Red and Blue share one mission: make the business safer and stronger. Replace rivalry with partnership and watch velocity, resilience, and outcomes surge.
Snark might feel harmless, but it lands as disrespect. It erodes trust, reduces knowledge-sharing, and slows fixes that protect the company. The cost is real: fewer lessons learned, slower remediation, and a brittle security culture.
Reframe: It’s never Red vs. Blue—it’s Team Business vs. real-world threats. Treat findings like fuel for improvement, not ammunition for conflict.
Language shapes culture. When attackers and defenders operate as partners, curiosity replaces defensiveness and iteration replaces stalemates. Psychological safety accelerates learning and elevates defenses.
Leaders set tone, but peers sustain it. When jokes or jabs cross the line, a quick, respectful nudge prevents norms from drifting. Small course-corrections compound into a high-trust culture.
Say this: “Let’s aim critique at systems, not people. What’s the next experiment we can run together?”
Joint backlogs, shared SLAs, and purple-team exercises turn findings into fixes faster. Result: lower MTTR, fewer repeats, and more resilient apps and infrastructure.
I will: speak respectfully, attack problems not people, share context early, ask for help, and measure progress in business outcomes. I will model the culture I want to see.
Metric to watch: trend MTTR for critical findings and repeat-finding rate. If both improve, your culture is working.