The following thread is a short bit from @ri_cook's talk at @velocityconf in 2012, "Resilience in Complex Adaptive Systems" - I believe it's even more relevant than it was then.
(thread 👇)
(thread 👇)
1/"Let me start out by saying that the future of all your systems -- although you do not realize it right now -- is safety. You think of your systems as those "web app" systems …but they are also business critical systems." 1/n
2/"The key thing here is that these systems lines are merging; those "web app" systems are becoming *business-critical* systems, and indeed - business-critical systems have a way of becoming *safety-critical* systems. That is the future of the systems that you are making today...
3/"...is to be involved intimately in some aspect of safety. Whether it's dispatching fire trucks or locating a critical information on the web, all of this stuff is going to play out in a manner that has an impact on safety.
4/"So all of your systems will become safety-critical. If you do NOT have safety criticality in it now, you will have it in the future. What we observe when we study these things is that the systems we're working with are complicated…and more than that: they're complex."
5/"They have unexpected behaviors, they have unexpected responses to interventions, things don't work the way we expect them to. When we push the buttons we find new forms of failure and they're constantly changing in both obvious and not so obvious ways."
6/"The other thing about these systems is that they're ADAPTIVE. And "adaptive" here does not mean just simply changing, but changing in a responsive way to the different kinds of pressures under which they're operating."
7/"There's intentional and planned systems change, there's unplanned and local responses, there's responsive and reactive kinds of things going on ("reactive" is something you're probably very familiar with), "
8/"...there are structural and functional adaptations that are taking place and all of these things are happening on multiple time scales. The time scales for these adaptations can run from literally seconds all the way out to years or even decades..."
9/"...so we've got multiple adaptation cycles going on simultaneously across these large systems which are very very hard to characterize."
He goes on to describe and explain some of the core concepts that Resilience Engineering was founded on.
He goes on to describe and explain some of the core concepts that Resilience Engineering was founded on.
