I think we sometimes manage the curiosity out of really good security analysts. We give people dashboards…
James W. — Decision Intelligence Executive
I think we sometimes manage the curiosity out of really good security analysts. We give people dashboards, queues, playbooks, SLAs, escalation paths, and a hundred other things designed to make SecOps more efficient, which makes perfect sense until efficiency becomes the objective instead of the outcome. Somewhere in that process, the analyst who used to look at something strange and think, "I don't know what this is yet, but I want to pull on that thread," starts wondering whether they have enough time to justify looking at it at all.
There should be room for intuition in that environment. Not intuition as evidence, and certainly not intuition as an excuse to jump to conclusions, but intuition as permission to ask a question that hasn't been assigned yet. Experienced analysts see thousands of events, behaviors, incidents, false positives, and weird little inconsistencies over the course of their careers. Eventually some of that experience becomes pattern recognition, and occasionally they notice something before they can fully explain why it matters.
From a business perspective, that's a pretty inexpensive capability to encourage. Maybe an analyst spends three hours chasing something and discovers there is nothing there, but now you've eliminated uncertainty and probably learned something about the environment along the way. Maybe those same three hours uncover an attack path nobody realized existed, connect several seemingly harmless events, expose a fragile business dependency, improve a detection, or identify activity before it becomes an incident that consumes hundreds of hours and interrupts the business.
There is another benefit that is harder to put on a dashboard. Question assumptions, share strange observations, cross the boundaries between CTI, detection engineering, vulnerability management, architecture, and IR, while jr analysts learn how experienced people reason instead of how to process the next ticket, this is how you build institutional intelligence.
Obviously there needs to be accountability, because curiosity without discipline can become distraction just as easily as process without curiosity can become complacency. The instinct should create the hypothesis, and evidence should determine where it goes. Remember, being wrong should be considered an acceptable result if the investigation taught the organization something useful.
I wonder what we would discover if every SecOps leader deliberately protected a small percentage of analyst capacity for nothing more complicated than, "Go look at something you think we're missing."
We spend a lot of money trying to make security teams faster. Maybe we should spend a little more effort giving smart people enough room to be curious, because efficiency helps us process what we already understand, while curiosity is often how we discover what everyone else missed.
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Mario M.: This is an interesting product challenge too. Security tools are often designed around making known workflows faster — triage, escalation, investigation, remediation. But if every interaction pushes analysts toward the next predefined action, the product can unintentionally discourage exploration. Good security products should support efficiency without designing curiosity out of the workflow.