Vibe CISOing: The Leadership Skill No Dashboard Can Teach You
Because the most important signals aren’t technical—they’re human.
Not all threats come with signatures. Not all misalignments show up in logs. And not all risks are technical.
Sometimes, the most critical signal in a security program is the vibe.
That uneasy feeling before a breach. The tension in a cross-functional meeting. The moment when everyone follows the policy—but no one feels responsible.
Call it soft. Call it squishy. Or start listening to what it's telling you.
Because vibe CISOing is real.
And if we’re going to move from the old playbook to the next edge of cybersecurity leadership, we need to get serious about what it means.
What Is Vibe CISOing?
It’s not about intuition in place of data. It’s about recognizing that data isn’t only what you log—it’s what you observe, what you sense, what you create clarity around.
Vibe CISOing is a mindset and practice that takes the invisible parts of organizational life seriously:
The vibe of a team after a restructure
The social cues when developers avoid raising security concerns
The energy in the room when a CISO presents to the board
The burnout that doesn’t show up in quarterly KPIs
You’re not imagining it. You’re leading in it.
The vibe is not fluff. It’s feedback.
And like all feedback, it’s either listened to—or it becomes something you can’t ignore.
Why It Matters Now
The pressure is rising.
Budgets are tightening. Political and economic uncertainty is expanding. And many cybersecurity leaders are being asked to do more with less—faster, with fewer people, and higher expectations.
In that kind of pressure cooker, traditional risk models break down. Not because the frameworks are wrong, but because they miss what happens in the gray space:
Where people are confused, overloaded, or incentivized to bypass controls
Where entropy accumulates in communication, workflows, or incentives
Where the org quietly drifts out of alignment
When leaders stop listening to those signals, they lose the plot. And eventually, they lose the team.
From Strategic Multiplier to System Builder
In a recent post, I introduced the idea of the CISO as a Strategic Multiplier—someone who doesn’t just reduce risk, but expands organizational capacity.
That’s the shift: from managing controls to multiplying clarity, trust, and performance.
But how?
The best CISOs I know do three things differently:
They listen to the system, not just the stakeholders. They pick up weak signals, early warning signs, and contradictions in their environment.
They shape the narrative. They give language to what others feel but can’t articulate—and use that to reframe decisions and actions.
They move with intent. They don’t just fix problems; they design conditions for better performance, better outcomes, and a better future.
This is what Vibe CISOing enables.
It’s not mystical. It’s managerial courage and cultural awareness, tuned to the signals that metrics miss.
A Better Way to Lead Through Uncertainty
We don’t need more dashboards. We need a different design for leadership.
SPIRE is that design.
It’s not a feel-good framework or rebrand of soft skills. It’s a system—a leadership operating system—for navigating uncertainty with intention and impact.
Each letter in SPIRE points to what matters now:
Signal — Cut through the noise. Know what’s actually happening across your org, not just what gets reported in the dashboard.
Performance Intelligence — Understand how identity, governance, and security directly affect execution, delivery, and trust—not just compliance.
Insight — Expose what’s invisible in static metrics: bottlenecks, misalignment, entropy.
Reframe — Shift from reactive technician to strategic multiplier. Redefine security as a system of business enablement.
Execution — Close the loop. Ensure that what you know turns into what gets done—with clarity, cadence, and consequences.
SPIRE is not just a mindset—it’s a method.
And when paired with SPI 360, it gives CISOs and cybersecurity leaders a way to observe, measure, and act in alignment with the system they’re actually running—not just the one they hope they’re running.
This is how we lead differently.
Not by forcing performance, but by creating the conditions where high performance is inevitable.
The Conversation Continues
Join me and Jimmy Sanders tomorrow at Noon PT for a bold conversation about the next generation of cybersecurity leadership.
We’ll talk about:
What’s really broken in today’s CISO model
How governance must evolve as a living doctrine
And why no one can lead the next era alone
🎯 Register here: Strategy Layer Live — Monday, July 28th, Noon PT / 3:00 ET
Let’s bring more clarity, courage, and creativity into how we lead.
Because if we don’t tune into the signals—we’ll be the ones sending the wrong ones.
