die in car crashes because safety belts are designed for men? It's just terrifying.
:Yes, it is quite worrying. So in terms of your business and cyber security, you've talked about how that actually helps the business, but how does it help the individuals within the business kind of respecting the diversity? So I think like attracts like and we judge people on our values. So unlike a lot of companies and where it's all performance driven, w e have a mixture of performance c ause people are here to contribute and also the values of our business. And one of those values is go giving and supporting each other and valuing our differences and believing that our differences make us stronger. And what we found is, you know, even in thought types, and I know, stellar labs is very into t hought types. You know, even ignoring the fact that autistic people or the neuro diverse people often need different ways of learning to get the very best out of the learning and therefore the most productivity out of that learning. There are a whole heap of people who are for example, reflective thinkers or reflective learners. And a lot of courses aren't geared to help those people. For example, at Titanium, if s omebody i s g oing t o come in and deliver training, it's an insistence by us that we see their training material u pfront and we give people the option of reviewing that training material first so t hat those people that are reflective learners get time to mold that information over to make their conclusions and to contribute at the same level as the people that are more dynamic learners. And there is no wrong learning type. but we want people to be able to give their best in the room. And if you automatically put, you know, 50% of the room at a disadvantage because their learning type doesn't suit t hem, get information and process it instantly, then that's not serving the company or i ts t eams. So yeah, it's really about understanding that not everybody is the same for their benefit and the c ompany's benefit. C ause nobody wants to stifle productivity.
Speaker 1:Right and I totally agree with that idea about, when people are learning, it doesn't matter where the learning comes from. It doesn't matter how they choose to get it on, as they learn it, that is the most important. And if somebody finds it much easier to have the information up front and process it and have time to think it through and come up with their questions, then brilliant. That's marvelous. That's really valuable. We had it recently on our online program we were running and it was, you know, it was a very fast digital online interactive program and somebody afterwards said,"actually I really struggled with that". So what we said"next time was we'll just send you all the slides in advance. You can have them, you can look through them so that by the time the conversations are flowing, you've already got your questions." She actually found that really helpful. That was really useful to her.
:And I must admit, I've been in courses and I can't control external courses obviously. And I've been in courses and I know that I'm at a huge disadvantage and it's emotionally draining for me and very, in some cases, upsetting because knowing that you can't actually contribute to your best, that you're disadvantaged. It's a bit like somebody in a wheelchair having to have a course on the stairs. I don't just have a preference for having information up front. I have a need to have the information up front to be able to deliver my best to the room and it's not always possible. So I just have to deliver the best I can knowing that it's not the best I can really deliver. And that's very frustrating to somebody that would always want to serve the room to the best of their ability. So yeah, it is quite hard sometimes knowing that society does discriminate by design in many ways. and that's, that's very frustrating and something I'd love to be part of changing.
Speaker 1:Well, we're obviously very pleased that you're on our advisory board at stellar labs. And whilst, you know, we're talking to you about the, the cybersecurity trading in particular, of course our methodology is what's really important to us and that we believe does really support people who learn differently and it really, really works with the way, you know, our brains are kind of wired themselves to learn as opposed to how we kind of traditionally tried to teach stuff, information, into people over the years. So, um, it's been really interesting talking to you Nicola, and I hope we will have another opportunity and maybe next time I'll pay up with one of our techie people and you can talk through some of the t echie a reas as well. But I think it's been really fascinating to understand that the value of, of diversity to cybersecurity. Congratulations again on the MBE. A nd I look forward to talking to you again very soon.
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