Held on 16 February 2023
Learning From Disasters
The growth industry of the 21st century isn't artificial intelligence or designer genes—it's catastrophes, specifically the kind caused by our ever-more interconnected technological systems. Autopilots that cheerily fly us into mountains, stock trading systems that go on crazed buying sprees, water quality or car emissions warnings that mask the problems they were supposed to detect; the examples multiply daily in newspaper headlines and court cases. Is Chicken Little right and the sky really is falling?
I don't think so. My clients teach me over and over that the most successful organisations are those who manage the calamities, keep them small, and convert them into learning opportunities. One tech team I led years ago blithely released buggy code multiple times a day, ensuring that we could roll back any change with just one click and thus creating many tiny, easy-to-undo crises rather than one big disaster. Netflix go even further and let loose the "chaos monkey" to knock out servers and even whole data centres, preferring a small, controlled outage to hours of system downtime and improving robustness at great speed as a result.
Join me on this free livestream to discuss what you can learn from catastrophes with the help of a world-class expert on this topic: Chris Clearfield, co-author of Meltdown. Chris and I will talk about:
- Why complex systems are incomprehensible by design, and why more training isn't the answer.
- The dangers of interconnecting many components and why microservices aren't the panacea they seem to be (at least not without great care in their design).
- How diversity of viewpoints and soliciting opposing views can help you anticipate, plan for, and learn from your own disasters.
