A note about terms: Use of terms like anomaly, event, incident, and accident tend to evoke strident debates about their exact meanings. They are used inconsistently in tech and elsewhere. Frustration with their variable interpretation has led some to try to give them crisp definitions.| www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com
This is a keynote talk I gave at the first Learning From Incidents conference in 2023. The video recording is here. It seems clear to me that industries and organizations that depend critically and fundamentally on software have been paying attention to the sort of topics people have spoken about here at this conference. The […]|
The following is a transcript (edited just a tiny bit) and slides from a talk I gave at SRECon 2024 Americas. For those who like videos, here it is. Before we get started, could you please raise your hand if you’ve read and are familiar with a paper entitled “How Complex Systems Fail”? If you’re […]|
Multiple professional and research communities feel a profound loss at the death of Richard I. Cook. Richard died peacefully at home on August 31, 2022 in the loving care of his wife Karen and his family. Dr. Richard Cook was a polymath who excelled in multiple careers, usually simultaneously. A physician and anesthesiologist, he was […]|
We have written before that documents written about an incident can take many forms and structures, depending on the author(s), purpose, and target audience. The goal of this post is to describe what makes public-facing articles that companies publish about incidents different from internal write-ups representing an effective incident analysis, and a rationale for why […]|
Dr. Johan Bergström, who leads the MSc program in Human Factors and Systems Safety at Lund University (I am an alumnus) has a short ~7 minute video discussing three common analytical traps that incident analysts and accident investigators can get caught in. They are: 1. Counterfactual reasoning2. Normative language3. Mechanistic reasoning Have you seen any of these […]|
These are just a few “Above-The-Line” patterns we’ve observed in cases over time, and potential nicknames for the patterns in the style of how cons are named in movies such as Ocean’s Eleven. Is this shorthand that we use in regular use in our work? Not regularly, but it’s been fun to name them once […]|
I am an angel investor in Jeli.io, and could not be more excited for the product to come out of “stealth” mode, for many reasons! At its core, Jeli is built around the easy collection and annotation of this data, helping analysts make connections between chat transcripts, interviews, prior related incidents, and a whole host of […]|
Demonstrating adaptability and the need for sustained adaptability Projections made in previous TT episode The projections made in Episode 2 are largely confirmed by experience during the summer. Private communications with individuals on these topics reveal substantial levels of stress and stress-related disturbances, notably sleep cycle disturbances, vivid dreaming, varying degrees of anhedonia, strained personal […]|
A few weeks ago I gave a talk at the DevOps Enterprise Summit London (which was virtual). The description of the talk: In the past two years, we have had the opportunity to observe and explore the real nitty-gritty of how organizations handle, perceive, value, and treat the incidents that they experience. While the size, […]|
Incidents are unplanned investments| www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com
This is a keynote talk I gave at the first Learning From Incidents conference in 2023. The video recording is here.| www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com
