The Identity Salon: Five-Year Problems, Chatham House Notes, and DNS Nonsense - Spherical Cow Consulting

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The Identity Salon: Five-Year Problems, Chatham House Notes, and DNS Nonsense

Heather Flanagan<br>July 21, 2026July 15, 2026<br>Hot Takes, Podcast

The Identity Salon: Five-Year Problems, Chatham House Notes, and DNS Nonsense

"Every so often, I accidentally start a side project. Sometimes this is because I have had a brilliant idea."

Sometimes it is because I have had a stubborn idea. More often, it is because a few people I trust keep circling the same gap in the industry, and eventually one of us says, usually over an excellent Scotch whisky, “Fine. Apparently we have to build the thing.”

The original conversation was with Ian Glazer, Andi Hindle, and me. We were talking about a gap in the identity industry, particularly for senior enterprise architects and the people who have to think several moves ahead.

A Digital Identity Digest

The Identity Salon: Five-Year Problems, Chatham House Notes, and DNS Nonsense

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The Gap We Kept Seeing

Identiverse is a fabulous conference. I say that with some bias, yes, but also with a great deal of respect for what that event does well. It is very good at the problems people are facing now: what is breaking now, what needs to be funded now, what regulators are asking now, what programs are trying to ship now, what teams are trying to explain to leadership before everyone’s eyes glaze over.

But another category of conversation tends to happen in hallways, over coffee, or in the bar after the official programming ends. Those are the conversations about the problems senior architects can see coming in the next five to seven years.

That timeframe is actually an important part of this story. Five to seven years is not science fiction. It is not “someday.” It is also not next quarter’s implementation crisis. For senior enterprise architects, five to seven years is a completely reasonable planning horizon. In many cases, thinking about that horizon is quite literally in the job description.

There are also wonderful events like the Internet Identity Workshop. IIW is one of the most important spaces in the identity ecosystem, and I will happily continue to send people there. But IIW is often highly speculative by design. It is an unconference. It is where potential standards work, new ideas, rough edges, and ambitious concepts can be tested in public with people who know how to argue productively.

That is necessary, but, alas, it is not always what an enterprise architect needs when they are trying to figure out how wallet ecosystems, AI-mediated access, delegation, fraud detection, identity proofing, regulatory requirements, workforce identity, and security architecture are all going to collide before their current roadmap is done pretending to be realistic.

So we started The Identity Salon™.

Why This Fits Me Better Than I Expected

I do not think of myself as a visionary thinker. There is nothing wrong with that, and I play a useful role in the industry. But that said, there are people in this industry who can look at a handful of signals and sketch the shape of a possible future before the rest of us have found the whiteboard marker.

But as it turns out, visionary thinkers need people who understand where they are trying to lead and who want to help make the vision implementable. That part I understand very well.

A lot of my work has lived in the spaces between ideas and deployment: standards and operations, governance and architecture, strategy and the deeply inconvenient reality of existing systems. I like the point where a compelling idea has to survive contact with budgets, incentives, policy, legacy infrastructure, procurement, user behavior, and the occasional compliance team with a very sharp pencil.

The Identity Salon sits exactly in that space. It is not just about imagining where identity might go. It is about asking what would have to be true for those futures to work in practice.

What the Salon Is For

The goal is simple enough to describe and...