Security News > 2021 > February > Cognitive agility can help solve some "wicked" cybersecurity challenges
McKeown's focus is the cybersecurity space, where wicked problems are the norm.
Research, McKeown said, has identified a new cognitive agility approach that, through agile, adaptive thinking, will go a long way to improve the odds against heretofore unseen adversarial encounters.
"Cognitive agility reflects the capacity of an individual to easily move back and forth between openness and focus," said Jared Ross, Lucas Miller, and Patricia A. Deuster in their National Library of Medicine article, Cognitive Agility as a Factor in Human Performance Optimization.
In her next article in the series about cognitive agility, The Psychology of Cyber: Understanding cognitive agility as a fix for the 'wicked problem' of cyber crises, McKeown defined the core concepts that each cybersecurity responder needs to incorporate.
Openness: Cybersecurity events are complex, and those responding need to be open to ideas and how the stakeholders view the situation as it unfolds.
"Cybersecurity presents an interesting new domain for the psychology of crisis response as it requires a higher cognitive workload than many traditional situations," McKeown said.