Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours, and that this e-mail finds you on a boat with shoddy connection, in the tropics, three months after I sent it.
Your company could be here.
I am, for the first time, opening up to newsletter sponsorships. For more information about how to put your brand in front of thousands of highly skilled, highly engaged professionals, send me an email. First come, first served.
Now accepting keynotes for 24Q2-24Q3
Every year, I create three main presentation decks. For 2024, they are:
What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do: How to turn uncertainty into a competitive advantage. (Based on my new book by the same name.)
Regression Toward the Meme: Why modern leadership falls into old traps - and how to avoid them.
The Efficiency Illusion: How to uncover the hidden costs of digital commerce and create profitable growth.
If you want to book me for your event, corporate speaking slot, or workshop, merely send me an email. To make sure I am available, however, please do so at your earliest convenience; my availability is limited and the schedule is filling up fast. More information may be found here.
A couple of updates before we go-go
I will be direct; the last week has been rough. On Sunday morning, I woke up with a migraine. As it transpired, it would be the starting signal for the sinusitis from hell. Every day since, I have been utterly floored by headaches, fevers, swollen sinuses, and a myriad of other things the details of which I shall spare you for reasons of decency.
While I have been taken out of the game, so to speak, my wife has had to do everything at home - including having to deal with a two-and-a-bit-year-old going through her “independence phase” - and not a single complaint has passed her lips. Not one word.
To say that I have won the marital lottery would qualify among the most self-evident statements of all time. Not only is she the love of my life, but also the strongest, kindest, most supportive person that anyone can ever dream of having the good fortune to meet. Elin, you are incredible. Genuinely incredible.
I should point out that my daughter has been admirably sympathetic as well; asking me how I feel, coming in to give me hugs and kisses so that I get better, and so on. If there is one thing that I miss above all others when I am ill, it is not being able to spend time with her. And the more I reflect upon it, the more I realize that being able to be with loved ones is the one definition of success that trumps all others.
Anyway.
A bit of an outlier newsletter this week as a result. For one, I am making it free for all. The practitioner’s interview is usually restricted to premium subscribers, but just getting to this point has consumed a large part of the little energy that I currently have. My lack of oomph also means that there are no market vitals. I hope that you understand.
It is one hell of a practitioner that we are interviewing though. I particularly enjoyed the question and answer on pushback toward the end.
Moving, therefore, swiftly on so that you can get to it.
2024.2.f
Resilience - Of Paramount Importance
Part VI: The Practitioner’s Interview
Over the years that this newsletter has existed, we have repeatedly found reason to come back to fundamental laws of complex adaptive systems, such as the fluency law and the law of stretched systems. The creator of both, as well as the mind behind the theory of resilience engineering that we have covered in the past few weeks, is David Woods.
David is not only a professor at the Ohio State University, but also indisputably one of the foremost practical experts within the field to be found anywhere the planet. He has over 40 years of experience from high risk settings, including accident investigations in aviation, nuclear power, critical care medicine, crisis response, military operations, and space operations with NASA.
It therefore is with a fairly hefty degree of humility (and, obviously, pride) that I am able to introduce him as this theme’s concluding interviewee.
Over the last few weeks, we have discussed resilience at length. You speak of brittleness as, in a sense, the opposite of resilience. How can we identify where systems are most brittle?
Well, it depends. We can discuss it at different levels of understanding and action. We can discuss it in fundamentals as proven theorems about how the world works. We can discuss it in terms of general ways to operate - guided adaptability - and do this more for top management, middle management, and so on. We can discuss it for how to architect human-technology systems.
The action agenda is about preparation and revision, which requires provisioning systems in advance with capabilities to smoothly transition from deploy-mobilize-generate, as situations deteriorate (and vice versa, in preparation for handling stress).
The key is to recognize anomalies and not discount them despite pressures and high load.
There will always be unintended consequences; as you have stated eloquently before, yesterday’s solutions present today’s surprises that become tomorrow’s challenges. Every strategy will be tested at its boundaries. But how do we keep on our toes and on the lookout for the unforeseen events?
Learning from incidents is critical because they reveal that your world works differently than your model of the world. But this also changes how an incident is defined, how we might understand the incidents, and even which sets of incidents are worth understanding.
There is no one and done answer, unfortunately. The ability to revise is what matters; the ability for maneuver in the anticipation of stresses that will come even though the specific form of stress is uncertain.
Emergent patterns are crucial for understanding complex adaptive systems. But how do we search for them? How can we identify adaptive cycles?
Research finds general patterns from observing adaption and complexity in action - pattern finding. We have many patterns and some of these become laws, and the laws come from formal and proven properties of this world. Responsible roles can then use the patterns to understand where adaptation is narrow, weak and limited, and where it is present (though not always in the ways we might think best):
The most general patterns concern how growth and what I call complexification are intertwined. This helps begin the process of breaking free from linear assumptions.
The impact of your work in high-stakes environments such as space, air traffic, and first response units - areas where understanding resilience, graceful extensibility, and adaptive capacity can be the literal difference between life and death - is obvious. But are the implications for low consequence environments such as commercial businesses similar? That is to say, do the same principles apply?
Yes, and they actually apply everywhere because they represent laws about how this world works. High risk worlds where tangible experience with surprise is common is a great natural laboratory to see the laws and patterns in action at scale.
All worlds have consequences and goal conflicts for stakeholders. Outsiders can debate which consequences are worse and for whom. Responsible parties, however, tangibly feel consequences from brittleness related breakdowns anywhere and try to deflect many of those consequences.
Safety does not lie separate from the processes of growth and change. The efforts to improve capabilities, productivity, and efficiencies are intimately connected to safety, especially through the resulting complexities that arise. Handling threats to safety and threats to economic viability ultimately derive from the risk of brittleness and require the same adaptive capacities needed to overcome this risk.
Finally, from my experience, the pushback to more adaptive approaches tends to be rooted in a deterministic world-view; there is an assumption that we do not need graceful extensibility as long as we have the right strategy, do dynamic planning, or run enough scenarios to prepare ourselves for the future. What are some of the counterpoints to your work that you have faced most frequently?
Well, the usual response from organizations to [findings in complexity science and resilience engineering] is simple: my world is stable and not like space operations, military operations, and emergency or critical care medicine. In my world variability can be blocked or suppressed, minimizing the need for adaptation since work to plan/role/rule will reliably produce desired outcomes. This rationalization makes several assumptions that are erroneous everywhere given the complexities of the modern world:
It assumes that surprises only occur rarely (“corner” cases); whereas, actually, challenge events regularly occur at the boundaries of plans, automata, and procedures (the definition of surprise here being events that break plans in smaller or larger ways).
It assumes that it is easy to recognize conditions which would signal the need to modify plans and procedures; whereas, actually, this recognition is difficult and challenges arise from unexpected directions.
It assumes that the time required to put modified plans into action is short (or shorter than the pace of change in the world); whereas, actually, disruptions accelerate tempo, increasing the risk of being stale and slow to revise (and disruptions increase pace, data overload, workload peaks/bottlenecks, cognitive load, and coordination demands).
It assumes that interdependencies can be limited as new capabilities are deployed, and additional ones that arise can be identified and treated by expanding analysis and modeling efforts.
It assumes that the effects of surprise can be compartmentalized; whereas, actually, surprises compound and spread over the extensive interdependencies in all modern systems.
These beliefs are rarely true — and even if true for the moment, processes of change and growth will make them moot.
Yet, these beliefs lead organizations to over-rely on compliance. In the aftermath of incidents and breakdowns, the assumptions lead to increased pressure for compliance rather than learning the importance of guided adaptability. Pressure for compliance undermines the adaptive capacities needed to mitigate risks that arise from brittleness.
And with that, we thank David Woods for kindly taking the time out of a hectic schedule to answer our questions, and conclude the discussion about resilience engineering for now. Next week, I promise to bring both more energy and a new theme.
Until then, have the loveliest of weekends.
Onwards and ever upwards,
JP
Feel better JP!